Compared to previous types of marketing, digital marketing is a data goldmine. Theres no 100% verifiable way to measure how many people read a newspaper ad, but Google Analytics can quickly tell you how many people visited each page on your website, how long they visited for, and so much more.
In the realm of digital marketing, email marketing takes the lead as the most effective with websites coming in at a close second. On average, every dollar spent on email marketing generates $38 in return. If youre ignoring email marketing, youre throwing away money.
To make the most of email marketing, it is important to understand the wealth of data every email campaign generates. By digging into the data, you can improve your email marketing for even better results for your company.
Fortunately, many email marketing services make it easy to understand important email marketing data no degree in research methods or mathematics required.
While your particular marketing goals will influence which email marketing data is most important for you to examine, there are five types of data that are always worth tracking.
Open Rate
Part of what makes email marketing so amazing is how effective it is at putting your brand in front of your audience.
Consider other digital channels that give you direct access to your audience. In 2016, Facebooks organic reach for business Pages dropped to 6%. Meanwhile, on Twitter, brands reach about 4% of their audience with their tweets. By contrast, the average email open rate is about 20%, depending on the industry.
For an audience of 1,000 email subscribers, 1,000 Facebook fans, and 1,000 followers on Twitter:
-
40 Twitter followers will see your tweet
-
60 Facebook fans will see your post
-
200 email subscribers will open your email
Best of all, those email numbers only consider an average open rate. By improving your subject lines and optimizing the time you send your email campaigns, you can dramatically improve your campaigns open rates, leaving other digital marketing tools in the dust.
There is a lot of info out there on how to write better email subject lines. Start with this article for tips to write catchy subject lines or this one about branding bulk email headers.
Click-to-Open Rate
Many people focus on the click-through rate (CTR) which tells you: of the people who received the email, how many clicked on a link within it. This is a good metric to watch, but it can often be swayed by timing, subject lines, and more. The click-to-open rate (CTOR), on the other hand, tells you: of the people who opened the email, how many clicked on a link within it. This is a better metric to help gauge the effectiveness of your emails content.
If your email service doesnt feature this metric in its analytics section, it is easy enough to calculate yourself:
Click-to-open rate = unique clicks / unique opens 100
Whats a good click-to-open rate? It depends on many factors, including industry and type of email, but a good click-to-open rate is between 20-30% for promotional campaigns.
Conversion Rate
Once someone has clicked on a link in your email, you want them to take a particular action, whether thats to sign up for an event, buy a product, or download a resource.
The conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link in an email and then completed the action you wanted them to take. It tells you whether your email marketing is reaching its specific goals.
Because conversion rate measures an action taken outside of the email, you have to integrate your email service and your web analytics to measure the conversion rate within your emails. To do this, create unique tracking URLs for your email links. For the best integration, you should have your emails hosted by the same company as your website.
List Growth Rate
Theres not much point in sending the emails if you dont have an audience to receive them. Obviously, you want your email subscriber list to grow. Thats why its important to track your list growth and loss.
But keep in mind that it is normal for email lists to decay by nearly 23% every year. This decay happens as people change or abandon their email addresses, which is why its important to devote time and energy to continuously growing your subscriber list.
Overall ROI
There are a few ways to calculate your email campaigns return on investment (ROI). The most basic formula is:
($ in additional sales – $ invested in the campaign) / $ invested in the campaign 100
As with any other marketing channel, your marketing team must demonstrate what the value of email marketing is. Theres no better way of doing that than showing the impact it has on the bottom line.
Over time, you will also find certain periods during which your ROI spikes, which will help you decide when to devote more attention to your email marketing. For example, if your company sells consumer products, you may well find that November and December are the months when ROI on email marketing is at its highest.
This is information you want to have, as it will help you determine when you will get the most bang for your buck with email marketing.
When you take a data-driven approach to your email marketing, your brands email marketing campaigns will slowly but surely improve their ROI. Start by examining these five metrics, and then experiment with A/B testing, email segmentation, and sending times to learn how particular variables alter your email marketing success.
Youll quickly find that analyzing emailing marketing data is not only good for your ROI, but that its also a lot of fun.