Email Success Measurement

I am finishing my Data, Data, Data 3-part blog series with a look at the metrics you use for email marketing evaluation to establish email success!

Email Success Measurement

What metrics should I use to measure the success of my email marketing campaigns, and how does my data play a role in this?

The criteria for success will vary from one email to another. What are your expectations for the data based on the content of the email, and how can you measure it?

Key Email Marketing Metrics to Track

First what you shouldn't be measuring;

Open Rate: the percentage of recipients that opened your email. 

You simply can’t look to this email metric anymore to establish email success. It is unreliable, the main issue is that rates are artificially inflated by Email service providers and bot/spam filter interactions.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): the percentage of recipients who clicked a link in your email.

So while CTR is generally more reliable than open rate, it’s not a sure way to measure your email success either.

CTR can be misleading as, someone clicking doesn’t mean they were engaged or liked what they saw, someone clicking could be by accident, especially if they are viewing the email on a smaller device such as a mobile phone, and finally much like with open rates bot/spam filter interactions can inflate CTR rates and whereas techniques such as a HoneyPot link can help identify these clicks they still make the CTR somewhat unreliable.

What you should be measuring;

Bounce Rate: the percentage of emails not delivered.
High bounce rates hurt deliverability and sender reputation.
Data role: Clean your email list regularly; assign accountability for following up on hard bounces. For example, Contact Owners should clean Contacts and SQL Leads, and Marketing should clean Prospects and other Leads.

CRM tip; Ensure accountability for Contact data hygiene by introducing a data hygiene dashboard 

Unsubscribe Rate: How many people opted out after receiving your email.
Signals whether your content is off-target or too frequent.
Data role: Correlate unsubscribes with specific campaigns to refine targeting and frequency.

Automation tip; For Leads working their way through the funnel who have unsubscribed create an automation to downgrade their lead status and possibly delete them.

Specifics you can monitor for different types of email;

Brand Awareness emails.

Brand awareness emails are challenging to measure since their primary goal is to create and maintain brand recognition. Key metrics to monitor include visits to your website generated from the email, tracked through UTM parameters.

Newsletters.

Engagement Over Time
What it tells you: When your audience is most active, newsletter fatigue
Why it matters: Helps you to refine send times and frequency and consider changing up the layout
Data role: Use email platform analytics to find optimal send windows.
CRM tip; Utilise features like the Einstein send time optimisation feature in Salesforce.

Content and Events/Webinars Emails.

Emails containing new Whitepapers/Case Studies and emails promoting Events or Webinars typically include a specific call to action. The downloads for new content emails can be tracked, while registrations and attendance for events/webinars should be monitored. The measurement of these emails is both the email effectiveness and the content and event/webinar relevance to the audience.

I hope these data blog posts have been helpful.