What Metrics Should You Be Measuring When Evaluating Your Email Marketing Campaign?

by Susan Mullin

As every marketer knows, email is an important part of any marketing strategy. Effective email campaigns can increase sales, strengthen customer relationships, generate new leads, prevent customer attrition and control marketing costs. Results from email marketing can be easy to measure and assess, but with a potential data deluge, what are the most important factors to evaluate? When you’re interviewing for marketing jobs in Washington, DC, it pays to know which metrics to focus on when evaluating email campaigns.

Delivery Rate

This is one of the most rudimentary metrics to measure, but it it’s a critical one. If you send 1,000 emails and only 500 are deliverable, it skews the validity of the rest of your metrics. It also puts your company at risk of being blacklisted if your messages are viewed as spam by a large number of potential recipients. A clean, accurate list should achieve a delivery rate of 95 percent or better. If you find your delivery rate is much lower, reexamine it before your next mailing to eliminate the emails that bounce and focus on collecting new and more accurate email addresses for subscribers.

Open Rate

People must open your emails to receive your message. It doesn’t get any more obvious than that. Marketers must take this statistic seriously. According to MailChimp, in the staffing industry, typical open rates are around 20%. In marketing, it’s just a little lower. If your open rates are lower than industry standards, find out why. One of the biggest factors that determines whether someone opens an email is the subject line. It must be concise, clear relevant to the user, and it should align with the message found inside.

Click-Through Rates

Once the delivery and open hurdles have been cleared, the email must inspire the reader to act and click through to the website. Typical click through rates range from 2-5 percent. Relevancy is critical at this stage as well. For example, sending an offer for a sale on women’s shoes to the men on your list will have a negative impact on CTR because women’s shoes aren’t relevant to most men. Segmenting the email list and grouping subscribers by important traits and customer lifecycle stages is vital for maintaining relevancy.

Campaign Landing Page Bounce Rate

Once customers have clicked through, what do they find? It’s critical the landing page match what the recipient expects. If they feel tricked or misled, they won’t be receptive to your message. Landing pages must match the content and the promise of the email. Landing pages tend to have a high bounce rate because honestly, marketers aren’t that good at them. They are intrusive, deceptive, slow or just plain boring. Give your landing page the attention it deserves if you want to perform better than the frequent 90 percent bounce rate.

Conversion Rate and Revenue per Email

You cannot accurately measure success if you don’t know how much revenue you’re generating per email, but many marketers struggle to uncover this metric. Email campaigns can be measured through Google Analytics conversion tracking and Google’s URL builder in order to pinpoint how much revenue each conversion brings in.


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Posted in , Digital Marketing