Email marketing is one of the most accepted marketing strategies. This strategy is said to have a higher performance rate than the other sought-out strategies. Email marketing can help you achieve your goals. Your goals may be different while sending emails. You might want to generate more leads, promote content, transform prospects to clients, retain customers, or garner more traffic to your website.
When you send your email; you need to take a moment to think what is your goal for sending this email? To measure the success rate of email marketing a few key performance indicators (KPI’s) you should keep in mind. Fortunately today we have inbuilt analytics tools in the email marketing campaign to track your success rate. Then too below mentioned are a few techniques you can keep in mind;
“Open” Rate:
In simple terms, this means the number of emails that have been viewed by the recipients. Your subject line plays a very significant role while measuring this metric. But a common misconception is that the open rate does not determine the actual success of your email. This is because in a true sense an open mail means opening of the mail including the image. Most mails have images embedded in the mail, if a recipient does not view the image or has disabled viewing of the image the mail is then considered not opened. So this metric is kind of unreliable to measure the success of your strategy.
“Click to link” Rate:
This means checking how many of your recipients have visited the link provided in the mail. One also needs to verify for how long has the visitor been on the landing page aka the website after viewing the mail. If the recipient does not perform any activity on the landing page it means you need to rethink your subject line. If a visitor performs some activity on the landing page that means your mail has successfully achieved its goal.
“Conversion” Rate:
This means specifically viewing how many people have taken action based on what the mail had asked them to do. This is based on the actual purpose of the mail. Depending on if your mail suggested them to fill out an e-form, or to visit your website. Via Google Analytics one can get an idea of how many recipients have viewed your website. This measurement technique is one of the sure-shot ways of measuring the success of your email.
“Bounce” Rate:
This helps you in measuring how many mail ids have received your mails. There are two types of bounce rates: Soft and hard. A soft bounce rate means mail is not delivered to the recipient because of a full inbox or other technicalities. Whereas a hard bounce rate means mail is not delivered because the mail id is not valid. Make sure to remove all the invalid mail ids from your list because that affects your digital reputation.
“Unsubscribe” Rate:
This means the number of recipients who have unsubscribed from your mailing list. The ratio of unsubscribed rate should be around 0.5%. However, it is normal for a small number of subscribers to unsubscribe from your list because of changing needs and tastes. But if a large number of people from your list have unsubscribed you need to pay attention to where you have gone wrong and rectify your mistakes.
Tips to keep in mind:
- Make sure you do not have too many links in your mail. It might be confusing for the recipient and might ignore the mail overall.
- Personalize your subject lines. Maybe use names or humor, this way the chances of viewing a mail increases.
- Within a span of a few days, you can rerun the same campaign to your mail id’s. This way you can judge which emails performed or underperformed.