Once touted as a dying marketing tactic, now a superstar among all of its digital marketing counterparts, email is not only here to stay but it can also take your company forward as a whole. Provided that you execute a comprehensive email marketing strategy, that is. And to do that in this competitive day and age, an age of the apprehensive consumer who doesn’t like companies spamming them in their inboxes, you have to have the right information at hand so that you can craft an email strategy that boosts conversions, elevates brand authority and trust, and inspires shares.
As you might have guessed, you can only achieve this by monitoring the right KPIs to make every decision better and more cost-effective than the last. So today, we’ll be looking at the most important email marketing metrics for 2020 and how you can capitalize on the right information.
Click-through-rate (CTR)
The first and most obvious metric you need to track, and not just for your email campaigns, is you click-through-rate. The CTR metric allows you to analyze how successful every email is at guiding customers and recipients in general towards the content on your website, or towards other relevant platforms such as your social media accounts. You need to know how many people are clicking the links in your emails so that you can analyze what is working and what needs fixing, and actually fix it in the shortest timeframe possible.
Interestingly, doubling your CTR over the long term can skyrocket your conversion rate by as much as 50%, so it’s important that you keep a close eye on this metric. Calculate this metric by:
- Using an automated tool, or;
- You can do it manually by dividing the number of people who clicked on a link with the number of delivered emails, and multiplying the sum by a hundred.
Email open rate
Another key metric that will give you an insight into the effectiveness of your email efforts (as well some insight into brand authority, trust, and its overall image) is the email open rate. Simply put, you need to know whether or not your recipients are opening your emails, or if they are automatically sending them into the trash folder. This will tell you whether or not the subject lines you write are actually compelling enough to elicit a positive action, or if they are just too drab or overly-salesy for your target audience.
Once you have these numbers, you can start reassessing the copy and the mindset you use to create email content, and create a better narrative that is more relevant to your target demographic. Calculate the open rate by dividing the number of unique email opens with the number of emails sent, but without factoring in the number of bounces.
Overall ROI
The overall return on investment for your email marketing campaign is difficult to measure, as it encompasses numerous variables and smaller metrics that you need to plug into the final calculation. This is why it’s important to use comprehensive reporting software that can automate the process and help you keep track of all relevant KPIs on a single dashboard, which will in turn help you calculate the overall ROI quickly.
You can measure single metrics manually, but when it comes to these types of complex metrics, you need to have the right reporting tool on deck so that you can be as precise and meticulous as possible, but without wasting money or employee resources. Through the reporting tool you will need to calculate your overall spend, your overall gain, but also your customer lifetime value, the number or new leads, the number of conversions, the bounce rate, and other KPIs that will allow you to generate your overall ROI report.
Email conversion rate
Another key metric is the email conversion rate, or in other words, how many people that have clicked on one of the links in your email have actually interacted with your website. Remember, a conversion is not just a sale, it’s also when a customer downloads your eBook, orders a free sample, signs up for a free trial, or does anything else to become a quality lead that you can convert into a loyal customer. If the CTR is good but the conversions are stagnating, that means that you need to work on your CTAs in the emails but also, that you need to improve the copy and the CTAs on the landing pages.
Emails by category
Here’s a metric that not many marketers think about, but all experienced marketers swear by: the emails-by-category metric. It’s absolutely vital that you know where each and every one of the emails you send ends up, so that you can tweak your copy and work on your brand’s authority and trust in order to make every email land in their inboxes. This metric should also tell you how many emails have been deleted from every folder, and whether or not your recipients are moving them from spam to their inboxes.
This is not only a good way to gain a sense of how your emails are faring with your audience, but also how your employees are managing their email communication, and whether or not they are overwhelmed with the workflow. Overall, knowing the categories where your emails are ending up will allow you to improve your email campaign as a whole.
Wrapping up
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in your digital marketing playbook, but in order to make it work for your business, you need to stay on top of the most relevant metrics. Follow these KPIs, and you will have no problem optimizing your email campaigns for the modern online audience.
