Email marketing: the metrics to know the success of your campaigns

 Email marketing: the metrics to know the success of your campaigns-Overview

You have the perfect creatives for your email marketing campaign  . Your database is more than ready, and the tool you are going to use to manage the campaign works perfectly. Are you missing something? Yes !: Before you start, you have to know how you are going to measure the results.

For marketers, measuring our actions is as important as executing them. Before launching a campaign, we have to be clear about what metrics we are going to include in our dashboard, to monitor them as we move forward. So let's take a look at the key metrics in email marketing.

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Email-marketing-metrics-to-measure-the-success-of-your-campaigns

The main email marketing metrics

Bounce rate : this figure measures emails that fail to be delivered to their recipient for different reasons. If the email does not exist we speak of a "hard bounce", while if the email exists but the mail cannot be delivered temporarily we would have a "soft bounce". It is important to debug the database so that this metric is as close to zero as possible. Otherwise, email providers such as Gmail or Outlook may consider us spammers and will not allow us to deliver emails.

Openings : 

percentage of users who open the message, with respect to the emails delivered. The open rate is determined by the trust generated by the email sender and the attractiveness of the subject.

CTR : 

percentage of users who click on an email compared to those who have opened it. It can vary greatly depending on the campaign and is one of the critical data to optimize.

Conversion rate: 

percentage of users who perform the desired action, such as buying something in our ecommerce or registering on our page.

Unsubscribes : 

percentage of users who voluntarily remove themselves from our mailing list after receiving a specific email. As is logical, it is desirable that it be as small as possible. If the unsubscription percentage is high, we are offering insufficient quality content or sending too many emails that saturate the user.

Complaints : 

users who mark us as spam. It is also important to keep it very low so as not to cause problems with mail providers. 

Email marketing metrics: what numbers can we expect?

Sometimes it is difficult to assess whether your campaign is being a success or if you need to improve, especially if you are relatively new to email marketing. For this reason, it is always convenient to review the figures for different markets. Let's see what the main studies say on the subject.

Average figures of the main email marketing metrics

In March 2018,  Mailchimp  conducted a study of email marketing results based on company size. Rather than focus on the differences based on the number of employees, this study is interesting to see the  average data  of the main metrics:

Openings: 

the average is around 20%.

Click rate: 

between 2 and 3% on average, a figure that can be improved with an attractive offer.

Rebounds:

 around 0.3-0.4% for the hard bounce and 0.4-0.5% for the soft bounce.

Complaints: 

below 0.015%.

Discharges: 

below 0.3%.

Mailchimp --- Metrics-email-marketing

Data by type of campaign

A Getresponse study   conducted in 2018 compared the main figures for behavior-triggered, autoresponder and newsletter campaigns.

The result is the open and click rates are much higher in the case of the first two cases, that is, of  the emails that are activated in response to user behavior . While behavioral-triggered emails achieved 45.7% open rates and 10.75% clicks, newsletters only achieved 22.83% opens and 3.48% clicks.

Getresponse Metrics email marketing

The conclusion is that many  newsletters  are not capable of offering relevant content, perhaps because they insist on maintaining a certain frequency. My recommendation, therefore, is to focus more on having interesting content and less on sending communications in a specific period. It is also a good idea to test the content on social networks to see which ones generate the most interest.

To get :The 14 best autoresponders for emails in 2020

Best days and times to send emails

Rivers of ink have been written about this email marketing metric, so let's see if we can shed some light on it.

According to the Getresponse study from last year, a very revealing fact is that  the spikes in click and open rates do not coincide . While the highest open rate occurs between 10 and 11 in the morning, emails generate more clicks in the afternoon, after the end of the working day (that is, between 6 and 7) and at night before going to sleep.

Getresponse --- Email-Marketing-metrics

As for the days of the week, all email marketing metrics are generally better from Monday to Friday, with Tuesday and Thursday being the most interesting days. But rather than blindly following this recommendation, my advice is to experiment with what works best for your business. If you move in the leisure or entertainment sector, don't rule out weekends in advance.

Email marketing metrics: what works best

Finally, we are going to see another study by Getresponse, in this case on different strategies applied to emails and their impact on open and click rates.

Getresponse email marketing metrics 2

Emails that include  images  get a click-through rate of 4.22%, while those that do not contain them only get 3.06%. Therefore, this practice is clearly beneficial.

Customizing  the subject of emails manages to slightly increase the open rate, from 23.57% to 24.43%. In the same way, customizing the body of emails also has a moderate positive effect on click-through rates, from 3.61% to 4.46%.

Including  emojis  in email subjects is still a minority practice (only 8% of messages include them), but it manages to increase the open rate by almost two points (from 23.50% to 25.46% ).