Digital Marketing How to Measure Your Email Marketing Success – Actionable Plan for Better ROI

Are you digging around to find the best ways to measure email marketing performance? With so many email marketing success stories, statistics and opinions circling online, it can be hard to gauge your email marketing success. So, how to measure email marketing effectiveness for your campaigns? In this blog, we discuss how to plan and measure email marketing success rates.

Let’s dig in without any further ado!

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a digital marketing stream which helps marketers build closer relationships with existing customers. Moreover, personalized email marketing is among the top marketing trends of 2023 and it is gaining popularity. Emails are the primary medium for link-building with existing customers and for eventually compelling them to take the desired action.

Suggested Read: Top 2022 Content Marketing Trends That Should be on Your To-Do List

How to Make a Good Email Campaign?

Creating a good email campaign is crucial for effective communication and engagement with your audience. Here are some actionable tips to help you make a good email campaign:

Define your goals: 

Start by clearly defining the objectives of your email campaign. Whether it’s promoting a new product, driving traffic to your website, or increasing brand awareness, having specific goals will guide your content and design choices.

Build a quality email list: 

Focus on growing a quality email list with subscribers who are genuinely interested in your content. Offer incentives like exclusive content, discounts, or freebies to encourage sign-ups. Avoid purchasing email lists, as they often result in low engagement and can harm your sender reputation.

Segment your audience: 

Divide your email list into smaller segments based on demographics, interests, or previous interactions. This allows you to send targeted emails that resonate with specific groups, resulting in higher engagement and conversions.

Craft compelling subject lines: 

Your subject line is the first impression, so make it catchy and compelling. Keep it concise, arouse curiosity, and highlight the value or benefit your recipients will get by opening the email. Personalization can also be effective.

Create engaging content: 

Focus on creating valuable and relevant content for your subscribers. Keep your emails concise, scannable, and visually appealing. Use a mix of text, images, and multimedia to make your content engaging and easy to consume. Incorporate a clear call-to-action (CTA) to encourage recipients to take the desired action.

Optimize for mobile devices: 

With the majority of emails being opened on mobile devices, it’s crucial to ensure your emails are mobile-friendly. Use responsive design, optimize images for quick loading, and keep your email width within mobile screen dimensions.

Test and analyze: 

A/B testing is a powerful tool to optimize your email campaign management. Experiment with different subject lines, content formats, CTAs, and send times to identify what resonates best with your audience. Track important metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to measure your campaign’s success.

Personalize your emails: 

Use personalization tokens to address your subscribers by their names and tailor the content based on their preferences or previous interactions. Personalized emails feel more relevant and are more likely to generate higher engagement.

Maintain a consistent schedule: 

Establish a regular schedule for sending emails to your subscribers. Consistency helps build anticipation and keeps your brand top of mind. However, avoid overwhelming your audience with too many emails, as it may lead to unsubscribes or reduced engagement.

Follow email marketing best practices: 

Familiarize yourself with email marketing best practices, including complying with anti-spam regulations, including an unsubscribe link, and ensuring your emails are accessible to people with disabilities. This helps maintain a positive sender reputation and ensures your emails reach the intended recipients.

How to Determine Email Marketing Success – 3-Step Email Performance Measurement Plan

Here are some quick steps to help you map out the perfect email marketing performance plan:

Pick the Correct Timing for Tracking Performance

Email marketing may show success overnight or after a fortnight. Therefore, it all boils down to what type of email campaign sequence you select and how receptive your emailing list is. Thus, you can pick a weekly, fortnightly or monthly schedule to track the performance of your email marketing. Set clear benchmarks before the launch of every email and compare them with the results you are receiving.

Establish Your Goals, Objectives and KPIs

Every industry has specific goals and objectives. Your email marketing strategy shall carefully incorporate those KPIs which are highly relevant to your industry and offering. Thus, it means that you must take email marketing strategy into account while planning your complete digital marketing strategy.

Some common goals for an email marketing success plan look like this:

1. Brand Awareness
2. New Product Announcements
3. Promotions
4. Sales
5. Customer engagement
6. Customer Retention

Rule Out What is Working From What is Not Working

Conduct an email success analysis based on the type of content that has shown the most success among your mailing list. Moreover, you can also analyze what is working based on the type of imagery and links driving you most results. Finally, focus on the success-driving factors and refine them to optimize your email marketing success rate. A successful email writer improves on what is working and eliminates what is not working.

Also Read: Content Marketing Vs Email Marketing – How To Combine Both for Best Results?

Some Common Email Marketing KPIs Include

The success of email marketing depends upon different KPIs. The most common KPIs include:

Delivered Rate

Your email marketing campaign will only work if the intended audience is receiving the emails in their inbox. Make sure that your deliverability is optimized. In this step, you need to take special care about the email sending rate, so that your email address is not blacklisted.

Open Rate

As an email creator, you want the recipients to open your email. The email open rate determines the percentage of email recipients who opened the email. A higher email open rate is preferred for the success of your email marketing campaign. Ensure that you include catchy subject lines, relevant email body and personalized message in every email to boost the email open rate.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

You will often come across this metric on your email dashboard and all the email marketing discussions. If someone is opening your email, they shall be compelled to click on your CTAs. CTR indicates how many people have clicked on the email buttons corresponding to your CTAs. Thus, it reflects the interest recipients are showing in your emails.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate reflects the success of your email marketing campaign. Ideally, the goal of most emails is to convert the recipients. If your conversion rate is high, it means that your email success rate is also high. 

Email Marketing Average Benchmarks

According to data shared by a popular email marketing platform, the average open rate and click through rate across all industries is 21.80% and 2.78% respectively. The email marketing success rate varies depending upon the industry. For the marketing and advertising industry, the open rate and Click-Through rate is 17.81% and 1.92% respectively. ^[1] 

Suggested Read: Is Email Marketing Effective? Top Reasons and Tips to Use It

However, bear in mind that open rate and click-through rates are only a fraction of the number of emails you send. Both these metrics differ for every industry. Therefore, you can gradually improve your email marketing success rate. 

You can also take help from AI email generator to bolster your personalized email marketing efforts.

How to Make Email Marketing More Effective?

Here are some practical tips to boost your email marketing campaign effectiveness:

Focus on engagement metrics: 

Analyze time spent on email by tracking the average duration recipients spend reading your emails. For instance, if you notice that recipients spend an average of only 10 seconds on your emails, you may consider optimizing your content to make it more engaging and concise.

Measure conversion attribution: 

Implement a multi-touch attribution model that tracks all touchpoints leading to a conversion. For example, if a subscriber interacts with your email, visits your website, and makes a purchase within a specific timeframe, attribute the conversion to all three touchpoints, not just the last click.

Monitor deliverability metrics: 

Keep an eye on bounce rates to identify potential list quality issues. For instance, if you notice a sudden increase in hard bounces (permanent delivery failures), you may need to clean your email list by removing invalid or inactive email addresses.

Segment and analyze by audience: 

Compare engagement metrics between different audience segments. For example, analyze the open rates and click-through rates of male and female subscribers to identify if there are any significant differences in their preferences or behaviors.

Analyze email client and device metrics: 

Use an email analytics tool to track how your emails perform across different email clients and devices. For example, if you find that a significant portion of your audience opens emails on mobile devices, optimize your email design to ensure it renders well on smaller screens.

Utilize email heatmaps: 

Use a heatmap tool to visualize where recipients click within your emails. For example, if you notice that most clicks occur around a particular call-to-action button, you can consider optimizing its placement or design to make it more prominent and clickable.

Conduct cohort analysis: 

Create cohorts based on user behaviors, such as first-time purchasers, repeat customers, or inactive subscribers. Track engagement metrics for each cohort over time. For example, compare the open rates and conversion rates of new customers versus loyal customers to identify differences in engagement levels.

Monitor sharing and forwarding metrics: 

Include social sharing buttons in your emails and track the number of times recipients share or forward your content. For example, if you notice that a particular email receives a high number of shares on social media, analyze its content and messaging to understand what resonated with your audience.

Analyze personalization impact: 

Compare the performance of personalized emails against non-personalized ones. For example, measure the click-through rates of personalized product recommendations versus generic product recommendations to determine the effectiveness of personalization in driving engagement.

Benchmark against industry standards: 

Compare your email metrics to industry benchmarks. For example, if the average open rate in your industry is 20%, and you consistently achieve a 30% open rate, it indicates that your email campaigns are performing above industry standards.

Email Marketing Success FAQs

Which metrics should you track to measure the success of email marketing?

The best answer for how to measure email marketing effectiveness lies in tracking the success metrics. The email marketing success rate relies on 8 common metrics:

1. Open Rate
2. Click-Through Rate
3. Bounce Rate
4. List Growth Rate
5. Email Share/Forward Rate
6. Spam Rate
7. Unsubscribe Rate
8. Overall ROI

What are KPIs in email marketing?

KPIs for successful email marketing is different for each type of business and its corresponding goals. However, some common KPIs for email marketing across all industries are:

1. Open Rate
2. Click-Through-Rate
3. Conversion Rate

How do you measure email marketing engagement?

Email marketing’s engagement is dependent on three metrics, the Open Rate, Click-Through Rate and Click-To-Open Rate. Usually, metrics are usually available on your email marketing tool’s dashboard. Additionally, you can manually measure them using the following formulas:

1. Open Rate = (Number of Emails Opened + Number of Emails Delivered) x 100
2. CTR = (Total Email Clicks + Number of Emails Delivered) x 100
3. CTOR =  (Number of unique Clicks + Number of Unique Email Opens) x 100

How can I improve my email metrics?

Don’t worry if your email performance is not up to the mark. Here are some tips that can help you achieve email marketing metrics:

1. Conduct A/B Testing with subject lines and CTAs
2. Include Stats or Emotional Words in Subject Lines
3. Segment your audience more specifically
4. Personalize Sender address and email body content
5. Add an email pre-introduction or pre-header
6. Set up auto-resend email campaigns

What is a good email engagement rate?

The average good email engagement rate for different industries ranges between 17% and 28%. Your engagement rate will reflect how many recipients opened the email.

References: 
[1] Email Marketing Statistics and Benchmarks By Industry – MailChimp