Let us guess: you’ve been communicating with your customers for a while now and you still can’t figure out your way around the many email marketing metrics available to you? Let’s try to answer all your doubts here.
Evaluating the performance of your email communications is an activity no less important than the actual creation of campaigns. This type of activity can not only be easily planned, but can also provide us with key indicators to better understand our audience, enhance what works, and discover what does not bring results.
In summary? After launching the first email campaigns, we already have a series of key information available to optimize our strategy.
Mail Marketing Metrics: Planning
At the exact moment in which you are about to create an email campaign it is essential to think about a measurement, evaluation and analysis plan. These are three fundamental phases, which allow us to also work on a less executive and more strategic plan.
Three steps for a more complete picture:
- Time period: defining a period of time taken into consideration is essential, not only to commit to measurement but also for possible comparisons with previous periods. In this way it will be possible to evaluate whether the optimizations made to our messages are actually improving the results. Performance must be tracked on an ongoing basis. Consistency always pays. So before defining KPIs and email marketing metrics, we could say that it is good practice to create a performance tracking program; we can divide it by type of campaign, weekly, monthly, etc… The improvement patterns identified can also refer to a specific audience segment, then related to a specific offer or a type of message;
- Objective Definition: Performance tracking must (necessarily) be consistent with the objectives of a campaign. It therefore becomes necessary to ask yourself: for what specific objective am I sending this communication? And how can I measure it?
- Call to Action: This is where the so-called calls to action come into play. What exactly does our audience / target have to do? Yes, we have to tell them. The subsequent analysis can then shed light on various aspects: the audience’s involvement with the type of message, or the reactivity with the type of content (images, text, other links), etc…; this is behavioral information of interest towards the proposed content.
Metrics or KPIs? Definitions and Differences
First of all, let’s answer (briefly) the question: what is a KPI? And how does it differ (conceptually) from the metrics we’ve talked about so far?
In general, a KPI – an acronym for Key Performance Indicator – is a value that measures the effectiveness with which a company is achieving a specific objective. These are essential metrics, also used to measure the performance of marketing campaigns. In a broad sense, whether you are implementing a social strategy, or organic positioning of content within search engines or, again, a customer relationship strategy, understanding which metrics and KPIs to monitor are essential.
Quindi, come differiscono i due concetti? Possiamo rispondere a questa domanda sostenendo che le metriche si riferiscono a tutto ciò che in una campagna è, di fatto, misurabile. Si tratta di dati, perlopiù, quantitativi.
KPIs, as we can also deduce from the meaning of the term, are qualitative and quantitative data that allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing action or of the same strategy (starting from the proposed objectives).
Metrics & KPIs: Measurement & Optimization
Let’s get back to the heart of the matter: which email marketing metrics should you always monitor?
To understand the impact that email marketing activities have on our corporate marketing strategy, it is necessary to understand the meaning of each metric. Here are the main metrics common to all tools and to MA – Marketing Automation:
- Message Delivery: expresses the number of email messages actually delivered to the recipients / targets of a campaign;
- Open Rate (opening rate): ratio between the number of emails opened by contacts and the total number of emails delivered. There are types of campaigns, called A/B tests, that allow you to test different subjects of the emails to obtain more information on what drives a contact to open (and read) one communication compared to another;
- Click-through Rate (click rate): this is the ratio between the total number of openings of an email and the total number of clicks received within the links (such as CTAs) in the body of the email; in this case too, A/B test campaigns can be very useful as indicators of engagement of target contacts;
- Bounce Rate: measures all those messages that have been rejected by a mail server. In this case it is the ratio between the total number of emails sent to our target and the number of those rejected. It is distinguished in hard bounce and soft bounce: the first is permanent (the email address is no longer active). In the second case we can classify the classic out of office;
- Unsubscribe: the total number of contacts who have decided not to receive our communications anymore. Naturally, users unsubscribe for many reasons. The data to monitor is essential above all to improve the deliverability of our messages and, also, the quality and interest in what we offer;
- Device statistics: This is an often overlooked piece of data. But in light of the latest regulatory and contractual changes from some of the big tech players, we can no longer ignore this information. It is an aggregate of metrics relating to which devices are used by our audience to read emails. If we take into consideration a segment / campaign target to which it is now easy to match a type of device. This could make a big difference in the type of message designed for them.
Conclusions
The world of email marketing is constantly evolving, but despite the various changes taking place, the metrics and KPIs we have referred to in this article always remain unchanged.
In the first part of this content, we insisted on the importance of planning: it is an essential part of designing a successful strategy; where measurement, evaluation and analysis come before any set of metrics of email marketing or any other communication channel.
