An Intro to Email Analytics
Email marketing has the highest return on investment of all digital marketing channels. Studies show that 4% of those who receive an email campaign will make a purchase on your site compared to 2.5% from organic search and 0.6% from social media. But, the average office worker receives 120 emails per day. If you’re sending out a weekly newsletter, that’s 839 emails that you are competing against to grab your consumers’ attention. So how can you tell if your campaigns are measuring up? Here are a few basic terms that you will need to know in order to make sense of your email analytics:
Open Rate
Let’s start out easy. An email campaign’s open rate is the percentage of emails opened out of the total number of emails that were delivered. Your open rate is important because it’s the first step in engaging your audience. Without opening your email, how can audience members learn, click, and purchase?
Conversely, open rates can be a bit misleading. According to HubSpot:
“an email is only counted as ‘opened’ if the recipient also receives the images embedded in that message. And a large percentage of your email users likely have image-blocking enabled on their email client. This means that even if they open the email, they won’t be included in your open rate.”
This makes open rates inaccurate in measuring how well a certain campaign is performing.
Click-Through Rate
Your campaign’s click-through rate is defined as the percentage of those who click on a link within the email out of those who received the email. If you send the email out to 500 people and 20 people click on a link, you have a click-through rate of 4%.
The click-through rate is one of the best measures of how your audience is actively engaging with your brand and marketing efforts. Check out this article to see what a ‘good’ click-through rate is quantified as in your industry.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the number of people who complete a desired action in the email (making a purchase or filling out a contact form) divided by the number of users who received the email.
Generally, when sending an email campaign there is a call-to-action that you want your audience to follow through-on. Maybe it’s reading a blog post, buying a product, or registering for an event. Regardless of what the action is, your conversion rate is one of the most insightful metrics on how you are hitting your email goals, as well as overall business goals.
Unsubscribe Rate
Your unsubscribe rate can be calculated by taking the number of users who unsubscribed from the email campaign, divided by the number who received the campaign.
Like we said before, we are inundated with hundreds of emails every week and in order to cut through the clutter of our inbox, we unsubscribe from businesses and organizations that are no longer pertinent to our lives. Having audience members who unsubscribe is a natural part of email marketing, but you do want to watch out for high unsubscribe rates or spam rates that indicate you may be adding people to your contact list that did not opt-in to receiving emails.
