Email Marketing has become one of the most important strategies for every successful business to find new customers and turn previous customers into loyal repeat customers. But that is only possible if email marketing was done right with successful campaigns.
No one can launch the best possible email campaign at the best time, it requires trial and error. Email marketing analysis allows us to study different parts of the email campaign to understand what parts are performing well and what other parts are holding the campaign's performance down and need to be improved.
What is Email Marketing Analysis?
Email Marketing Analysis is the process of tracking and studying certain metrics of the email campaign that determine the performance of each part of the campaign. By studying these metrics we know which parts can be improved to improve the success of the full campaign.
For example, by tracking the email open rate we can understand if the subject line of the emails we've sent is performing well, so we can know for a fact if it is better to keep this subject line or try to improve it.
The most important Email Marketing Metrics.
Now we will discuss some of the most important metrics in Email Marketing that you should track to understand how well is your campaign performing. High numbers on some of these metrics indicate more success like the open rate, while high numbers on other metrics, like the unsubscribe rate, indicate failure.
1. The Open Rate
- What is the open rate?
The open rate of an email campaign is the percentage of people who opened the email from the people who received it in their inbox. The open rate of a campaign can be calculated by the following formula:
The open rate = (The number of people who opened the email / The number of people who received the email) * 100.
- What does the open rate indicate?
The subject line and the opening phrase of the email play the biggest role in determining whether the recipient will open the email or not. So the open rate of an email campaign indicates how well the subject line and opening sentence of the email are performing. A high open rate means that the subject and opening phrase lines are doing a good job, while a low open rate means that these two parts need some improvements to compel the recipients to open the emails.
- How to fix a low open rate? / Solutions to a low open rate.
One of the most common solutions to a low open rate is the use of catchy words in the subject line, but I don't fully endorse this approach as it has some risks. The use of catchy words in the subject line or the email body without caution can expose our campaign to triggering spam filters or even spam reports, and that can have very harmful effects on the growth of our business as our domain might get blacklisted. Read our article on techniques to avoid spam filters and reports in email marketing.
Another solution is to add more mystery to your subject line. This approach tends to push the users towards opening your emails to discover what is it that they don't know, and it doesn't have the risks of catchy words. To implement this approach try to state the subject of your email in the subject line with a bit of vagueness, but make sure that the reader at least understands the general idea behind your email (improving business growth, marketing tactics, ...etc).
2. The Click-to-Open rate.
- What is the Click-to-Open rate?
The Click-to-open rate of an email campaign is the percentage of people that have interacted with the email (like clicking) from the people that have opened the email. The Click-to-Open rate of an email campaign can be calculated using the following formula:
The Click-to-Open rate = (The number of unique opens / The total number of clicks) * 100
- What does the Click-to-Open rate indicate?
The Click-to-Open rate is determined mainly by two parts of the email, the hook and the call to action. A high Click-to-Open rate means that these two parts are doing well, while a low rate most likely means one of two things, a hook that is not interesting enough for the reader to continue reading or a vague call to action, both of these problems would result in the reading exiting the email without clicking through.
- How to fix a low Click-to-Open rate? / Solutions to a low Click-to-Open rate
Every marketing email should include a hook that is interesting enough to grab the attention of the reader to continue reading through the email until they reach a very clear and specific call to action that would instruct the reader what to do from there on (clicking a button for example).
It is also advised that you give the reader a special limited-time offer if they take action now, so the element of urgency will tempt the user to click through to not lose that offer
Improving the Click-to-Open rate requires a lot of testing because there isn't a clear-cut way to better hook or call to action. That is done with A/B testing where you send different versions of the email and track the statistics to see which version is performing better.
3. The Unsubscribe Rate
- What is the Unsubscribe Rate?
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of the people that unsubscribed from your email list of the number of emails sent. The unsubscribe rate can be calculated using the following formula:
The unsubscribe rate = (The number of people that unsubscribed/The number of emails delivered) * 100
- What does the unsubscribe rate indicate?
When a person unsubscribed from your email list they've made the final decision that they don't want to continue the relationship with your brand, and that's mainly because they feel that they aren't getting enough value for the number of emails sent to them by you.
So a high unsubscribe rate mainly indicates that you are sending emails more often than you should and the recipients are getting annoyed by them. Or that the recipients have lost trust in your brand because the emails you're sending them aren't offering enough value.
- How to fix a high unsubscribe rate? / Solutions to a high unsubscribe rate.
When you notice a high unsubscribe rate, the most logical approach you should take is to send emails less often than you do. This solution will lower your unsubscribe rate dramatically because nearly no one will be annoyed by very few emails to the point they unsubscribe.
Another very important solution is that you don't send any email for the sake of sending it, and you make sure that you're providing value with every email sent. Value can be determined in many ways, you can include useful information, limited-time offerings, advice, reminders, ...etc.
4. The Conversion Rate.
- What is the conversion rate?
The conversion rate is the percentage of people that have taken an action (such as making a purchase or signing up for a service) from the total number of people that have received the email. The conversion rate can be calculated using the following formula:
(The total number of conversions / The total number of clicks) * 100
- What does the conversion rate indicate?
In most cases, the conversion rate has nothing to do with the emails that you send but with the pages that you're sending the recipients to. So if you are getting a low conversion rate, it means that the product or service pages are not well optimized for conversion.
In rare cases, a low conversion rate can indicate that you are exaggerating the details of the product or service that you're promoting in your emails, or due to unfulfilled promises.
- How to fix a low conversion rate? / Solutions to a low conversion rate.
First, you should make sure that the pages you are sending customers to with the links in your emails are well-optimized for conversion. This solution doesn't have anything to do with email marketing and is beyond the purpose of this article, so I will not go into more detail.
You MUST always make sure your promotions in the email campaigns reflect the details of the product or service you are promoting because if customers notice that you've exaggerated in your emails they wouldn't take the desired action and would lose trust in your recommendations and your brand.
5. The List Growth Rate.
- What is the list growth rate?
The list growth rate is the change in the size of the email list taken as a percentage of the total number of emails sent in a campaign. The list growth rate can be positive when the list is growing and negative when the list is shrinking. This rate can be calculated using the following formula:
The List Growth Rate = 100 * (The number of new subscribers - The number of new unsubscribed) / The total number of emails sent.
This metric is particularly important in cold email and lead generation through paid ads or generic traffic.
- How to improve the list growth rate with a lead magnet?
One of the most powerful techniques for getting a high growth rate is the use of lead magnets. A lead magnet is a free offer that you give away in exchange for the person's contact information, the offer can be an eBook for example, or any other digital product.
A very good tip to improve the list growth rate with a lead magnet is to choose the free offer to be relevant to the people you're promoting to. For example, if you're promoting to dentists you should offer a free search engine optimization eBook, that wouldn't tempt them to subscribe, Read our full lead magnet guide here.
6. The Email Bounce Rate.
- What is the email bounce rate?
The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that could not be delivered to the recipient's inbox from all of the emails sent. The bounce rate can be calculated using the following formula:
The bounce rate = (The number of bounced emails / The total number of emails sent) * 100
- What are the causes of a high bounce rate?
The main cause of a high bounce rate is having many invalid or inactive emails in your email list. For example, if you have a lead magnet form that doesn't verify the ownership of the entered email, users might enter invalid emails just to get the free offer, and you will end up with many invalid email addresses in your email list resulting in a high bounce rate.
- How to fix a high bounce rate? / Solutions to a high bounce rate.
The best way is to validate your email list to filter out invalid emails, this can be done in multiple ways on different validation depth levels, you can read our full email validation tutorial here. This approach will rid you of the invalid emails already in your list but you should make sure to stop including invalid emails in your list, here comes the next part.
From now on, you should verify the ownership of email addresses before including them in your email list, or at least you should validate them. This will make sure that your email list doesn't get filled with invalid emails resulting in a high bounce rate again.
7. The Campaign ROI.
- What is the Campaign ROI?
ROI stands for Return On Investment. This is a term used in every marketing campaign or any other business venture. The return on investment is the ratio between the money spent on the campaign and the money made by the campaign. The campaign return on investment can be calculated using the following formula:
ROI = (Money made / Money spent) * 100
We break even if the ROI is 100% because the money made is equal to the money spent in that case. While if the ROI is less than 100% percent then we are losing money, but if the ROI is more than 100% then our campaign is profitable.
To get more intuition about the ROI, I will give the following examples. If a campaign's ROI is 95%, it means that the campaign made 95% of the money it spent, then it lost 5% of the money it spent. If the ROI is 100% then we've made 100% of what we've spent, then we broke even. While if the ROI is 110%, then the campaign made 110% of the money it spent, then we would've profited by 10% of the money we've spent.
Everything explained in this section applies to email marketing campaigns as well as any other investment. Email marketing campaigns tend to be very cheap, so in most cases, the ROI would be much higher than 100%, and it's estimated that the average ROI for an email campaign is 410%.
Conclusion.
One of the most important steps for a successful email marketing system is implementing good analysis after receiving the result of every campaign. Email campaign analysis is necessary because it allows us to know which parts of our emails are performing well and which parts require improvement.
No matter how good at email marketing are you, most of the parts of an email campaign require trial and error to be perfected. And to get the most benefits from the mistakes and errors we make, we should track some metrics that determine the success of our email campaign and study them to improve what needs to be improved and keep what is performing well.
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