No matter how many marketers talk about the social media and mobile marketing rave, email marketing still continues to win when it comes to outreach, conversions and profitability. However, there’s more to email marketing then simply composing and pressing the send button.
The Statistical Fact Book 2013 released by Direct Marketing Association had an excerpt revealing that analyzing data is one of the biggest challenges for marketers, and the second biggest challenge is leveraging the analytics to increase engagement and conversions in future campaigns.
The good thing is that most modern email marketing software already includes Google analytics and other metrics, so there’s no separate integration required. The real challenge is to improve future campaigns by making use of current analytical data and metrics and to constantly be improving upon your processes.
Important e-mail marketing metrics and analytics
1. Delivery rate
This is the rate of emails that actually end up in the inbox of the recipient. You can use the analytics to find out the total number of emails sent, and minus the emails that weren’t send to them. The bounce rate should also be deducted to determine the delivery rate.
Emails may not always reach the recipient’s inbox because they may end up in the spam box. The delivery rate should be above 90%. If this rate starts to decrease over the period of time, you need to check different factors contributing to the declining percentage. It could be because your IP has been blacklisted or your subject lines have grammatical and other errors. Improving the delivery rate will increase the campaign’s ROI and your ISP reputation.
2. Bounce Rate
There’s a small amount of emails that fail to reach the inbox of the recipient. This usually happens in two situations and you need to be aware of them in order to take appropriate action.
The first situation is where the inbox of the recipient runs out of storage space or the email server has issues. There’s not much you can do in this case except wait for the problems to be solved.
The second situation is when something is wrong at your end and the email is not sent. This mostly happens when the recipient’s email turns out to be invalid. You should avoid keeping such email contacts because if your emails are sent in bulk to invalid email addresses, you can be tagged as a spammer.
You should also take a deep look at your body content and the subject line because they may also make your emails end up in the spam filter. Improving bounce rate takes time but is important for successful campaigns.
Both delivery and bounce rate are related to each other and these two analytics are quite important to improve email marketing conversions.
3. CTR
CTR stands for click through rates, and it’s the prime focus of email marketing analytics. The click through rate shows the number of recipients who clicked on a picture or link in your email. This is quite important to find out about your ideal recipients and what they expect from you in future emails.
After realizing the type of links that are being clicked, you’ll be able to deliver more relevant content. The click through rate pretty much guides you about the step that should be taken next. For example, if someone has a high CTR for Facebook marketing links, an email regarding social media marketing services will be more helpful and relevant for him/her compared to an email about affiliate marketing services.
4. Conversion rate
Conversion rate determines how many recipients responded in a way that you wanted them to. This rate also tells you the number of leads generated from your campaign and measures the overall success.
If your conversion rate is low, you can try changing the content of the e-mail, design of the landing page or experiment with a custom layout. You can also add tags to different campaigns to get an idea of how the emails are performing. By a little brainstorming, it’s possible for you to increase conversion rates in every campaign
All the data and information you collect from email marketing analytics will only be beneficial if you put it to the right use. Analytics aren’t only meant for getting on the good side of management, but should also be used to optimize your cross-channel and targeted marketing performance.
You can benchmark how the campaigns performed over different time periods and try to come up with strategies to improve marketing performance in the future.
This is a guest post
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