When it comes to email marketing, marketers can say a lot of things about it. It could be the most important components of an improved email. It could be email marketing mistakes. It could be examples of excellent email marketing tips. Or it could be the important things digital marketers should do to avoid spam filters. But in the end, it does not matter how boosted your emails are if you can’t recognize the outcomes of your hard works and efforts. In fact, measuring whether your emails are helping or not is very important to achieve your goals.
Therefore, before sending your email, ask yourself this question, what are the goals of my email marketing? Is it to make more leads? Convert current leads into clients? Or is it to increase subscriber database?
Whatever your goals are, the next important thing that you should do is to identify what email marketing metrics you will need in order to track and determine the progress of your email marketing campaign.
Here are the most referenced and widely tracked email marketing metrics.
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Open Rates
As soon as your email has landed in your customer’s inbox, the subsequent challenge is to get your email message. This email marketing metric identifies the total number of persons who opened your message. However, there are some email service providers that open email messages automatically like iPhone and Yahoo, while others don’t automatically load photos. Actually, if the image is not downloaded, then the message is not counted as opened.
On the other hand, you can still identify if your efforts lead to a better result by doing a comparison. If the open rates of your email last month is 10% and they are now 20% it means you’re doing a great job.
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CTR or Click-through Rates
The CTR is very easy to understand, because if the client clicks the link on your email then you have instantly acquired one click which is equivalent to one percent. So if you send an email to 100 people and 25 of them clicked your links then you will be having a 25% CTR.
In fact, it is one of the most important metrics for email marketers because it gives a direct understanding how many are interested in your offer, brand, and content.
Furthermore, there is a difference on open and click-through rates that may be possibly helpful and fairly common and it is called the click-to-open-rate. It determines how many people opened your message and clicked your links as well. However, if CTR is higher compared to your open rate it means your email’s subject line is not definitely good.
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Hard Bounces
Ignoring hard bounces can lead to an unsuccessful marketing campaign. Hard bounces take place when you send a message to an email address that is no longer existing. Actually, Internet Service Providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail are closely monitoring hard bounces. That’s why you need to remove those non-existing email addresses on your list as soon as possible or else you will be penalized and as a payment, your delivery rate will be reduced.
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Soft Bounces
As opposed to hard bounces, this email marketing metrics happens when you delivered an email message to a certain inbox that is already full. On the other hand, soft bounces are the result when persons are signing up on your list using a disposable or junk email account. Nonetheless, you don’t have to worry about soft bounces especially if one percent of the email messages you’re sending produce soft bounces.
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Delivery Rate
Some companies are utilizing third-party vendor and generate a project of deliverability just to improve their delivery rate. However, if your delivery rate is more than 95 percent then you don’t have to worry about since it is already good enough. But if it’s less than 85 percent, it is considered as bad deliverability rate. Fortunately, some email service providers deliver 95% of the delivery rate of the email messages they sent.
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Forwarding Rate
This is the rate at which your emails that are being shared or forwarded to other email recipients may not seem important at all. But it is possibly one of the most significant email marketing metrics that every marketer should be tracking.
Forwarding rates show how you make new contacts. These persons that are listed on your email list are now in your database, but still, the main focus is conversion. Lending enough attention to your forwarding rate is very important in order to found out which kinds of offers and articles tend to get more shares and you can use that understanding for your future email marketing campaigns.
Bottom Line
Be wise in choosing which email marketing metrics you’re tracking and ensure that you’re able to effectively measure the condition of your email list, distinct email performance, and your development towards your goals. Furthermore, as long as you determine and measure those things, you’re doing an effective and successful email management.