Drafting an email campaign is the first of many steps when thinking about your email marketing strategy. One of the most important steps is how to measure the success of your campaign and how to use this data to improve the next email you send to your customers. In this blog we’ll highlight the top five metrics to measure and why they are important.
Top five metrics to measure
1. Deliverability rate
Deliverability rate shows the percentage of sent emails successfully delivered to a recipient. This metric is one of the first tracked once an email has been sent. If you have a high deliverability rate that means your list of emails is valid and your email is in your customer’s inbox. But if you start to see that your delivery rate is dropping this could mean you’ve been blocked.
Aim for: 99%
If your delivery rate is 97% or less, then audit how you collect your email addresses. Learn more about building an email list.
2. Open rate
Open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your email. This metric is driven by strong brand awareness or subject lines.
Aim for: 20%
There are many ways to improve the open rate of your email by A/B testing the time of send or different subject lines.
3. Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate is the percentage of those who opened your email and clicked through to it. This evaluates two metrics in one, the number of people who opened the email and the number of clicks. Many use this metric to measure the overall success of the campaign.
Aim for: 3.5%
Ensuring the content you are creating is relevant to your audience will set you up for success. Along with sending an email at the right time, one strong call to action that includes an incentive (i.e discount) and mobile optimization are a few other tips.
4. Conversion rate
The conversion rate of an email is the percentage of subscribers who performed a specific action (i.e., a purchase). This is one of the most important metrics of an email campaign since it usually is the overall goal.
Aim for: 2% or more
There are a variety of ways to improve your conversion rate like adding a discount to your subject line, mobile responsive design, and a clear CTA that makes it easy for your readers to know where to perform the specific action you want them to take.
5. Unsubscribe rate
An unsubscribe rate is the percentage of users who opted out of a subscriber list after an email campaign was sent.
Aim for: 0.5% or less
To keep this metric low you can test your email frequency and keep content digestible and relevant. When we talk about email frequency we are referring to the number of times you email your subscribers. They don’t want to hear from you every day, so it is important to build this into your strategy right from the start. This goes hand in hand with relevancy and digestibility.
Now that you have a list of metrics to measure it’s important to know where to find them. If you are using Shopify Email, tracking is automatically enabled and the campaign report shows the following directly in the admin:
- The delivery rate
- How many subscribers unsubscribed
- Click-through rate
- How many times the email was reported as spam
- How many unique visitors your store had from the email
- How many times a visit to your store from the email resulted in items being added to the cart
- How many orders were placed by customers visiting your store from the email
- The dollar amount in sales made from visits to your store from the email
Although we encourage you to keep your open tracking enabled, you can always update your settings by learning more here. Remember to always analyze your email campaign results and adjust accordingly. This will make you an email marketing expert in no time.
