S
Suzanne Scacca
Guest
If you’re involved in creating newsletters, drip campaigns, transactional emails or other email marketing communications, you want to make sure your strategy is effective. This post goes into which metrics matter most in email marketing and how to use them to optimize your strategy and outcomes.
There are lots of metrics you can analyze whenever you send an email out to leads, subscribers, customers and others. But should you spend your time reviewing all of them?
For example, let’s say you have an automated “You forgot something” email that goes out whenever a logged-in customer abandons their shopping cart. You wouldn’t care about a metric like the sharing or list growth rate with this kind of email. However, you would want to know the open, engagement and conversion rates.
In this post, we’ll look at nine important metrics to analyze in email marketing, what each of them tells you and how to use them to optimize the different types of emails you send.
Studying your email marketing metrics will help you answer critical questions about the efficacy of your strategy. For instance:
As for which email marketing metrics to pay attention to, start here. Some of these metrics will be readily available in your email marketing platform (like open rate). Others you’ll need to calculate on your own.
The open rate is calculated based on the number of emails that were successfully delivered to and opened by your recipients. The calculation looks like this:
No. of Opened Emails ÷ (Total No. of Recipients - No. of Bounced Emails) ✕ 100 = Open Rate
Here’s an example of how you’d calculate this number:
You send an email to 143 subscribers. 14 of those emails bounce, which means your message was blocked and never made it to their inbox. Of those that did receive it, 52 open it up.
52 ÷ (143 - 14) ✕ 100 = 40.3%
On its face, this number looks good. But what does this number actually do for us? Alone, not much.
The open rate is a valuable metric to use for comparison purposes.
Basically, it gives us an idea of how certain kinds of email marketing efforts improve over time. That said, avoid comparing different types of email open rates against one another (like the open rates of a newsletter vs. an ecommerce purchase summary email). But comparing all product upsell emails against one another, for instance, is fine.
The open rate gives us a way to compare how one email does compared to another. For example, let’s say you send out a weekly newsletter. You could look at the open rates to chart how engaged your subscribers are over time. But another way to look at this is to see if there are particular subjects that subscribers are more likely to open.
DateSubject LineOpen Rate
Jan. 42024 holiday sales hit new lows [Report]13.2%
Jan. 1110 of the most profitable fitness apps in 2024 (and why)42.9%
Jan. 18How to build a retail business that survives in the digital age21.6%
Jan. 255 of the best payment processors to use in 202542.9%
The open rate is also a valuable metric when A/B testing, like when sending out the same email with different subject lines to subscribers. You can also use this metric to assess which kinds of topics your subscribers are more eager to open.
This metric refers to the total number of times any of your subscribers opened your email. So, it includes multiple opens from the same person.
Why should you care about this metric? Unlike the open rate, you can use this one to evaluate individual email performance.
To start, you’ll need to compare the number of opened emails to the number of times the email was opened. Here’s an example of how it would look:
Total emails sent143
No. of opened emails52
Total no. of times emails were opened71
If you want to see the average number of times your subscribers opened a particular email, use this formula:
Total Opens ÷ No. of Opened Emails
Here’s how it looks with actual numbers:
71 ÷ 52 = 1.37
This is a lot like the website metric that tells us the average number of times someone visits a landing page. This one answers how many times subscribers, on average, opened the email.
This is a valuable metric as it suggests an eagerness to read what you sent. There are a few reasons why someone may reopen an email:
You can dig deeper into your metrics to see if there’s a correlation between the subscribers who opened the email multiple times and other activities. For instance, were they more likely to click on links than those that opened it once? Did they tend to belong to one user segment over another? Is there something else that makes them stand out?
Another thing this metric can help you figure out is the right length and timing of your email. While it’s great that some subscribers will come back to reread an email, extra-long emails might be a turnoff for others.
The same goes with timing. Say you send your newsletters on Monday mornings. Some subscribers reread it when it comes through, but most seem to not have the time for it. You might also want to consider that your emails are getting lost in the shuffle.
So, there’s a lot of ways in which this metric can help you identify potential delivery problems and to encourage more engagement.
The bounce rate is the number of emails that were unsuccessfully delivered to subscribers.
To calculate the bounce rate, use the following formula:
(No. of Undelivered Emails ÷ Total Emails Sent) ✕ 100 = Bounce Rate
This tells us the percentage of emails that never landed in someone’s inbox. Here’s how it looks with actual numbers:
(14 ÷ 143) ✕ 100 = 9.79%
Bounces come in two forms: soft and hard.
Hard bounces typically mean that the email is invalid or no longer exists (if it ever existed at all). Soft bounces mean that the email was temporarily blocked. This could be due to the subscriber having a too-full inbox.
The bounce rate isn’t all that helpful when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of the emails you send. What it will tell you, however, is if your subscriber list needs to be scrubbed.
Because soft bounces are often temporary blocks, be careful about unsubscribing all bounced subscribers whenever you send an email. Keep tabs on your list of bounces over time. Unsubscribe the hard bounces (the ones that never get through). For all others, give it a month. If you can’t reach a particular subscriber during that time, take them off the list.
The click rate (or clickthrough rate) tells you the number of emails where someone clicked on one or more of the links.
There are two ways to calculate this percentage. It depends on if you want to know what percentage of emails had engagement or how much activity there was overall. Let’s look at the difference.
To see what percentage of your subscribers engaged with the email you sent, use this formula:
(No. of Clicks ÷ No. of Opened Emails) ✕ 100 = Email Engagement Rate
Here’s how it looks with actual numbers:
(2 ÷ 52) ✕ 100 = 3.85%
This calculation tells us that 3.85% of your subscribers engaged with your email. It doesn’t tell us what the click rate is compared to the total number of times your email was opened.
To find out that percentage, use this formula:
(No. of Clicks ÷ Total Opens) ✕ 100 = Click Rate
Here’s how it looks with actual numbers:
(2 ÷ 71) ✕ 100 = 2.82%
This calculation tells us the true engagement rate based on all the times your email was opened.
This number will usually be lower than the email engagement rate as it takes into account subscribers that opened the message multiple times. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, you might want to pay closer attention to this calculation as it’s a more accurate reflection of what’s going on.
While almost 4% of your subscribers may have engaged with your email at some point, it can take multiple opens and read-throughs to get to that point. So, this metric can help you decide if a more effective strategy is needed when sending your messages. Perhaps the emails themselves need to be shorter or you need to schedule them at a more convenient time for your users to read them.
Something else to explore when reviewing this metric is which links were clicked. In some emails you send, there may be only one call to action. However, if your email contains multiple internal links, it’s worth evaluating which ones seemed the most attractive to your subscribers. This can help you decide what kinds of content to include in your subsequent emails.
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribed after receiving an email. To calculate it, you’ll use this formula:
No. of Unsubscribers ÷ (Total No. of Recipients - No. of Bounced Emails) ✕ 100 = Bounce Rate
Here’s how it looks when you plug in actual numbers:
3 ÷ (143 - 14) ✕ 100 = 2.33%
Ultimately, the goal is to have the unsubscribe rate be as close to 0% as possible every time you send an email. The number might be a bit higher if you send an email to your subscriber list after a long delay in sending anything. But this is why you keep an eye on this metric. So long as the number stays steady or continually goes down from email to email, then you’re good.
Any major spikes in unsubscription activity after this point, however, should be investigated. They could be a sign that your email marketing strategy has gone in the wrong direction or that a particular promotion was not well-received.
The spam count tells you how many unsubscribers marked your email as “spam” or “abuse.” This is something you want to avoid at all costs.
Similar to spikes in unsubscriptions, you should investigate any major instances of subscribers marking your emails as spam.
This is problematic for a couple of reasons. For starters, it suggests that some users are unhappy with the content of your emails. Also, it could put your whole email marketing strategy at risk. If your sender address and brand are flagged as “spam” enough, all your communications may end up in Spam or Junk folders. Worse, you may be barred by your email marketing software from sending any further emails.
This metric tells you how much your list is growing over time. To calculate the list growth rate, use this formula:
(No. of New Subscribers - No. of Unsubscribers) ÷ Total No. of Recipients ✕ 100 = List Growth Rate
Here’s how this looks with real numbers:
(4 - 3) ÷ 143 ✕ 100 = 0.7%
Essentially, this metric tells you how much your list has grown or shrunk within the context of the overall list size.
It’s important to pay attention to how your subscriber list is expanding (or contracting). This metric won’t necessarily reflect on the quality of your emails, per se. That is, unless you’re seeing huge numbers of subscribers sharing or forwarding an email.
What it will do is tell you how effective your marketing strategy is. If your newsletter list is growing, take a look at where those signups occur most frequently. For example:
Once you discover where all these signups take place, consider optimizing the user experience further. Better yet, A/B test alternatives to choose optimizations that help increase your growth rate instead of the reverse.
Your newsletter subscriber list isn’t the only one that may be growing. For instance, if you’ve built a lead generation landing page or element (like a popup), the growth could be coming from there. If it is, you need to figure out why. Has there been a sudden boost in visibility for the page where this form is? If so, where is the traffic coming from—search engines, social media, somewhere else? Is it a result of an active campaign you’re running or something else?
Again, if you’re enjoying a spike in subscriptions, consider testing and optimizing the user experience. You may see your list growth rate shoot up even further.
This metric tracks what percentage of recipients opened your email, clicked on a link and then completed the suggested action. The conversion could be a:
The conversion rate won’t apply to every email you send. However, if you’re directing traffic to a website, social media page or third-party link where a conversion can take place, and that’s the intended goal of the email, then this is a metric you should be tracking.
Here’s how you calculate the conversion rate:
No. of Recipients That Completed Action ÷ (Total No. of Recipients - No. of Bounced Emails) ✕ 100 = Conversion Rate
In reality, the calculation would work like this:
2 ÷ (143 - 14) ✕ 100 = 1.55%
Now, tracking conversions from email can be somewhat tricky as you’re dealing with two separate platforms.
One way to monitor conversions from email is to use a multichannel management system like Progress Sitefinity. This way, you’ll be able to track your users as they weave in and out of various marketing channels.
If you’re not using a multichannel management system, you can still capture this data. The best way to do this is by adding a unique tracking URL to the call-to-action button or link in the email. It’ll take a little extra work to connect the dots, but the data will be there.
And if it’s important to you to know which channels are driving conversions and helping you meet your business goals, then email conversion rate is a must-track metric.
The return on investment (ROI) metric is a complex one as it requires you to calculate the cost of an email campaign and then compare it to the profit.
The most basic formula for this metric goes like this:
(Profit - Cost) ÷ Profit = ROI
Depending on what kind of email campaign you’ve run, there may be a lot of variables you need to collect data on.
Let’s use a multi-week email as our example.
You built the subscriber list from a blog post and Instagram post touting the secrets to building a successful visual brand. Each week, the subscribers receive an email with a link to a five-minute video. Each discusses a different aspect of brand design along with some tips. At the end of the emails, you invite subscribers to sign up for your branding design service if they want to outsource the work to a pro.
When calculating the cost of this email marketing campaign, you’d have to include the time and/or money spent on:
Then you’ll have to add up the profits. This calculation might not be that straightforward either.
Tracking sales conversions from each email can be done easily enough (see section above), there are other ways to profit, though, and some of them take time to happen.
For example, let’s say you have someone sign up for the email and then pay for your services. They refer you to five of their colleagues, two of whom skip the emails and go straight to the landing page to convert. There’s no easy way to connect that conversion to the email unless you ask the lead, “Who referred you?”
Or let’s say you have a number of people who complete the email series without converting. However, they decide that they love your content and think it would be worthwhile to subscribe to your blog. There may be other opportunities for them to convert down the line. Again, though, tracing those conversions back to the email can be difficult, if not impossible.
So, ROI tracking can be useful. But it’s not always an exact science.
This is why it’s really important to keep an eye on all your email metrics. For instance, even if you don’t see a huge amount of conversions from this email campaign, your newsletter list growth rate might skyrocket as a result. Even if it doesn’t put money into your pocket right away, those subscribers are worth something, right?
So, it might be valuable to factor in the overall increase in leads and sales for your business over time when making this calculation.
Email marketing can be one of the more effective ways to market to your target audience. Just as with other kinds of content marketing, it’s vital that you keep tabs on what’s happening with the emails you send. Seeing healthy open rates is fine and all, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You need to go deeper if you want to discover what’s working and what needs improvement.
For the best results, email marketing should be done in conjunction with other user research and testing methods. For example, you can A/B test your subject lines and email lengths to see what resonates best with subscribers. You can also experiment with sending emails at different days and times. You can even survey subscribers to see what their email content and frequency preferences are.
And don’t forget about your website. Optimizing the user experience at the initial point of contact can help you get more subscribers.
Continue reading...
There are lots of metrics you can analyze whenever you send an email out to leads, subscribers, customers and others. But should you spend your time reviewing all of them?
For example, let’s say you have an automated “You forgot something” email that goes out whenever a logged-in customer abandons their shopping cart. You wouldn’t care about a metric like the sharing or list growth rate with this kind of email. However, you would want to know the open, engagement and conversion rates.
In this post, we’ll look at nine important metrics to analyze in email marketing, what each of them tells you and how to use them to optimize the different types of emails you send.
9 Metrics to Measure the Success of Your Email Marketing Strategy
Studying your email marketing metrics will help you answer critical questions about the efficacy of your strategy. For instance:
- Are my subscribers even opening my emails?
- Those that do, are they engaged enough to take action (i.e., click)?
- What kinds of links or offers do they click on most?
- Are there certain days or times of days when my emails are opened and engaged with most?
- Which subscriber segment engages and converts at the best rate? And at the lowest rate?
- Are we spending time on the right kinds of messaging and campaigns?
- Are our email efforts helping or hindering our overall marketing strategy?
As for which email marketing metrics to pay attention to, start here. Some of these metrics will be readily available in your email marketing platform (like open rate). Others you’ll need to calculate on your own.
Open Rate
The open rate is calculated based on the number of emails that were successfully delivered to and opened by your recipients. The calculation looks like this:
No. of Opened Emails ÷ (Total No. of Recipients - No. of Bounced Emails) ✕ 100 = Open Rate
Here’s an example of how you’d calculate this number:
You send an email to 143 subscribers. 14 of those emails bounce, which means your message was blocked and never made it to their inbox. Of those that did receive it, 52 open it up.
52 ÷ (143 - 14) ✕ 100 = 40.3%
On its face, this number looks good. But what does this number actually do for us? Alone, not much.
The open rate is a valuable metric to use for comparison purposes.
Basically, it gives us an idea of how certain kinds of email marketing efforts improve over time. That said, avoid comparing different types of email open rates against one another (like the open rates of a newsletter vs. an ecommerce purchase summary email). But comparing all product upsell emails against one another, for instance, is fine.
The open rate gives us a way to compare how one email does compared to another. For example, let’s say you send out a weekly newsletter. You could look at the open rates to chart how engaged your subscribers are over time. But another way to look at this is to see if there are particular subjects that subscribers are more likely to open.
DateSubject LineOpen Rate
Jan. 42024 holiday sales hit new lows [Report]13.2%
Jan. 1110 of the most profitable fitness apps in 2024 (and why)42.9%
Jan. 18How to build a retail business that survives in the digital age21.6%
Jan. 255 of the best payment processors to use in 202542.9%
The open rate is also a valuable metric when A/B testing, like when sending out the same email with different subject lines to subscribers. You can also use this metric to assess which kinds of topics your subscribers are more eager to open.
Total Opens
This metric refers to the total number of times any of your subscribers opened your email. So, it includes multiple opens from the same person.
Why should you care about this metric? Unlike the open rate, you can use this one to evaluate individual email performance.
To start, you’ll need to compare the number of opened emails to the number of times the email was opened. Here’s an example of how it would look:
Total emails sent143
No. of opened emails52
Total no. of times emails were opened71
If you want to see the average number of times your subscribers opened a particular email, use this formula:
Total Opens ÷ No. of Opened Emails
Here’s how it looks with actual numbers:
71 ÷ 52 = 1.37
This is a lot like the website metric that tells us the average number of times someone visits a landing page. This one answers how many times subscribers, on average, opened the email.
This is a valuable metric as it suggests an eagerness to read what you sent. There are a few reasons why someone may reopen an email:
- They weren’t able to finish it in one session, so they saved the rest for later.
- They read through it but wanted to save the call to action for when they had more time.
- They really enjoyed what they read and wanted to give it another read.
- They wanted to share it with someone else.
You can dig deeper into your metrics to see if there’s a correlation between the subscribers who opened the email multiple times and other activities. For instance, were they more likely to click on links than those that opened it once? Did they tend to belong to one user segment over another? Is there something else that makes them stand out?
Another thing this metric can help you figure out is the right length and timing of your email. While it’s great that some subscribers will come back to reread an email, extra-long emails might be a turnoff for others.
The same goes with timing. Say you send your newsletters on Monday mornings. Some subscribers reread it when it comes through, but most seem to not have the time for it. You might also want to consider that your emails are getting lost in the shuffle.
So, there’s a lot of ways in which this metric can help you identify potential delivery problems and to encourage more engagement.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the number of emails that were unsuccessfully delivered to subscribers.
To calculate the bounce rate, use the following formula:
(No. of Undelivered Emails ÷ Total Emails Sent) ✕ 100 = Bounce Rate
This tells us the percentage of emails that never landed in someone’s inbox. Here’s how it looks with actual numbers:
(14 ÷ 143) ✕ 100 = 9.79%
Bounces come in two forms: soft and hard.
Hard bounces typically mean that the email is invalid or no longer exists (if it ever existed at all). Soft bounces mean that the email was temporarily blocked. This could be due to the subscriber having a too-full inbox.
The bounce rate isn’t all that helpful when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of the emails you send. What it will tell you, however, is if your subscriber list needs to be scrubbed.
Because soft bounces are often temporary blocks, be careful about unsubscribing all bounced subscribers whenever you send an email. Keep tabs on your list of bounces over time. Unsubscribe the hard bounces (the ones that never get through). For all others, give it a month. If you can’t reach a particular subscriber during that time, take them off the list.
Click Rate
The click rate (or clickthrough rate) tells you the number of emails where someone clicked on one or more of the links.
There are two ways to calculate this percentage. It depends on if you want to know what percentage of emails had engagement or how much activity there was overall. Let’s look at the difference.
To see what percentage of your subscribers engaged with the email you sent, use this formula:
(No. of Clicks ÷ No. of Opened Emails) ✕ 100 = Email Engagement Rate
Here’s how it looks with actual numbers:
(2 ÷ 52) ✕ 100 = 3.85%
This calculation tells us that 3.85% of your subscribers engaged with your email. It doesn’t tell us what the click rate is compared to the total number of times your email was opened.
To find out that percentage, use this formula:
(No. of Clicks ÷ Total Opens) ✕ 100 = Click Rate
Here’s how it looks with actual numbers:
(2 ÷ 71) ✕ 100 = 2.82%
This calculation tells us the true engagement rate based on all the times your email was opened.
This number will usually be lower than the email engagement rate as it takes into account subscribers that opened the message multiple times. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, you might want to pay closer attention to this calculation as it’s a more accurate reflection of what’s going on.
While almost 4% of your subscribers may have engaged with your email at some point, it can take multiple opens and read-throughs to get to that point. So, this metric can help you decide if a more effective strategy is needed when sending your messages. Perhaps the emails themselves need to be shorter or you need to schedule them at a more convenient time for your users to read them.
Something else to explore when reviewing this metric is which links were clicked. In some emails you send, there may be only one call to action. However, if your email contains multiple internal links, it’s worth evaluating which ones seemed the most attractive to your subscribers. This can help you decide what kinds of content to include in your subsequent emails.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribed after receiving an email. To calculate it, you’ll use this formula:
No. of Unsubscribers ÷ (Total No. of Recipients - No. of Bounced Emails) ✕ 100 = Bounce Rate
Here’s how it looks when you plug in actual numbers:
3 ÷ (143 - 14) ✕ 100 = 2.33%
Ultimately, the goal is to have the unsubscribe rate be as close to 0% as possible every time you send an email. The number might be a bit higher if you send an email to your subscriber list after a long delay in sending anything. But this is why you keep an eye on this metric. So long as the number stays steady or continually goes down from email to email, then you’re good.
Any major spikes in unsubscription activity after this point, however, should be investigated. They could be a sign that your email marketing strategy has gone in the wrong direction or that a particular promotion was not well-received.
Spam Count
The spam count tells you how many unsubscribers marked your email as “spam” or “abuse.” This is something you want to avoid at all costs.
Similar to spikes in unsubscriptions, you should investigate any major instances of subscribers marking your emails as spam.
This is problematic for a couple of reasons. For starters, it suggests that some users are unhappy with the content of your emails. Also, it could put your whole email marketing strategy at risk. If your sender address and brand are flagged as “spam” enough, all your communications may end up in Spam or Junk folders. Worse, you may be barred by your email marketing software from sending any further emails.
List Growth Rate
This metric tells you how much your list is growing over time. To calculate the list growth rate, use this formula:
(No. of New Subscribers - No. of Unsubscribers) ÷ Total No. of Recipients ✕ 100 = List Growth Rate
Here’s how this looks with real numbers:
(4 - 3) ÷ 143 ✕ 100 = 0.7%
Essentially, this metric tells you how much your list has grown or shrunk within the context of the overall list size.
It’s important to pay attention to how your subscriber list is expanding (or contracting). This metric won’t necessarily reflect on the quality of your emails, per se. That is, unless you’re seeing huge numbers of subscribers sharing or forwarding an email.
What it will do is tell you how effective your marketing strategy is. If your newsletter list is growing, take a look at where those signups occur most frequently. For example:
- Homepage promotional section
- After reading certain blog posts
- Main blog page
- Newsletter subscription page
- Subscriber form in the footer
- Email marketing checkbox included in the checkout form
Once you discover where all these signups take place, consider optimizing the user experience further. Better yet, A/B test alternatives to choose optimizations that help increase your growth rate instead of the reverse.
Your newsletter subscriber list isn’t the only one that may be growing. For instance, if you’ve built a lead generation landing page or element (like a popup), the growth could be coming from there. If it is, you need to figure out why. Has there been a sudden boost in visibility for the page where this form is? If so, where is the traffic coming from—search engines, social media, somewhere else? Is it a result of an active campaign you’re running or something else?
Again, if you’re enjoying a spike in subscriptions, consider testing and optimizing the user experience. You may see your list growth rate shoot up even further.
Conversion Rate
This metric tracks what percentage of recipients opened your email, clicked on a link and then completed the suggested action. The conversion could be a:
- Purchase
- Download
- Subscription
- Appointment scheduling
- Form fill
- Other action that aligns with your business goals
The conversion rate won’t apply to every email you send. However, if you’re directing traffic to a website, social media page or third-party link where a conversion can take place, and that’s the intended goal of the email, then this is a metric you should be tracking.
Here’s how you calculate the conversion rate:
No. of Recipients That Completed Action ÷ (Total No. of Recipients - No. of Bounced Emails) ✕ 100 = Conversion Rate
In reality, the calculation would work like this:
2 ÷ (143 - 14) ✕ 100 = 1.55%
Now, tracking conversions from email can be somewhat tricky as you’re dealing with two separate platforms.
One way to monitor conversions from email is to use a multichannel management system like Progress Sitefinity. This way, you’ll be able to track your users as they weave in and out of various marketing channels.
If you’re not using a multichannel management system, you can still capture this data. The best way to do this is by adding a unique tracking URL to the call-to-action button or link in the email. It’ll take a little extra work to connect the dots, but the data will be there.
And if it’s important to you to know which channels are driving conversions and helping you meet your business goals, then email conversion rate is a must-track metric.
ROI
The return on investment (ROI) metric is a complex one as it requires you to calculate the cost of an email campaign and then compare it to the profit.
The most basic formula for this metric goes like this:
(Profit - Cost) ÷ Profit = ROI
Depending on what kind of email campaign you’ve run, there may be a lot of variables you need to collect data on.
Let’s use a multi-week email as our example.
You built the subscriber list from a blog post and Instagram post touting the secrets to building a successful visual brand. Each week, the subscribers receive an email with a link to a five-minute video. Each discusses a different aspect of brand design along with some tips. At the end of the emails, you invite subscribers to sign up for your branding design service if they want to outsource the work to a pro.
When calculating the cost of this email marketing campaign, you’d have to include the time and/or money spent on:
- Strategy
- Writing the blog post
- Writing the Instagram post
- Designing the web page and social media post
- Editing and optimizing all the content
- Boosting the Instagram post
- Writing each email
- A/B testing and optimizing the emails
- Designing and formatting each email
- Creating the pricing/signup landing page
- Setting up the checkout and payment processor
- Setting up the automated post-checkout steps
Then you’ll have to add up the profits. This calculation might not be that straightforward either.
Tracking sales conversions from each email can be done easily enough (see section above), there are other ways to profit, though, and some of them take time to happen.
For example, let’s say you have someone sign up for the email and then pay for your services. They refer you to five of their colleagues, two of whom skip the emails and go straight to the landing page to convert. There’s no easy way to connect that conversion to the email unless you ask the lead, “Who referred you?”
Or let’s say you have a number of people who complete the email series without converting. However, they decide that they love your content and think it would be worthwhile to subscribe to your blog. There may be other opportunities for them to convert down the line. Again, though, tracing those conversions back to the email can be difficult, if not impossible.
So, ROI tracking can be useful. But it’s not always an exact science.
This is why it’s really important to keep an eye on all your email metrics. For instance, even if you don’t see a huge amount of conversions from this email campaign, your newsletter list growth rate might skyrocket as a result. Even if it doesn’t put money into your pocket right away, those subscribers are worth something, right?
So, it might be valuable to factor in the overall increase in leads and sales for your business over time when making this calculation.
Wrapping Up
Email marketing can be one of the more effective ways to market to your target audience. Just as with other kinds of content marketing, it’s vital that you keep tabs on what’s happening with the emails you send. Seeing healthy open rates is fine and all, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You need to go deeper if you want to discover what’s working and what needs improvement.
For the best results, email marketing should be done in conjunction with other user research and testing methods. For example, you can A/B test your subject lines and email lengths to see what resonates best with subscribers. You can also experiment with sending emails at different days and times. You can even survey subscribers to see what their email content and frequency preferences are.
And don’t forget about your website. Optimizing the user experience at the initial point of contact can help you get more subscribers.
Continue reading...