Chapter 4- How to measure the effectiveness of your email campaign?

Hello Readers!

First, I would like to thank you all for showing deep interest in our free email marketing course where we are providing you with the basic to advanced fundamentals of email marketing.

For those who are new to our Beginners Guide to Email Marketing (which is our free course trail), we are providing the course by dividing it into chapters like;

• Chapter 1- How to get started with email marketing,

• Chapter 2- How to create the email marketing list from scratch,

• Chapter 3- How to create a free email template without coding.

In chapter 4 of the email marketing course, we are going to discuss how to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign?

Once you start creating your email marketing strategy, you create email templates to share your business information like a product launch, product sale, etc.

However, all your email marketing campaigns can go in vain if it’s not properly planned and measured the effectiveness.

Email effectiveness is a broad phrase for marketers as well as businessmen to describe the success of their email marketing campaigns.

Email campaign success doesn’t include creating and shooting emails to your clients. It has a very broad concept. Like, it includes how many of your subscribers opened your emails, how many emails got bounced, how many have reached the right audience, and so on.

But before measuring the effectiveness of your email campaign, you need to clear your ultimate goals for your email marketing campaign. There is no point to create the campaigns if you don’t know what are your goals and how you even begin working on strategy, execution, and reporting.

But don’t worry! We are here to clear all your doubts and concern regarding related to the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns; like,

• What are the metrics to measure your email marketing effectiveness?
• What are email marketing KPIs (metrics)?
• How to create an email marketing analysis?
• What email metrics are important to track and measure?

So here we go! But the first question We would like to answer that must have popped up in your mind i.e; “Should I measure opens or clicks?”

The answer is YES!

The first and common goal of any email marketing campaign is to analyze the open or click rates. The success of the email campaign opens or clicks within the email.

We, humans, get irritated easily whenever we see anything in abundance. Like if you are jammed up with ‘n’ number of emails, would you open each and every email?

I guess no! Then what about your email where you have shared your the launch of your product? You want your email to be unread or get into the trash. Of course No!

“This is the reason why measuring opening or clicking rate is very important. Because of the volume of emails that an individual receives on a daily basis, using clicks or click-through rate, is a superior measure of effectiveness.”

Emails are the backbone of any online marketing campaign. It is a channel that helps to support as well as influence your overall marketing strategy. Also, opening and clicking email would suggest your effort is on the right track which can lead to an impact on your organization’s ROI.

An ideal marketer would determine the performance of an email campaign. He/she would be well aware of the important metrics that they should be measuring on a regular basis if you want to maintain email list health and improve the ROI of your campaigns.

Important Email Marketing Metrics to Measure

There are a few important email marketing metrics that you need to measure your email marketing campaign on a weekly or daily basis. 
Now, let’s take a look at the metrics…

Open Rate

Your emails are usually sent to large lists that indicate your potential audience; however, the actual number who have an interest in your business and the one who will read your emails.

Though whatever is the size of your list, the percentage of emails that are opened to read is your actual valid potential audience. The percentage is called the open rate.

It’s an important metric to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.

It helps to know that your subscribers are actually opening your email and reading them.

How to Calculate: Total Opens / Emails Delivered
When to Track: Weekly

Click-Through Rate

This is another important metric to determine the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. An ideal email always has at least one Call-To-Action that determines how much interest have shown by the audience.

The Call-to-Action generally promotes a service, feature, or product that the business offers.

The click rate tells you how effective these calls to action are in your email campaign.

These rates give you a  percentage of how many times a link within the email is clicked versus how many messages were sent.

The click-through rate will always be equal to or less than the open rate because the user has to open your email in order to click any of the links.

How to Calculate: Total Clicks / Emails Delivered
When to Track: Weekly

Unsubscribe Rate

There are many times when a marketer keeps on focusing on the number of increasing subscribers rather than focusing on unsubscribers. It’s very important to keep an eye on your unsubscribed audience.

You need to look at common patterns why they are unsubscribing you or removing themselves from the list. The reason can be any; content, interest, favoritism (favorite brand), number of emails, etc.

Just keep track on the same and unsubscribe rate which is the percentage of your email recipients who clicked on the “unsubscribe” link inside your email due to XYZ reason.

How to Calculate: Total Unsubscribes / Emails Delivered
When to Track: Weekly

Conversion Rate

The conversion builds upon the effectiveness of open rate, click rate, and call to action.
It determines that the user is responding and taking an action like purchasing your product, downloading a brochure, etc; depending on what type of call to action you have used in your email marketing campaign.

The conversion rate will always be the lowest of the three main measures because it requires the user to take the action you intend.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of your email recipients who completed your desired action (e.g. purchasing a product).

How to Calculate: Total Conversions / Emails Delivered
When to Track: Monthly

Bounce Rate

This is the most important parameter to decide how effective is your email marketing list. This factor is completely different from the open rate, conversion rate, or click rate.

The bounce rate gives you an indication of the quality of your mailing list. In other words, it suggests how many email addresses are valid in your email list.

Plus there are generally two types of bounces in email marketing;

• the soft bounce is mail messages that are returned for a variety of reasons like his or her mailbox is full, etc.
• the hard bounce, where the users’ email address is invalid or the mail server can not be reached.

Your bounce rate is the percentage of your total emails sent which weren’t successfully delivered to your recipient’s inbox.

How to Calculate: Total Bounces / Emails Sent
When to Track: Monthly

Forward/Share Rate

Every email marketer is advised to use social media sharing buttons to create more visibility and engagement for their business. These sharing buttons help your subscribers to forward your email to a friend or share your email by clicking on the share button inside your email.

This may not seem like an important metric to measure, but it’s a really good thing to try and increase. If your existing leads are forwarding your emails, that means they are actually becoming ambassadors of your brand and generating new leads for you.

How to Calculate: Total Forwards / Emails Delivered
When to Track: Monthly

Campaign ROI

Your email marketing campaign is nothing if it doesn’t generate ROI. Let’s read a little about it.

What It Is: The overall return on investment for your email campaigns. In other words, the total revenue is divided by the total spending.

As with every marketing channel, you should be able to determine the overall ROI of your email marketing.

Your campaign ROI is the overall return on your investment for your email campaign.

How to Calculate: (Sales – Invested) /  Invested
When to Track: Monthly

Growth Rate

Ultimately what will be the role of an email marketing campaign if it won’t help you to grow your email marketing list.

Aside from open rate, click rate, call to actions, conversion rate; you also need to make a track of the growth of your email marketing list.

This should be your at least secondary aim to grow the mailing list in order to extend your reach, expand your audience, and position yourself as an industry thought leader.

Your list growth rate is the rate at which your email list has grown over a certain period of time.

How to Calculate: New Subscribes – (Unsubscribes + Complaints) / Total Subscribers (over a specific period of time, e.g. the last 30 days)
When to Track: Monthly

Now, as we have shared what is the basis of email marketing metrics that you should be tracking to now the effectiveness of the email marketing campaign.

Let’s take a look at some parameters – how to figure out where to focus your efforts to make your email marketing campaign – A Success.

Here are the three ways to focus to create a successful email marketing campaign:

1. Experiment With Your Subject Lines

Email subject lines are the first piece of content that readers see even before opening your emails. We agree, subject lines are not easy to create but it is the first hurdle to work on if you want a successful email marketing campaign.

Email subject lines help to determine the open rate. For a successful email campaign, design at least two different subject lines for your emails like as we do in A/B testing and split your campaign for testing.

To keep things fresh and write some winners, keep these strategies in mind:

• Invoke immediacy and excitement.
• Use words aligned with your brand.
• Remember: People like to see their own names and even shout-outs to their cities.
• Use 50 characters or less—that’s all most mobile device displays can fit.
• Just as you don’t duplicate content online for SEO reasons, don’t reuse subject lines, either.

It is always a good practice to run A/B tests on subject lines. It will help you to understand your audience’s behavior and open rate stating whether they open the email or trash it.

2. Use Many Anchors for the Same Link

As your primary goal in email marketing is to get more and more visitors to your website or landing page, that can be accomplished only with the right set of Calls to actions and anchor links.

The content with appropriate anchor links would get to work nurturing visitors along their sales journey.

To find out how well your emails accomplish that, you need to track click-through rates (CTR) for your links.

An increase in CTR means more readers are finding your content applicable and actionable (and clickable).

Try this two-step approach:

• Link to the same piece of the site contains more than once in a single email.
• Use a different language to describe each link. These are the words that appear underlined and in a different color, also called “anchor text.”

3. Track Engagement Rates, Not Just Open Rates

Try to figure out how long people spend their time reading your email.

• Is your email content engaging enough?
• Are they actually reading them?

These things you can easily measure with the help of email marketing tools you are using like MailChimp, GetResponse, AWeber, etc.

With these tools, you can even analyze that they are just opening the emails or being served a preview by their inbox applications.

However if the audience is deleting them, then the engagement rate will be less than two seconds.  

It takes at least six seconds to develop an impression of just one part of your email content.

Anything between three and seven seconds should be considered a “skim rate” metric; a “read rate” means emails are open for eight seconds or more.

Use UTM Code Generator

One way to know if your email campaign is effective is by using UTM codes. What is a UTM code? An Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) code refers to a snippet of simple code that’s added to the end of a URL. UTMs are also called tracking tags because they allow you to track the origin of the website traffic. 

The primary function of a UTM code is to track the performance of sales and marketing campaigns and the performance of web content. The URL parameters you can track include the source (root), medium (ways used), campaign (like email campaign), term, and content.

Here are the good-to-know facts about UTM codes: 

– Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) are regular Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), but with a maximum of five variables or parameters added, which are processed by Google Analytics. 

– The source parameter tells you the website sending you traffic. For example, you can use a UTM code to your Facebook or Instagram page to track all traffic coming from your social media pages.

– To help improve your traffic, UTMs can be set up with other Analytics tools to generate relevant data. The corresponding data will be seen in your email campaigns, giving instant insight into the specific UTM code’s performance. Use a UTM code to determine the traffic coming from your email campaign, which reflects the effectiveness of your headlines and email content.

– While you can add the UTM parameters to your desired URL on your own, it’ll take more time. You can use a trusted UTM code generator to generate the best UTM code you can use for your next email campaign. With a UTM generator, you can place the URL and then fill out the data for various parameters. Once it’s done, your UTM link is ready to use.

Conclusion:

When you know the effectiveness of your content and the working of your email marketing campaign, you can add more value to your campaign than any ordinary message.

With these email marketing metrics, you will be able to measure the engagement of your audience as well.

Delivering that kind of juice to opted-in inboxes will send that many more engaged visitors to your site (and more informed, mature leads to the sales team). What else do you need?
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