Chapter 5 – Measuring Results and Optimizing Your Strategy
In order to determine whether or not your email marketing campaigns are working, you need to analyze the data from your campaigns. The marketing measures, when all is said and done, always serve to achieve a pre-defined goal, and whether or not you've achieved that goal can only be determined by using the proper KPIs (key performance indicators).
The results that you obtain can also help you to decide whether you can expand your budget for your email marketing strategy.
Also, data analysis is an essential part of being able to optimize your email marketing campaign continually. The only way that you'll be able to gauge the success of your email marketing campaign at all is if you examine and analyze the most critical measurements on a regular basis.
Delivery Rate and Bounce Rates
Among other measurements, email marketing tools will measure the delivery rate, as well as the bounce rate of your emails. These two measurements are mutually complementary and depend on various factors such as technical conditions and sender reputation.
The bounce rate of your emails should always be less than one percent if you want to have a successful campaign. If your bounce rates are higher than this, then you'll need to do some maintenance on your list, and determine which email addresses are no longer valid and remove them from the email list.
Open Rate
The refers to the percentage of subscribers who open the emails you send to them. This figure can be based either on the total number of emails opened, or the number of recipients who opened the email. The latter number is more meaningful and is known as a "unique open rate.”
Click Rate
The click rate represents the ratio between the recipients who click on at least one link in an email and the number of emails sent out. You can use this measurement to determine whether your email copy and call-to-actions are compelling enough to get users to take action. This is the most crucial measurement for you to keep track of in your email marketing campaign.
Click-to-Open Rate
This measurement is the ratio of the number of unique clicks to the number of unique opens. The reference value, in this case, is not based on the total number of recipients, but rather the number of recipients who opened the email.
If your click-to-open rates (CTOR) are low, it could mean that the content of the email isn’t fulfilling the expectations raised by its subject line. This means that a large number of your subscribers opened the email, but found the content of the email to be uninteresting and didn’t click on any of the links.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of recipients that executed the desired action at the end of the process. This could be anything from purchasing a product, downloading an e-book, or registering for a webinar. You can use this measurement to determine the final success of your email marketing campaign.
Unsubscribe Rate
It is quite reasonable with email subscribers to unsubscribe to an email list because they don't want to get news from the company anymore. The unsubscribe rate describes the ratio of unsubscribes to the total number of emails delivered.
You can typically expect to have an unsubscribe rate of about 0.25 to 0.50 percent for each mailing. As stated previously, it is essential that you include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in every email and to implement an unsubscribe process that is clean and simple.
Email List Growth Rate
The email list growth rate indicates the net increase in the number of email subscribers within a given period. This value is accordingly negative in cases when a mailing list shrinks.
Spam Complaint Rate
This measurement shows how many delivered emails were marked as spam. Your spam complaint rate shouldn’t go higher than 0.3 percent. Anything higher than that and you can expect email providers to institute penalties when you try to deliver future emails.
Return on Investment
Your return on investment (ROI), is the financial ratio that is used to measure the return of an entrepreneurial strategy. This measurement compares the profit to the invested capital. When used in email marketing, the term refers to the ratio of the costs required for an email marketing measure to the revenue generated by it.
Before you send out your first emails and start analyzing the results, you need to determine the goals of your email marketing and what you are going to measure. You can set goals like gaining new customers, increasing revenue, or raising brand awareness, or it can be a combination of goals. In order for you to define concrete goals, you are also going to need to establish the appropriate KPIs.
Measurements like click rate, conversion rate, and email list growth rate should always be on your list of metrics to analyze. However, you also need to specify and track the correct KPIs depending on the goals you want to accomplish. For example, if your goal is to gain more subscribers, then you need to focus on the email growth rate, as well as the subscribe/unsubscribe rates. If your number one goal is to increase revenue, then you need to focus on conversion rate.
Analyzing the data associated with your email marketing campaigns is a never-ending process. They should be used to uncover potential areas for improvement in your email marketing campaigns and should immediately flow into planning for your subsequent campaigns.
You will need to compare the measurement results that are achieved by your different email campaigns to get a better sense of what did and didn't work.
As you optimize your email marketing campaign, try different subject lines, sending the emails at different times, placing different call-to-action buttons, and so on, until you find a formula that works. If you discover that specific measurements results aren't satisfactory, then you need to do some digging to find out the cause so you can further optimize your emails to obtain the desired results.