Email is a part of our everyday lives. We may start our mornings with a cup of coffee while we scroll through our emails, or it may be one of the first things we check when we pick up our phones. From a marketing perspective, email is effective. Studies show 60 percent of customers purchase as a result of receiving a marketing email, and these emails are often five times as likely to convince a consumer to buy a product/service as the average social media post.
Open Rates
When companies or businesses want to know how well their emails are performing, as many as 40 percent look at open rates as their primary measure of success, according to studies.
An open rate, as its name suggests, is the percentage of people who open your email.
And while open rate is important (you can’t get people to interact with your brand without opening emails from you), it doesn’t tell the full story of your message’s success.
When you think about what email performance data to focus on, remember your “why.” You don’t create and send out emails just so your customers can open them. You may send emails to boost sales, drive audiences to your website, or encourage attendees to RSVP to an event. The open rate of your email doesn’t tell you if you made a sale, increased traffic to your website, or received more RSVPs.
Metrics to Look At
The following are data points to look at in addition to the open rate that will tell a fuller story of email success:
- Click-Through Rate: This measures how many subscribers opened your email and clicked on any one or more of the links.
- Conversion Rate: This metric tells whether your subscribers followed through after clicking on a link. If they clicked on a link to purchase your product, they bought it. If they clicked on a link to sign up for an event, they are now on your guest list.
- Total Orders & Revenue Per Email (RPE): These two data points focus on how many orders were placed because of your email, and how much money it made.
- Subscriber Data: There are several metrics to look at: unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, and subscriber growth.
- Unsubscribe rate measures how many subscribers hit “unsubscribe” at the bottom of your emails. This can tell you how well your emails resonate with your audiences.
- Bounce rate alerts you to unsuccessful email deliveries, often because an email on your list was misspelled, invalid, or non-existent. This can help you keep a clean email list.
- Subscriber growth measures how many subscribers you’ve added to your list versus how many have unsubscribed or have been removed from the mailing list over a certain period. The more subscribers you have, the more likely you are to gain and maintain customers.
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