When it comes to doing insight email marketing well, there’s a lot to say (Exhibit A: our 25 blog posts on the topic). But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how optimized your emails are if you can't see the results of your efforts -- not to mention measure whether email is helping you hit your goals.
So before sending your next email, let’s take a look at the metrics you should be paying attention to in your email marketing efforts. Without paying close attention and acting on any of these, you’re leaving valuable insights at the door.
1) Clickthrough Rate
Clickthrough rate (CTR) lets you easily calculate performance for every individual email you send. From there, you can track how your CTR changes over time. Clickthrough rate is a very important metric to be tracking, as it gives you direct insight into how many people are engaging with your content and interested in learning more about you.
2) Conversion Rate
After an email recipient has clicked through on your email, the next goal is typically to get them to convert on your offer -- in other words, to take the action that your email has asked them to take. So if you're sending an email to offer your audience the chance to download, say, a free ebook, you'd consider anyone who actually downloads that ebook to be a conversion.
3) Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of total insight emails that could not be delivered to an inbox. There are “hard” bounces, which are the result of an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and “soft” bounces, which are the result of a temporary problem with a valid email address like a full inbox or server problem.
Hard bounces should immediately be removed from your database because ISPs use these to determine your reputation. Too many hard bounces and suddenly you’re deemed a spammer.
Soft bounces may either clear up on their own once the server problem has resolved – or you can try re-sending the email after a few hours or days.
4) List Growth Rate
Keep a close eye on your list growth and loss. Believe it or not, there's a natural 25% annual decay of your email marketing list – so it’s more important to pay attention to growing your subscriber list and maintaining its overall healthy size. See the Bonus Tip below for how to keep your Unsubscribe worries to a minimum.
5) Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate
The rate at which your email recipients forward or share your email with others may not seem all that significant, but it's arguably one of the most important metrics you should be tracking. Why? Because this is how you generate new contacts – and it’s a surefire way that your content is as good as you think it is.
Unsubscribe Rate
Like weighing yourself every day, checking your unsubscribe rate obsessively can be more hurtful than it is helpful. If you take nothing else from this blog, remember this: the unsubscribe rate isn’t a reliable picture of the health of your email list. Many subscribers who are tired of receiving email messages from your brand won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process. They’ll just stop opening, reading, and clicking on your email messages.
That's why it's much more effective to measure subscriber engagement by clickthrough rates and conversion rates. Checking your monthly unsubscribe rate is really only helpful for calculating your overall list growth rate; so do keep an eye on that – but only once every few months.
The Bottom Line: Be smart about which metrics you're tracking, and make sure you're able to effectively measure individual email performance, list health, and your progress toward achieving goals. These are the keys to a healthy insight email marketing strategy.