How do you know that your emails are performing?
It seems like a simple enough question with a simple answer, right?
Well, it’s not!
There’s a lot we need to look at when talking about email marketing. Of course, there are initial steps to making your emails count, like optimizing your emails. However, at the end of the day, it won’t matter how optimized your emails are. If your emails are not performing as they should, then they are not helping you hit the goals of your ecommerce marketing strategy.
Luckily, there’s a wealth of data available to the modern marketer. Just one problem, though. While there are lots of real metrics that show you how well your emails are doing, there are a lot of vanity metrics that can be more distracting than helpful. So, where do you start?
Today I’ll be looking at some valuable email marketing metrics and KPIs you should be paying attention to grow your conversions.
5 Email Marketing Metrics Every Marketer Should be Tracking
#1. Overall ROI
No surprise here.
There’s a lot of talk in marketing circles about return on investment. Most marketing decisions are dependent on how much profits are made. So it makes a lot of sense that the overall ROI should be one of the things you are tracking when it comes to email marketing.
The truth: the return on investment provides a goldmine of insight into the success of your marketing channel. If you measure whether email marketing works as a marketing channel, a drop in the overall ROI could mean that your email marketing strategy isn’t working as well as it ought to be. But an increase in overall ROI implies that it’s probably something you could explore further and make much more returns.
So you always need to ask yourself; how many leads did your emails generate? How do your emails translate to potential revenue? These are all metrics that will help you determine just how valuable email marketing is as a marketing channel.
#2. Click-Through Rates
You just started a new email campaign. And you thought things were going pretty well. But it’s only after you check the click-through rate that you quickly realize that people are hardly engaging with your emails.
Why does it work?
Because it gives you direct insight into how people are engaging with your emails.
I’m sure you see the number of people engaging with your emails when people send a reply email. But checking the click-through rate gives you a clearer picture of how many people are actually engaging with your emails and the performance of every individual email you send out. This will make it easy for you to track how the click-through rate changes over time.
#3. Conversion Rate
After the ROI and click-through rate, guess what another metric you need to be monitoring? Conversion rate. As it turns out, it’s not enough for people to click through your emails; they also have to complete an action.
So, say you’re offering your audience a free discount on a burger, you’d consider the people who buy the discounted burgers to be conversions. If your tactics are good enough, you will have a high conversion rate. And over time, you can see the conversion rate going up.
#4. Bounce Rate
There’s a lot we could talk about in terms of metrics. But if we could go beyond click-through rates and conversions, bounce rate is definitely a deal-breaker.
Put simply, a bounce occurs when visitors leave before they can interact with your emails. This could be due to several reasons. It could be they probably just don’t like what you’re offering. Or your emails just aren’t as exciting.
One good way to check how your emails are performing is by looking at the bounce rate. Then you can remove the bounce addresses from your email list.
#5. List Growth Rate
Aside from the bounce rate and conversion rate, checking the list growth rate is also an excellent way to keep tabs on the performance of your emails. If the list growth rate has been at a healthy size for the past few months, it might indicate that you are not doing enough to grow your subscriber list. You also need to consider that growing your list is actually more important than keeping it at a healthy size so that there’s still a sizeable number of people on your list even when others pull out.
Conclusion
Succeeding in email marketing can be challenging. Especially if you don’t know what e-commerce marketing strategy you should adopt to achieve the desired results. But if you track these metrics regularly, you should be able to understand how to improve your tactics.