Is it working? How to measure your email marketing campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing and is popular amongst businesses of all shapes and sizes. The advanced options for measuring the success of your campaigns means that email marketing can really help you to understand your subscribers in far more detail than many other marketing activities.

Analysing the success of your email campaigns lets you to see how you were able to convert leads and also highlights any areas for improvements, so you can build on your open and engagement rates.

To begin with, start by monitoring the performance of each of your emails after they have been sent. The key metrics to keep track of are:

• Open Rate: This is calculated by Number of Emails Opened / Number of Emails Delivered x100. A healthy open rate sits anywhere between 20% – 40%.
• Click-Through Rate: Calculate this rate by Number of Unique Clicks / Number of Emails Delivered x100. A good clickthrough rate is around the 15% mark.
• Unsubscribe Rate: To get your unsubscribe rate take the Unsubscribe Number / Number of Emails Delivered x 100.

This basic level reporting will give you an idea of how well your emails are being received, whether they are triggering SPAM filters (you’ll see this in the number of emails not delivered) and how engaged your subscribers are with your email marketing efforts.

Delving further into the results of your email marketing will help you to tweak your strategy and give you a better understanding of your customers and prospects. The first step in doing this is to decide exactly what it is you want to achieve from your email marketing efforts. For example, is it to grow your database? Turn more leads into customers? Generate leads? Whatever it is you are trying to do, will become the baseline against which you measure your email marketing success.

Once you have clear goals for your email marketing strategy you can then measure its effectiveness – if one of your aims is to grow your database, you can measure the growth of your subscriber list. To do this you will need to take the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, then divide that by the total number of email addresses on your list and multiply by 100. Try doing this every month to see how well your subscriber list is growing. Additionally, if your goal is to gain new leads or convert leads into customers, be sure to track and measure these metrics regularly.

Integrating your website and email marketing with Google Analytics will give you even more insights into your subscribers, their actions and how engaged they are with your email content. Google Analytics will show you how visitors use your website after they have clicked-through from an email. From these insights you can gather a good understanding about which products or services they may be interested in.

Many email marketing platforms have in-built reporting features that will help you to monitor your email campaigns. Ask us how the Act! CRM Cloud can transform your email marketing strategy.