Do you want to determine which email marketing metrics matter for your small business? If so, we have you covered.
Email is the most used digital marketing platform available today. A stunning 80% of marketers say they used email to increase engagement and retention. Couple this with the fact that the average email campaign return on investment is 4,400%, and it’s easy to see why email is so popular.
Despite the benefits, many small business owners and marketers don’t understand how to track their email marketing metrics. Metrics are absolutely vital to your success. It’s impossible to improve if you don’t know where you want to be or how you’ll get there.
You’ve probably heard of 30 or more email metrics when browsing online. When it was all said and done, there’s a chance you thought to yourself, “Which email metrics actually matter?”
Today, I’m going to answer that question. I will review the 7 most important email marketing metrics you should track in 2023.
Let’s begin!
Open Rate
First, let’s talk about your open rate.
Put simply, your open rate is the number of people who opened the email you sent to them. If you sent out 500 emails and 400 people opened them, you would have an 80% open rate.
The reality is open rates are much lower than 80%. Across all industries, the average open rate is below 30%. If you want to boost engagement and see success with your campaigns, you have to convince people to open your emails.
Personalizing your subject lines is an effective way to improve your open rate. Research shows that adding personalization can improve your open rate by 26%!
The reason this strategy works is simple; people are more likely to open emails that are tailored to their interests. I recommend asking users to share their preferences, so you can segment them and personalize their messages for a stronger open rate.
Click-through Rate
Click-through rates are another important metric that you should track.
Click-through rates (CTRs) represent how many people click or tap on a link inside your email.
For example, if 100 people open your email and 20 click on your special promotion, you have a click-through rate of 20%. In reality, the average email click-through rate is about 2.13%.
The strategies for improving your click-through rate are similar to that of your open rate. Use personalization and show people content and offers that make them want to visit your website or social media page.
In this situation, knowledge is power. Spend time getting to know your subscribers so you can create eye-catching, conversion-worthy messages.
List Growth Rate
As the name implies, your list growth rate represents how well your lead list grows. It also measures how many new subscribers convert into customers.
Businesses with a high growth rate generate new subscribers and keep users engaging long enough to turn them into customers. On the other hand, companies with a low growth rate need to focus on their lead generation efforts.
Here are a few ways to generate more leads using your website and social media:
- Create a newsletter landing page
- Offer visitors a lead magnet
- Include a link to your signup page in social media bios
- Host events and ask users to sign up to register
Positive growth is good, but you must balance it by looking at other metrics, like your churn rate.
Sharing Rate
If you want to track how visitors share content within your emails, keep an eye on your sharing rate. Every time a subscriber shares something, whether a blog post on social media or an event invitation through email, it counts as a share.
Sharing means more people get to see your brand, which means more opportunities for sales and engagement.
I recommend tracking your share rate for specific campaigns. For instance, if you’re hosting a giveaway and want to see how many people share your content, this is an excellent time to track this metric.
If you do not see the engagement you had hoped for, go back to the drawing board and make changes to the incentive and your brand message until you reach your goals.
Unsubscribe Rate
No one likes to talk about it, but you need to track your unsubscribe rate if you want to grow efficiently. Simply put, your unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who decide to stop engaging with you over a predetermined time.
They stop the engagement process in one of the most powerful ways possible – by unsubscribing from your email list.
If you see a large number of people unsubscribing from your list, take a look at your campaigns to make sure something isn’t off. For example, did you schedule too many emails for the same day? Do recent emails have unprofessional errors that turn away subscribers?
Your unsubscribe rate will help you determine what you’re doing well and where you can improve. For context, a good unsubscribe rate is between .1 and .5%.
Inactive Users/ Churn Rate
Inactive users, also known as churn rate, is another metric you should track in 2023. Churn signifies how many users have stopped opening your messages or engaging with emails.
The key thing to remember about this metric is it’s different for everyone. Companies that sell high-ticket items, like jewelry, can consider users active even if they haven’t opened an email in a year. On the other hand, a pet supply store may mark a user as inactive after 2 months without engagement.
An abnormally high churn rate means your emails are not meeting expectations. When you step into this situation, the best thing you can do is reach out to your subscribers and ask them what kind of emails they’d like to receive in the future. Use their feedback to create segments and re-engage your decaying lead list.
Another helpful option is to scrub your lead list. Scrubbing is removing leads who haven’t responded to an email after a set time. I suggest scrubbing your list at least once a year so you can continually reach people who are interested in your products or services.
Deliverability Rate
Finally, let’s talk about your deliverability rate. Email deliverability represents the number of people who received your email when it was sent out. Several things can get in the way of deliverability, including spam filters and not using simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP).
Consider this; 15.8% of all emails sent go missing or end up in the spam filter. You will skew all of your other data if you don’t know that these emails never reached their destination.
Asking subscribers to approve your email address can help with this issue. You can also benefit from adding social proof icons to your emails. If people and email service providers see that your emails are from a trusted and respected brand, they are less likely to get marked as spam.
When it comes down to it, you need these 7 metrics together to create a big picture and assess your email marketing strategy. Having an accurate data set will make it much easier to determine what subscribers want and need from your email content.
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