The email marketing today is a tool for fast, effective communication and offers extraordinary potential for business.
To achieve the high investment returns that e-mail allows us as a tool, we must create planned actions, through specific strategies. But after carrying out the email marketing campaigns, the last and fundamental step is to measure the results obtained according to the desired objectives and, according to the expected effect, to determine new action plans.
It is very important to learn from the mistakes of learning from past campaigns not to repeat them again and take action against them. The only way to record whether or not our shipment worked is by measuring and analyzing the results.
Through the metrics we can observe the behaviors of our subscribers: how many emails have been sent, read, unread, unsubscribed, as well as how many clicked, which sections of the newsletter were most striking, or which products or articles are most interesting, How many generated conversion, which designs work best, among others.
Bringing control in email marketing is the fundamental step of any strategy. Each time a shipment is made, the statistics of the shipment must be observed and controlled. In this way you will be able to know how many people open and read your campaigns in a certain period of time, to improve the effectiveness of the message, frequency of shipments, issues, designs, links, etc.
Email Marketing Metrics
In email marketing we have four fundamental metrics that must be taken into account when analyzing and comparing the results with the desired objectives.
Deliverability or Delivery Rate
This metric indicates how many people have actually reached the email.
Deliverability = (Delivered * 100) / Sent
The Envoys are those emails to which the campaign was tried, that is, all the recipients of the groups that we selected at the time of sending.
On the other hand, “Delivered” are those emails that were not delivered correctly to the destination, also called “Bounced”. There are two types of bounces:
- Permanent rebates : Incorrect domains or permanent network errors. Invalid addresses due to boxes that do not exist, badly written addresses. These emails should be deactivated in our database.
- Temporary bounces: temporary problems in the destination server, full box. Usually the platform retry several times before marking the contact as rebound.
Read Rate or Open Rate
Within this metric are located the emails read: people who have selected the email in their mail box and have opened it. The reading rate is the number of emails that were opened on the number of emails delivered multiplied by one hundred.
Reading Rate = (Read / Delivered) * 100
The quality of the Database and the Subject, are the main factors that come into play when measuring and analyzing this metric.
The reading rate will depend on the quality of the database, the category, the particular campaign, but as a reference we can consider whether a campaign was successful or not based on the following percentages:
More than 30% of reading, we can consider the impact of our campaign was Excellent
Between 20% and 30%, the impact of our campaign was Very Good
Between 10% and 20%, impact Good
Less than 10%, From Regular to Poor
It is essential to be attentive to the results obtained from this metric and to act in time to obtain better and better results. There are many strategies that can be done, one of them is making a second mailing to contacts who did not read the newsletter, a subject more striking or another connotation different, and at another time or day.
Click Rate or CTR
This is one of the key metrics to analyze the success or failure of an email marketing campaign, as it is closely related to the conversion rate.
There are two fundamental metrics that have to do with clicks:
Index of Clicks or CTR (Click-Through Rate ): Is the amount of Clicks in a campaign in relation to the emails sent.
CTR = (Clicks / Sent) * 100
Click-to-Open Rate Click-To-Open Rate: Demonstrates the interest of the people who read the mail about the content of our message.
CTOR = (Clicks / Read) * 100
Audience, design format, number of message links, call-to-action buttons, highlighted phrases, are some of the factors that may influence the outcome of these metrics and that should be analyzed in detail to maximize the conversion and impact of Our campaign.
Viral Rate or VTR
Complementing our email marketing campaigns with social networks is a viral marketing strategy that allows us to achieve excellent results. The VTR (Viral-Through Rate) metric This metric measures the degree of virality that our campaign had:
VTR = ((Shared with Social Networks + Forwarded to a Friend) / Sent) * 100
Or if we consider the read, we could calculate the VTOR (Viral-To-Open Rate):
VTOR = ((Shared with Social Networks + Forwarded to a Friend) / Read) * 100
Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing Metrics
Here are some tips we can give you to improve the performance of your Email Marketing campaigns.
- The issue is one of the keys to the success of your campaigns. Say in simple and short words what will be found in the email. Never false expectations. Do not put matters in capital letters, or exceed 50 characters.
- The Database: keep the database clean and segmented, this is a capital of your company, since they are customers that you know yourself and it has taken time to collect them. Segment according to the interests of your clients and realize strategies to know their preferences.
- Plan your strategy: Plan an email marketing strategy based on goals and what is expected of the campaign. They can be quantitative or qualitative.
- Content and Design: people have already opened your Newsletter and hope to find what you have expressed in the subject, therefore it is fundamental the connection you make of it with the content. Send relevant content, eye-catching design and well-highlighted buttons, action callers to guide the audience to where you want them.
- Perform viral email marketing: integrating email with social networks is a must for any communication strategy.
- Results / Desired Objectives: Measuring the final result against the expected objectives of the email marketing campaigns allows us to analyze the success or not of the same, and according to the achieved to make new action plans.