Email marketing is still one of the most valuable tools in the marketing world. A successful, well managed, and clean email list can pay dividends for years to come. These benchmarks are helpful to determine the success of your campaigns. While many email companies provide these metrics, to is important to understand these so that you can see where the trajectory of your marketing efforts.
Campaign ROI
Campaign ROI is helpful in assessing how well a particular email has performed or automation is working. Tracking this might help you assess whether the campaign was successful and find ways to replicate for another campaign or disregard and look for ways to recover. Depending on your email provider will determine whether this reporting metric is in their dashboard or is it something that you should look to gather through other analytical tools
Calculate Campaign ROI:
($ in Sales – Cost of Email / Cost of Email)
List Growth Rate
Everyone loves to grow their business. Email marketing can have a significant role in improving your profitability and understanding the factors that make your list grow can have value. The list growth rate can help you understand how successful an inbound marketing strategy is performing. For most businesses, a solid strategy would recognize that a growing a list is worth the time and effort and finding the right mix is the challenge.
Calculate List Growth Rate
(New subscribers – (unsubscribers + complaints))/ total subscribes of 30 days
Bounce Rate (aka Delivery Rate)
Bounce rates can indicate the health of your email list. In fact, the lower the bounce rate the better. Email providers have a system to score a senders email. If the email provider recognizes a lot of emails bouncing it will likely devalue your email sending your hard work to the spam folder of legitimate emails. There goes the value of your campaigns and the value of your subscriber list. Keep your list clean and reap the benefits from your campaigns.
Calculate Bounce Rate
(# emails sent – #email bounces )/ #emails sent
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate is especially important and can be a healthy measurement when it comes to the success of your campaigns. This is valuable when you consider the subscriber value of each person. If a particular campaign has a high departure rate it may be a sign that something is wrong. Once you’ve diagnosed the issue you may want to plan a contingency plan to stop other unsubscribes from taking place.
Calculate Unsubscribe Rate
# unsubscribes emails/ # emails sent
Open Rate
Understand email open rates is important to grasp the effectiveness of a campaign. If a metric is poor you may want to assess some possible underlying causes such as poor subject lines, day and time of email sent, and even the frequency of emails.
Calculate Open Rate
(# of Conversions / # emails sent) x 100
Click Through Rate (CTR)
The click-through rate is a helpful metric in email marketing to understand the engagement of a particular message. Using this metric can help you understand a few things about your audience. Understanding question, was the message relevent and clear, can help you understand the success of each campaign.
Calculate Click Through Rate
# unique clicks/ emails sent x 100
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is one of the most widely used metrics. This measurement provides a percentage of who achieved the desired action of the campaign. Goals such as meetings scheduled, download access, and products/services purchased can be part of the objective. This is a good way to evaluate the financial success of your email campaign.
Calculate Conversion Rate
(# of Conversions / # emails sent) x 100
Forward/Shares Metric
Emails get shares and sometimes it might be worth knowing it’s extended reach. For some, this could be a vanity metric while others might find this as a measurement worth tracking. For instance, if you have a marketing automation campaign that requests referrals then this would be a great metric.
Calculate Forward/Share
((# of clicks on Share/Forward) / # emails sent x 100)
Email Subscriber Value
Understanding the value of each subscriber is important to understand the health of your email list. This metric is similar to customer lifetime value but this is based on the value of the specific channel.
($ in Sales – Cost of Email) / Cost of Email