5 Email Marketing Metrics to Watch Depending on Your Goals

• Updated on: 2018-11-05
• Read original article here

Email remains one of the best ways to reach your audience. Nearly all internet users have at least one email address and most check them daily.

It does no good, however, to send an email out into the void without an understanding of who will read it and how they will react. To ensure that you are doing everything to meet your goals, watch the metrics that apply. What you will look at will often depend on what you want to achieve.

We’ve assembled a few of the best metrics to watch for a range of email marketing goals.

If your goal is increasing awareness of your brand or a new product, your open rate is one of the most important metrics to look at. This is the measure of how many people are opening your emails and how many are deleting them unread.

If your open rate is lower than you would like, there are a number of strategies that can increase it. Changing your subject line to something that adds urgency, for instance, can help increase your open rate. You may also wish to vary the times and days that you send your emails. Business to business emails may get more response during morning hours. For B2C communications, weekends may work better for you.

If you want to increase traffic to a landing page or product page, measure how many people are clicking your links. The percentage of people who you are sending to who click through will tell you how successful you are.

To learn more about who is visiting, create unique tracking codes that go in each email. These codes can tell you which prospects are visiting your website to learn more. When paired with other information that you have about each prospect, you can learn more about what they respond to.

Including a single, clear, and compelling call to action (CTA) can increase the traffic to your site. Be sure that the CTA is easily seen. Using a larger font and setting it off from the paragraphs above and below can help. Try A/B testing of different colors and fonts. Look at whether you have the best results when you put the CTA above the fold versus at the bottom of the email.

Look at click-throughs and conversions when you are bringing a new product to your prospects.

There are a number of variables that can affect your success in this area.

Do your customers click through and buy more often when you feature a single product or several related ones? Does it help when your emails are mobile-friendly? Do you do better when you list a price in the email itself or when it is shown once they’ve clicked through to the page?

Testing these variables to see which give you the best results can dramatically increase your success in this area. Track your results to learn what your prospects respond to. Test one variable at a time with similar lists to learn more about what works.

While size isn’t everything, the number of people who you are reaching is important.

Learn whether your emails are turning prospects off by watching your unsubscribes. People unsubscribing to your list is a normal part of marketing. However, if you are finding that too many people are leaving, there could be something wrong with your approach. Try different headlines or offering the option to subscribe to a list that receives mail less often to keep your numbers up.

When you are working to grow your business, every bit of revenue counts.

Increases here can open up opportunities to expand your product range, bring in new talent, or expand into new markets.

To see how your email marketing stands up, look at your revenue per email — how much you earn, on average, for each marketing email that you send.

There are a wide range of actions that you can take that can increase your return on your email marketing investment.

Segmenting your marketing list can result in better conversions. With segmentation, you send a different marketing message to different groups of prospects based on their reactions in the past. This sort of highly targeted marketing is more resource intensive, but can also significantly increase your conversion rate and your revenue.

Upselling and cross-selling can also increase your revenue from each prospect who responds. For instance, instead of marketing a single product in each email, you can increase your revenue by offering related products together.

The shotgun approach to email marketing does not work anymore.

Too many of your clients are constantly bombarded by offers and promotions.

To stand out from the noise, you need to create email marketing assets that take your clients’ behaviors and preferences into account.

By carefully studying the data that you get from your marketing analytics, you can create more compelling marketing emails. This, in turn, helps you achieve your goals.