Email Marketing Metrics You Need to Monitor and Why
Digital marketing is always changing. The rise of social media and other online platforms prompts us to question, whether is email still effective for reaching your audience. But despite the dramatic evolution of marketing, the answer is a resounding yes.
Email remains a cornerstone of digital strategy for businesses of all sizes. Delivering personalised, direct communication with your customers, wherever they are in the world—what more could you want? But how do you measure the success of your email marketing campaigns?
Let's dive into the top 8 email marketing metrics that truly matter and find out how you can improve yours.
1. Open Rate
The open rate measures the percentage of recipients who open your email. It's one of the first indicators of the effectiveness of your campaign.
A high open rate suggests that your subject lines are compelling and that your emails are reaching an interested (and correct) audience. Several elements determine how hard your subject lines hit, including the sender's name, text length, and time of sending.
Improving Open Rates
Crafting engaging, personalised subject lines and segmenting your email list can take your open rates from dull to direct. The key here is to test sending times and frequencies, as well as wording, the inclusion of emojis, discounts, etc. This way, you can identify what works best for your audience and optimise future campaigns.
We use advanced analytics to understand your audience, come up with subject lines and preview text that resonates with them. As a Klaviyo email marketing agency, A/B testing and segmentation strategies are a big part of the Mélusine Studio approach. We ensure that your emails reach the right people, meaning they’re more likely to be opened and read.
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate refers to the percentage of email recipients who click on one or more links in a single email. It measures how effectively your email prompts action (if at all).
A high CTR suggests your content is relevant and engaging. It reflects the success of your email in connecting with the interests and needs of your audience and making them act.
Improving Click-Through Rate
Focusing on targeted content with clear calls-to-action (CTAs) will help your CTR. Personalisation and relevant offers are important, but you should never underestimate the power of visually appealing design. This has a surprising impact on engagement.
Make sure that all emails are optimised for mobile viewing to enhance the likelihood of clicks from mobile users. With the help of Klaviyo’s data science, it can provide you with a detailed performance review to give you a clear understanding of how your emails are doing.
3. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients who follow a link within an email and actually end up completing a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for an alert, or filling out a form.
This is a direct indicator of how well your campaigns convert interest into action. Like CTR, it reflects the effectiveness of your content, design, and CTAs, but goes a little bit further to analyse how all of these factors motivate recipients to move down the sales funnel.
Improving Conversion Rate
Improving conversion rates should be the overarching goal of your emails and so almost every detail needs to be considered. Where it differs from previous metrics is the importance of what happens after the click.
Your emails need compelling content that resonates with your audience, clear, persuasive, and strategically placed CTAs, personalised elements, and segmentation to generate high conversions. But your mobile optimisation also needs to be fine-tuned to make sure you are reaching customers where they spend most of their time.
You need to keep all the promises that your email puts forward. That means your discounts are easy to use, your links work, and your landing pages are effective.
4. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate refers to the percentage of sent emails that are not successfully delivered to recipients' inboxes. Bounces can be categorised as either "soft" or "hard." Soft bounces are temporary fixes, like a full recipient inbox, while hard bounces are permanent, such as an invalid email address.
A high bounce rate can be detrimental to your campaigns. It affects the reach of your messaging but also harms your sender reputation, potentially leading to your emails landing in the spam box. Keeping your bounce rate low is essential for maintaining list hygiene and making sure your campaigns deliver—literally.
Reducing Bounce Rates
Regularly clean your email lists, removing invalid or inactive addresses, to minimise hard bounces.
Try to re-engage subscribers (with a special offer) who haven't opened your emails in a long time to avoid soft bounces.
Use the double opt-in method, which asks sign-ups to confirm their subscription first by following an email link. This ensures that recipients are providing valid email addresses and are genuinely interested in your content.
In case you haven’t, you need to authenticate your emails with protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to improve deliverability.
5. Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who opt out of your mailing list after receiving an email. This can indicate how well your content aligns with the interests and preferences of your audience. While it's normal for every email list to have some unsubscribes, a higher rate can signal deeper issues, suggesting your content is not relevant, too frequent, or not what subscribers were looking for in the first place when they signed up.
Reducing Unsubscribe Rates
Segment your list and tailor your content to different segments of your audience to make sure your emails always land where they should.
Use data insights to personalise your emails and find the right balance in how often you send them. Too many alerts can overwhelm an inbox, leading to unsubscribes.
Monitoring the bounce rate helps in maintaining a healthy, engaged list. The table below from Klaviyo gives a good indication of how your account is performing based on your open rate, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam rate. An unsubscribe rate of 0.3% or higher would be classified as suboptimal.
Image source: Klaviyo
6. Performance by Email Domain
Understanding how your emails perform across different domains is crucial to optimising your email marketing strategy. Analysing email performance by domain provides insights into whether deliverability issues are specific to certain email providers, like Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, which can be the case.
Improving Performance by Email Domain
One way to improve domain-specific email performance is to gradually increase the volume of emails sent to a particular domain—especially if you're experiencing deliverability issues. This process is called rewarming and helps rebuild your sender's reputation.
Employing a dedicated IP address for large email lists can also aid in building a unique sender reputation. Regular email list cleaning and the implementation of email authentication protocols also help maintain good deliverability.
Note: Google and Yahoo have announced new sender requirements, which will go into effect in February 2024. Learn more about it here.
Engaging highly active subscribers first, conducting A/B testing to optimise email elements for different domains, adhering to best practices, and ensuring a responsive design for mobile devices are other key strategies.
7. List Growth Rate
List growth metrics measure the rate at which your subscriber base is expanding. It takes into account new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes and email deletions. This can demonstrate the health and reach of your email marketing efforts.
Positive list growth is needed for your long-term sustainability. You want to know that more and more people are interested in what you have to offer and that your audience is growing, meaning higher margins for conversions and sales.
Improving List Growth Rates
To enhance your list growth rate, you can start by employing lead magnets. These are incentives that encourage sign-ups, like discount codes or exclusive content. You should also be using your website, social media, and other channels to promote your newsletter.
Here are some additional examples of lead magnets that you can use to encourage sign-ups:
Offer a first-time buyer discount for new subscribers, creating an immediate incentive to purchase.
Encourage sign-ups by offering free shipping on subscribers’ first order.
Promote early access to sales or new products before the general public.
Provide valuable content related to your products in the form of e-books or free guides.
Use the chance to enter a giveaway and win a prize to attract new subscribers.
Collect birthdates upon sign-up and offer a special birthday discount or gift.
Offer a fun, interactive quiz related to your products, with personalised results or product recommendations.
For businesses with tangible products, offering samples or trial packs can be a strong incentive to sign up.
Invite subscribers to exclusive educational or entertaining events like webinars and live demos related to your brand.
Introduce a customer loyalty points system where signing up earns initial points and incentivises future purchases.
Simplifying the sign-up process goes a long way, too. Make sure that it’s straightforward to subscribe and can be done from multiple points on your website. Optimising your pop-up strategy is integral to list growth. This means rigorous A/B testing of your pop-up copy, different design variations, and cadence, and continuing to do so. Check out our blog to learn more.
8. Active On-site Tracking
Active onsite tracking in Klaviyo monitors whenever an identifiable browser visits your website. This provides valuable insights into customer engagement and essentially informs you about who is visiting your site, how often, and what actions they're taking. This metric can help you segment your contacts based on their interactions with your brand and allow for more targeted marketing strategies.
Improving Active On-site Tracking
This metric isn’t so much about improving active website visitors (your marketing strategies should already be focusing on this). But rather, you can utilise active onsite tracking to improve performance elsewhere.
For example, focusing on visitors who have previously interacted with your brand, using data gathered from active onsite tracking to personalise the browsing experience, and offering tailored product recommendations and content. Trigger browse abandonment flows, cart reminders, and cross-sell products.
Encourage site visitors to subscribe, opt in, or log in to increase the number of identifiable visitors and enhance the accuracy of your tracking.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing offers a direct line of communication to your customers—existing and potential. Understanding key email metrics will help to transform this channel and ultimately improve the most important metric of all, ROI (return on investment).
Your overall return on investment measures the profitability of your campaigns, and with low running costs, there’s no reason for your email marketing efforts to not be generating high returns.
So you want to improve your overall ROI? First of all, you need to be regularly analysing and refining your campaigns based on all key performance metrics. You also need to test, test, and test again, making sure to continuously optimise your account.
Book a call with us today and find out exactly how we can fix your metrics and supercharge your email marketing efforts.
