Email Analytics

IMPROVE EMAIL WITH ANALYTICS

Bounce rate = the percentage of total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient’s inbox

Delivery rate = the percentage of emails that were actually delivered to recipients’ inboxes

List growth rate = a measurement of how fast your email list is growing

Click-through rate = the proportion of the audience who clicked on one or more links contained in an email message

Conversion rate = the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action

Revenue per email sent = measuring the email’s return on investment

Bounce & Delivery Rate

Of all your email marketing analytics, your bounce and delivery rate are two of the most crucial to measure. A high hard bounce rate or a low overall delivery rate is often a symptom of an unhealthy email marketing program. Your email deliverability rate could be impacted by:

  • Your email sending reputation
  • The health of your email list
  • The value of your content
  • How well segmented your email list is

A poor sender reputation — scored by many ISPs using the free service by Return Path called Sender Score — is crucial to email deliverability.

83% of the time an email is not delivered to an inbox, it is because of a poor sender reputation.

If you are experiencing a high hard bounce rate – the undelivered emails that are the result of a permanent problem with an email address, such as being invalid or non-existent – immediately remove all of these email addresses from your list to prevent gaining a reputation as an email spammer and harming your email deliverability.

Your email delivery rate should always stay at 95% or higher. If it is lower than this or you find one month it slips below 95%, use this opportunity to scrub your list of the following contacts to decrease your bounce rate and increase your deliverability rate:

  • Duplicate and invalid email addresses
  • Contacts who haven’t opted in
  • Alias email addresses
  • Email addresses that hard bounce
  • Completely disengaged email recipients

If you find just one particular campaign has a lower than average delivery rate, it doesn’t mean that entire list segment should be deleted. Instead, examine the content of the email to see if there was an accidental indication to SPAM filters or ISPs that your message should be blocked.

List Growth Rate

Now that your email marketing program is healthy again, you may notice the size of your list has seriously decreased. The average email marketing list depreciates at a rate of 25% a year — which is a good thing, as it keeps your email list healthy and deliverability rates high. Take a look at your list growth rate, though, to ensure you’re continuing to add new contacts to that list for nurturing. If your list growth rate is low, it could mean:

  • More top-of-the-funnel offers
    You need more compelling offers that drive visitors to fill out a form and opt-in to your email communications.
  • More traffic to existing offers
    You have compelling offers, you just need to drive more traffic to those pages through content creation, better calls-to-action, and social media marketing.
  • More optimized pages
    You need to improve the visitor-to-lead conversion rate on your landing pages to better capture the traffic you’re driving.

Click-Through Rate

You may notice open-rate hasn’t been included as a measurement for your email marketing effectiveness. Click-through rate is a far more accurate indication of how well your email content resonates with your audience, as open-rate is often misreported based on how each individual email client calculates an “open.” If you have a high click-through rate for a campaign, you know the offer was compelling, aligned with the content in the email, and matched the interests of that particular list segment.

Naturally, you should expect to see lower click-through rates on offers with a higher barrier to entry. For example, if the offer in your email prompts your recipient to purchase something, you’ll receive fewer clicks than if your offer is to download a free content asset. When analyzing whether your click-through rate for a campaign is good, compare it to the click-through rate of other email offers of that type.

Whether you’re suffering an inordinately low CTR on a campaign or you simply want to improve an already good click-through rate, there are three different ways you can do it:

  • List Segmentation
    The better segmented your email list, the more targeted your email offer. eConsultancy reports that marketers who segment their list have 24% more sales leads, 18% more transactions, and 15% greater customer acquisition.
  • Optimize the Email & Landing Page
    A/B test the layout and copy in your email offer. Email recipients scan emails, so your offer should be above the fold, visually bold, and written with action-oriented copy. You can also add a sense of urgency by adding a time frame during which the recipient must redeem the offer.
  • Email Sharing Options
    Including social sharing options in email enables you to increase the email sharing and forward rate. Emails with only one social sharing option have a 30% higher click-through rate than emails without any social sharing options. Those with three or more have a 55% higher click-through rate. This is a quick addition to your emails, and helps you grow your email list while improving click-through rates and engagement.

Conversion Rate

But having a high email click-through rate is only really helpful if you also have a high conversion rate on the landing page to which your email links. The conversion rate of your email campaign relies on having a well-optimized landing page, which can be difficult if you’re pointing email recipients to a generic landing page instead of one messaged according to each individual list segment.

For example, perhaps you have an offer and landing page for a webinar about unicorn grooming, and you send an email campaign promoting that offer. That email campaign might go to two different list segments – unicorns interested in learning new hair styles, and unicorn groomers interested in learning how to give their unicorns new hair styles. You’d message those emails differently, and you should message the landing page for the webinar differently, too. If you have a high email click-through rate but a low overall conversion rate for an email campaign, it could be due to this type of disjointed messaging between email and offer content and landing page content.

Revenue Per Email Sent

If you are using email marketing for direct sales, you should use closed-loop analytics to attribute revenue to email marketing campaigns.

To do this (and any other closed-loop marketing analysis, for that matter), you must integrate your ESP with your marketing analytics. You can do this by using a unique tracking URL in all of your email links so you can attribute clicks to a specific email campaign.

If you find that your email marketing isn’t actually driving revenue, perhaps email should utilized more frequently as a lead nurturing tool to drive reconversions, not a mechanism for direct sales.

Marketing software can automatically take your email marketing messages and place their performance in the right analytics bucket. So when you visit your reporting data, you will be able to see the number of customers brought in from email marketing and compare that number to other channels. Undoubtedly, this step is essential to any marketer who wants to prove the worth of their work to management, putting it in language that the entire organization understands-sales.