Key marketing tool or annoying spam that proliferates your inbox flooding it with useless information? It’s up to you (or your friendly neighbourhood marketing agency) to make sure your email marketing falls into the first category, rather than the latter.
There is no one way to approach email marketing, whether you send a mail drop quarterly, monthly weekly will all depend on your business, your goals and your audience - and what they value when it comes to content. And this is where your email marketing metrics come into play. Priceless in the level of insight they can provide, here our email marketing whizz, the one and only Katie Evans, goes into a bit more detail…
What (really) is email marketing?
Email marketing is a direct and efficient way for businesses or individuals to communicate with their audience, build relationships, and encourage specific actions you want your audience to take. This could be making a purchase or visiting a specific page on your website.
The process uses an email marketing platform, such as Mailchimp, and includes segmenting contact lists, creating and curating compelling content and imagery and having strategic calls to action, to send tailored messages to your audience.
Campaigns are then analysed with key metrics, such as open and click-through rates reviewed to evaluate performance and continually optimise campaigns.
What are email marketing metrics and why are they important?
Email marketing metrics are essential to measure, and analyse, and are used to optimise email marketing campaigns. Using the metrics effectively can help you learn about your audience, what type of content is engaging and what isn’t and help create more effective and targeted email campaigns in the future.
What email marketing metrics should you be paying attention to when using Mailchimp?
Open Rate
- This measures the percentage of recipients who opened an email. A higher open rate helps to indicate whether your audience finds your content and subject lines compelling
- Testing with different subject lines and personalisation can help to improve an email campaign's open rate. However, it's important to analyse and interpret open rates in conjunction with other metrics, such as click-through rates and conversion rates, to get a more in-depth understanding of the overall performance
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in the email. This is an important metric, as it is an indicator of how effective an email campaign is at driving engagement and encouraging further action (engaging with content)
- Monitoring and analysing CTR is essential for optimising email campaigns and improving their effectiveness over time. CTR can highlight the type of content your audience is interested in and help tailor your content
- A higher click-through rate generally indicates that the email content, calls-to-action, and overall campaign strategy are resonating well with the audience
Engagement Rate
- Engagement rate is a metric that provides an overall measure of how recipients interact with your email campaign. It encompasses various actions that indicate engagement, such as opening the email, clicking on links, and sometimes other interactions like sharing or forwarding the email
- Engagement rate is a broader metric than the click-through rate (CTR) and offers a more comprehensive view of how well subscribers interact with the content in the email
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate in email marketing refers to the percentage of sent emails that were not delivered successfully. There are two types of bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces.
- A hard bounce occurs when an email cannot be delivered due to a permanent issue, such as invalid email addresses, or email addresses that no longer exist. For example, if the email address is misspelt or no longer in use, the email will result in a hard bounce
- A soft bounce is a temporary issue that prevents the email from being delivered. These may be caused by a full inbox, a temporary server issue, or an email message that exceeds the recipient's mailbox size limit. Unlike hard bounces, soft bounces may be resolved, and the email could potentially be delivered in future attempts
Measuring and keeping track of these key metrics (as well as others), will help you shape your email marketing strategy and provide relevant, compelling content to your audience, that will encourage them to engage with your business and/or product, and take further actions as a result
It is important to remember that email marketing is a long-term part of your strategy, that focuses on creating brand awareness and building relationships, as well as delivering on calls to action (purchases, event bookings etc).
