When you’re new to email marketing, it’s easy to get caught up in looking only at how many subscribers you have.
You work hard to grow your subscriber count, thinking that a big list correlates to more conversions … except that’s not quite how it works.
A high subscriber count means little if your deliverability, click through rate, and the open rates are low.
To grow your business through email marketing, these are the metrics you need to watch:
Your email open rate is the percentage of subscribers who opened your email.
You’ll find that this is often an indication of the strength of your subject line and the relevancy of the subject matter for subscribers. Relevant content is more likely to be opened, read and acted upon, so an understanding of your audience and what content would appeal to them is key.
You can improve your open rate by:
Your click through rate is the percentage of subscribers who clicked a link inside your email, as an average of the total emails sent.
You’ll notice that this differs from the next number – the click to open rate – because it’s counted from the total emails sent, not total emails opened.
The click through rate of your email campaign tells you how many subscribers visited your website from that email, and essentially how effective your email was. Because it’s counted from the total emails sent, this metric looks at how compelling both your subject line and content were.
You can improve your CTR by:
As mentioned above, your click to open rate is the percentage of subscribers who clicked a link inside your email from the total number of opened emails.
This number will always be higher than your CTR, because it’s a percentage of a smaller pool.
The CTOR tells you how effective the content of a particular email was at driving readers to your website, since it’s only looking at people who opened it. This can include the relevance of your content, readability, and calls to action.
You can improve your click to open rate by:
This is the number of people who opt out from receiving any more emails from you, as a percentage of the total number sent in that campaign.
A small number of unsubscribes is normal in any campaign, so don’t panic too much if this number never reaches zero. However, it is important to monitor your unsubscribes for spikes or trends.
This information can tell you what topics, subject lines, or send patterns are pushing your audience away. Is the information not interesting enough? Hard to read? Too frequent?
Sometimes, a high unsubscribe rate isn’t related to the quality of your emails, but the quality of your leads. If you’ve acquired a list of poor quality leads, you’ll be unlikely to keep or convert them no matter how hard you try.
You can avoid or improve this by:
Your bounce rate is the number of emails that couldn’t be delivered. These people didn’t receive your email at all, either due to an issue on their end or your end.
There are two types of bounces – a hard bounce and a soft bounce:
A hard bounce happens when there’s an error in the email address, the email address doesn’t exist, or the email server has blocked delivery.
A soft bounce happens when the recipient’s mailbox is full, their email server is down, the email is too large, the email is blocked due to content, blocked due to spam issues, or cannot be sent for other technical or unknown reasons.
You can improve your bounce rate by:
This is your ability to get your emails into your subscriber’s inboxes. It’s the percentage of emails delivered, from the total number sent.
Deliverability can depend on several things including bounce rates, spam issues, and email sender quality.
When your deliverability rating is good, your emails are more likely to be trusted by your recipient’s email server. Conversely, a poor deliverability rating can harm your entire campaign, no matter how good your content is.
You can improve your deliverability rate by:
Email marketing thrives on engagement, and in order to grow over the long-term you need to measure and act on the metrics that matter for this.
As a long-term strategy, don’t expect your results to shift overnight with optimisation. We aim to incrementally increase your results with each campaign, using data to tweak and test each aspect of your email marketing to build the results you seek.
With well over one hundred 5-star Google reviews, its safe to say we are the real deal. Client relationships and demonstratable results are our priority. If you'd like to know more, we'll even let you talk to some real clients.
