Email marketing is still the most effective form of digital promotion in terms of conversion rate. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Your audience is giving you permission to send them emails about your products and services. This indicates at least some level of interest. As such, it is important to carefully cultivate your email marketing efforts. For this, you will need some targeted KPIs to guide your campaign. Here are some of the most essential.
Total Sales: While not the most sophisticated KPI, it is an absolute essential. Evaluate the number of sales generated by your email marketing both over a set period of time and by each email blast. Doing so will provide significant insight into which emails struck home and which didn’t.
Unique Open Rate: There are a number of tools you can use to track whether emails are being opened or not. This is possible with the vast majority of email marketing service providers. Although not completely reliable, this number can still provide valuable insight into how successful your email blasts are. The email open rate is calculated simply as the number opened divided by the number of emails sent. If you are able to track unique opens, that can provide even more useful information.
Click Through Rate: This is the percentage of people who opened your email that then clicked on a link within the email. Track this KPI in order to determine if your content is enticing enough to make your audience want to learn more. In many cases, you will be able to drill down even further to determine exactly which link was clicked. This may help to indicate that your 15% off bike wheel replacement or far more interesting than 15% a new bike chain, for example. Use your click through rate to identify what gets your audience excited.
Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is the number of people who do not continue on to another page from your email landing page. In other words if you email about bike repair links readers to a page about your current discounts and 45 out of 100 do not continue to another page to learn more, your bounce rate it 45%. This can be analyzed on all pages and as degrees of separation from your landing page (i.e. bounce rate after 1 click, after 2, etc.)
Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the measurement of how many visitors to your website completed an action that you wanted them to. For ecommerce websites this is typically how many visitors made a purchase; however, it can also be actions like completing a form or viewing a video. While this is also tracked for the website as a whole, make sure you are evaluating the conversion rate of visitors that originated from email links.
List Growth: This is the change over time of the number of subscribers to your email marketing list. You should be evaluating this in a number of ways: the number of new subscribers, the number of unsubscribes, the total change, and the total number. Evaluating this can help to determine if you calls to action to subscribe are working and if your email content is annoying people, causing them to unsubscribe. Use these email marketing campaign KPIs to ensure your shepherd this important digital marketing technique in your business.