When creating email marketing campaigns, there are a lot choices to make in terms of style, design, send list and content. It’s hard to know what will work best and what details may interfere with you achieving your campaign goals.
Therefore, your first step should always be to determine which KPIs (key performance indicators) best track your progress towards your email marketing goals. This way, you’ll be better equipped to capitalize on data you collect and construct more effective emails in the future.
Essential KPIs You Need to Track
Keeping track of open rates is a good place to start in your KPI measuring efforts, but examining a range of metrics will give you a better sense of how your emails are really performing. Every email marketer should keep a close eye on the following five KPIs.
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Delivery Rates
This tells you what percentage of emails were delivered and reveals a lot about the quality (or cleanliness) of your email address list. Most email marketing platforms calculate this figure automatically. A high bounce rate and low delivery rate can damage your reputation and even lead to blacklisting of email providers.
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Unique Open Rates
What percentage of your list opens each email? As this focuses more on engagement, it can be a good measure of the effectiveness of your email subject lines as well as optimum delivery times. For example, an email you send on a Friday night may get considerably more (or less) opens than one you send on a Tuesday morning.
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Spam Complaint Rates
Find out the percentage of recipients that marked your email as spam. Perhaps you’re emailing the wrong kind of content to recipients, or it could just mean that people can’t be bothered to unsubscribe. MailChimp recently revealed the average spam rate across all industries is around 0.05 percent. So, if yours is higher it’s time to ask questions about the quality of your email content.
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Conversion Rates
Do you know how many email recipients completed your specific call-to-action? The conversion rate will tell you exactly how many people clicked on your order button or clicked through to your landing page. No matter what your goals are, you must monitor this figure from one campaign to the next and take the appropriate actions in order to increase your conversions.
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Unsubscribe Rates
Various factors can cause people to unsubscribe like they receive too many emails, they subscribed accidentally or the content is no longer relevant to them. While some unsubscribes will be unavoidable, a high unsubscribe rate indicates something is wrong with your campaign.
How to Track KPIs Effectively
KPI metrics will come primarily from whichever email software package you’re using. Most of these email marketing tools – such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, Litmus, AWeber, GetResponse or Vertical Response – provide detailed reports. If you’re serious about taking your email marketing to the next level, investing in one of these tools is the smart move.
How to Measure KPI Success Rates
Every business has unique marketing goals, so you need to decide which KPIs matter to your organization. Track these metrics month over month so you can start to recognize patterns that emerge.
For example, if your unique open rates continue to fall over time, do your subject lines need reworking? Perhaps fewer subscribers are downloading your ebook and your conversion rates are falling. Could this be due to unenticing calls-to-action? Or maybe it’s because you’re not clearly explaining the benefits of the ebook to your audience. By keeping track of your key metrics you will be better equipped to deal with these issues as they arise.
How Quality Content Can Boost KPI Rates
For most businesses, email marketing success often comes down to the quality of the email content. The tone and the topics of the emails are key to driving open rates and conversions. Here are some quick content marketing tips to improve the five KPIs mentioned in this post:
- To increase open rates, create compelling subject lines that address the needs of your target audience.
- To minimize unsubscribe rates you must create useful, quality content on a regular basis. To make your job easier, hire a team of quality content writers.
- Experienced writers will also be able to create more engaging content that boosts conversion rates.
- Avoid spam words to improve delivery rates. Check out Hubspot’s guide to email spam trigger words.
Ultimately, you need to understand the needs of your audience before you can create engaging and persuasive emails. By using these content marketing tips and regularly monitoring these five KPIs, you can ensure your emails are helping, not hindering, your business.