What Is Thought Leadership and Why Does It Matter?
Salesy content can only get your business so far, which is why thought leadership is an important part of your business growth strategy.
Without knowing the best metrics to track for your email marketing efforts, you risk poor email campaign performance or a strategy that yields only results for the short-term, rather than a long-term business growth solution.
Additionally, gathering and inferring data from your email marketing campaigns helps you learn more about your customers, increasing the likelihood of repeat customers and generating new clients through word of mouth.
But how do you know what metrics to track to make sure you get the most impact from your email marketing efforts? We’re here to help you out.
Here are the best metrics to track for email marketing success:
Open rate is one of the most important metrics for email marketing analytics. It shows you what percentage of people receiving your email are actually opening it. If you send an email to 100 people, and 20 of those people open the message to read it, you have an open rate of 20%.
Email open rate helps you understand the overall reach of your campaign. Higher open rates are associated with better subject lines and more opportunities to generate traffic and conversions. If your customers aren’t opening your emails, your campaign is valuable for little more than generating periodic top-of-mind awareness for your brand.
An ideal open rate to shoot for your email campaigns is 17-28%, depending on your industry, your target customer, and other factors. The average email open rate in 2022, across all industries, was 21.5%.
Click rate, also often called click-through rate (CTR), measures the percentage of people who click the links in your email, presumably to get to your website or landing page.
One of the main functions of your email marketing campaign is generating traffic to your website. The higher your click rate is, the more traffic you’re going to generate. You may also use your marketing emails to generate clicks to your content on external sites, or to other resources and partners.
In any case, the click rate shows how many people are taking meaningful action after opening your email and reading its contents. It can help you loosely calculate the value and impact of your campaign while guiding you on how to better motivate subscriber behavior.
A good click-through rate is 2–5%, depending on your industry, your target customer, and other factors. The average CTR in 2022, across all industries, was 2.3%.
Here’s an example of a bad vs. good CTA for your emails:
❌ Sign Up Today – This isn’t a great CTA because it’s not clear what the user is signing up for. A free trial? A newsletter subscription? The more clear you are on what you want them to do, the more likely they are to click on your emails.
✅ Reach Out to Earn an Exclusive Discount – This CTA example is good because it gives the email recipient the information they need to make a decision on whether they want to click on it or not. It doesn’t leave any confusion on what the goal of clicking the CTA is.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of your sent emails that never reach recipient email inboxes. In other words, these are emails that get flagged as spam or otherwise become undeliverable.
Your marketing emails can only work if they reach recipient inboxes. It’s very hard to have a perfect deliverability rate, due to variables that are beyond your control, but if your bounce rate is too high, it’s going to harm your email marketing campaign – and potentially make you seem like a spam sender.
An ideal bounce rate should be less than 2%. If your bounce rate is 5% or higher, you have a problem to fix. The average bounce rate varies based on industry, from 0.69 to 1.29%.
Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribe from your email list, based on the number of emails delivered.
Unsubscribes are always bad for your email marketing campaign. Each unsubscribe is another person you can no longer reach, and if you accumulate too many unsubscribes, it can reflect poorly on your reputation as a sender. Additionally, while you may not want unsubscribers, it’s important the email recipients have a clear understanding of where to unsubscribe; therefore, it must be easily accessible to them. If it’s not, this can lead to more harm than good for your email marketing campaign efforts.
A solid unsubscribe rate is below 0.5%, but most businesses are below 0.2%. You want this to be as low as possible.
Subscribe rate, also known as an opt-in rate, is the percentage of website visitors who subscribe to your email list.
The more subscribers you have, the more valuable your email strategy becomes. This metric helps you evaluate your ability to attract new subscribers.
On average, websites see an opt-in rate of 1–5%. Anything less than 1% requires closer inspection; the highest performers can see upwards of 25%.
You can improve your onsite subscribe rate with the following strategies:
Spam score reflects the quality of your sales emails; the higher your spam score is, the more your content seems like spam. Spam score can be calculated in different ways and for different purposes. For example, some email marketing tools estimate “spam score” for each individual email produced. But for our purposes, spam score is a measure of a sender’s authority, as calculated by Moz.
If your spam score is too high, as a sender or within a message, your deliverability will be jeopardized. This is also an indication of poor content, as spammy senders and messages tend to see worse performance metrics overall.
A spam score of 1–30% is considered low, a spam score of 31–60% is considered medium, and a score of 61–100% is considered high.
Conversion rate measures the percentage of successful email recipients who complete a specifically defined action, such as purchasing a product or signing up for a service.
Conversions are usually tied to revenue, so conversion rate is a great indicator of how much bottom-line success your email marketing campaign is producing.
An email conversion rate of 2–5% is pretty solid, but you’ll see some strong variance by industry and based on what you’re selling.
Here are some strategies to improve your email marketing conversion rates:
Your email marketing return on investment (ROI) shows how much value the campaign brings to your company compared to how much you’re spending on it.
In some ways, this is the most important email marketing metric since it combines elements of the other metrics to give you a high-level view of how valuable this strategy is to your business.
The average email marketing campaign returns $36 for every $1 spent, but some industries (like travel and tourism) see an average ROI of 53:1 or higher.
Here are some of the best ways to boost ROI in email marketing:
Web traffic driven by email is a total measure of the number of people visiting your website after opening an email from your business.
Understanding the amount of web traffic driven by email is important because this is an indication of how much web traffic your email marketing strategy is generating.
This is a hard metric to calculate a benchmark for since web traffic is going to vary so much by industry, target demographics, and other factors.
These represent just some of the most important metrics to track to measure your email marketing campaign success. Closely analyzing and scrutinizing these metrics can help you better understand your campaign performance, and ultimately lead you to more effective strategies and tactics. Industry and broad-level benchmarks can help you understand your campaign as it compares to those of your peers – but even if you’re technically “above average,” there’s always room for further improvement.
Interested in using email to see a higher marketing ROI, capture more leads, and ultimately generate more revenue? Abstrakt Marketing Group has the experts, tools, and resources necessary to help you achieve your objectives. Contact us for more information today!