Email marketing metrics are far simpler than other metrics such as Web site analytics.
Because there are only a small number of them, it is easy to track results and focus efforts on how to improve them.
But that doesn’t make email marketing easy. It is a big challenge first to get people to subscribe and then to keep them when they have so many other options.
There are four primary email marketing metrics for tracking the return on investment:
- Subscription rate
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Churn rate
he subscription rate shows the ratio of how many people have signed up for the email versus the total number exposed to the signup form.
Some experts don’t track this number, but it it worth watching for a simple reason — if the signup is promoted heavily and few people sign up for it, there is a problem with either the promotion or the perceived value of the email
The open rate is the number of subscribers who actually open the email when they receive it.
A fairly common range is between 15 and 25 percent.
The open rate improves when it is sent at a good time of the day or especially if the subject line is inviting enough.
At some point, the open rate doesn’t go any higher for a few simple reasons. The recipient isn’t there, doesn’t have time to read it, doesn’t even see it because it got blocked by a spam filter, etc.
The click rate is the number of subscribers who click on a link in the email.
The click rate can be tracked as a percentage of the total people who received the email (which will be a lower rate) or the number of people who opened and clicked (a higher rate).
he churn rate or unsubscribe rate is the number of people who unsubscribe to the email versus the number who subscribe.
A typical churn rate is less than 1 percent per month. Anything higher indicates a problem with the content of the email — either it has poor quality, is being sent at the wrong time or is a mismatch with the subscriber’s interests.
Obviously, the lower the percentage the better.
Another rate worth watching is the bounce rate, which shows the number of emails sent and rejected by the recipients mail server.
This usually happens because the recipient is no longer at that address.
A high bounce rate indicates that the email list isn’t being properly managed.