Email marketing is an excellent tool for connecting with your customers, but you must ensure you’re getting it right. The only way to do that is to measure its success using the Reports and Analytics functions.
Email marketing platforms have reporting features that will allow you to analyse the key metrics that will show you whether your email campaign is a success and will show you what is working so you can do more of it. It will also show you what isn’t working so you can make some changes.
That’s the great thing about email marketing platforms: they give you the key metrics that put you in the driving seat. Whereas with organic social media, you get a rough idea based on how many followers you’re gaining or how many likes you’ve had, with email marketing, you can get into the nitty-gritty. Reports give you quantifiable measurements on the crucial elements of your campaign: open rates, click-through rates, hard and soft bounce rates, those all-important conversion rates, and more.
What do the terms mean in relation to how well your campaign is doing? Let’s take a look:
Open rate – how many people opened your email? If you sent out one thousand emails and only twenty people opened it, that’s a good indication something isn’t right. Potential issues could be:
- You’re sending the email to people who aren’t interested in what you’re selling
- The subject line isn’t tweaking their interest
- It’s being sent at the wrong time
Bounce rates – how many emails weren’t delivered? This is broken into two halves – hard bounce and soft bounce. Hard bounce means the email will never be delivered. Soft bounce means the email address is still valid, but the email didn’t deliver. Reasons for bounces include:
- The person left the company, so the email domain was deactivated or someone deleted their personal account (hard bounce)
- Inbox is full (soft bounce)
- Server is down (soft bounce)
- Message was too large (soft bounce)
Click-through rate (CTR) – how many people clicked on the call to action (CTA), the ‘buy now’ or the ‘read more’ invitation? If only one person in a thousand clicks on your CTA, it could be that:
- You’re sending the wrong message to the wrong people
- The CTA isn’t piquing their curiosity
- The email is being sent at the wrong time
- The layout of the email isn’t inviting/clear enough
- There are too many CTAs, and it’s confusing for people
Conversion rate – how many people clicked on your CTA and followed through. You could be asking them to leave a review, vote for something, or to buy something. If the percentage is low, it could be that:
- The process is too complicated
- The offer isn’t enticing enough
- The email was sent at the wrong time (for example, towards the end of the month before payday)
As you can see, analysing the performance of your email campaigns gives you a lot of data to inform you on how to improve your success rates – so get those reports out and dig deep!
(If you need some help with email marketing terms, check out our jargon buster page!)
Email-Postman – email marketing that delivers!
Shaun Reynolds has been specialising in email marketing since 2005 and, in February 2019, launched Email-Postman. Since then, we’ve helped over 100 clients across a range of industries and sectors build successful email marketing campaigns across various email marketing platforms. For further information or to discuss getting help with your email marketing, you can arrange a free call-back today by clicking here!
