You sent off your email, but what now, did it perform the way you wanted it to? And how can you improve the next email? Simple, you need to use these 4 metrics to ensure successful.
Metric 1: The open rate
Many would say that using the open rate is a clear indication that the receiver opened and read your email. Not true, and we should be real about this. Sure, a receiver can open your email, but it does not imply that they read the contents therein.
An important factor to lure the receiver to open your email is with a sexy and eye catching subject line. More so, this step of opening up an email is the first step in the marketing funnel. Otherwise put, if they receiver is not opening up the email then they are not going to take part in your marketing campaign, and they will not be converted into customers or have any meaningful impact to your campaign. It’s as simple as that.
Measure your open rate, and focus on making your subject lines as eye caching as possible. Still, remember this is merely the first step, and this can’t be done in isolation to create that ideal email.
Metric 2: The reply rate
Simply up, the reply rate refers to how many people replied to your email. As a result, this metric measures the engagement levels between you and your receivers. It also indicates if your campaign is leaning towards a healthy outcome or not. That is since, once the receiver has opened the email and replied to the email, it is an indication that they took time to read the email. If there is no reply or comments about the email, you should get worried.
Then again, not all replies you will receive might be positive. Once you receive negative comments, you shouldn’t just ignore them, but use them as part of your marketing research. My point is that you might see a good point within these bombardments of perceived hate. Some comments might in fact be geared to protect your brand values so analyse them carefully. There might be a problem that you are sending emails too often and in fact spamming your clients. Or, you need to update your database so the reader is in fact the market that should be receiving your mail. But most of them have a problem, you should in a positive way respond and find out how a problem can be turned around. Thus, show your client that they care and you want listen to them.
Metric 3: The clickthrough rate
We have passed the opening and reading of emails, now you want to check the click through rate. Simply put, the click through rate measures how many people click the link to go to a site. In essence what this is measuring is the marketers ability to persuade a reader to go beyond just reading the email and go into action mode by clicking on the link. It can also imply that the information in the email aren’t relevant to the reader, or interesting to the reader. But that is fair. It is also your responsibility to send mark relevant information to potential clients. Thereby you should ensure that your database is up-to-date and divided into relevant groups. So, it’s vital that you have segmented your email list correctly. Segmentation is key to a high click through rate. This since it allows you to send offer and content to just the people who have shown interest and there is a greater chance that they will be clicking on the link and convert into the status of a client. A healthy clickthrough rate is around 10 to 15%.This number will increase as the segmentation is refined.
Metric 4: The overall conversion rate
Technically the next step is the overall conversion rate. This might seem like a repeat of the clickthrough rate, but there is a difference. As discussed before, the clickthrough rate is referring to people clicking on a link. The overall conversation rate however indicates the percentage of readers which have opened your email, clicked on the link and the go on buying your product or making use of service. Meaning that they have become your client. This percentage is easy to measure, as it’s a mere case of x emails where sent out and y people brought the items that was advertised in the email or link in the email.
Roundup
These are simple metrics to measure the success rate of your email campaigns. The main purpose what these metrics does for a marketer is do allow them to see how an email marketing campaign is positioned within your company’s revenue stream as a whole.
But you should also remember that within these 4 steps are many factors that could impact the success of each step. Least of these are the platform that a reader might be opening up an email, be it desktop or a mobile device, or the time of day which can be another factor that impacts these steps. Plus, if emails are opened on mobile devices it can also imply that extra will be needed to ensure that they are optimised for iOS and Android platforms.
Equally, different industries’ have over the past couple of years been effected differently. Event, education and legal services, for example have been receiving a lower response if one looks at the breakdown of opens, clicks and unsubscribes figures. Still overall sectors as retail e-commerce, marketing service and travel have in recent year been finding it more challenging than their financial service and consumer sector counterparts.
Equally, different industries’ have over the past couple of years been effected differently. Event, education and legal services, for example have been receiving a lower response if one looks at the breakdown of opens, clicks and unsubscribes figures. Still overall sectors as retail e-commerce, marketing service and travel have in recent year been finding it more challenging than their financial service and consumer sector counterparts.
