Email marketing has evolved over the years and knowing your KPI’s are now more important than ever.Gone are the days of broadcasting mass email marketing campaigns and not fully understanding the performance and results. KPI’s are becoming more integral to the reporting, analysis and understanding of your email marketing campaigns and databases. 

There are numerous reasons why email marketing KPI’s are important, but two of the main ones are:
  1. It is easier to align your efforts with the company objectives
  2. They can help you define success, what worked and what didn’t and what you should do again in the future.
Email marketing KPI’s will be influenced by:
  1. Is it your existing database that you are marketing to or,
  2. Are you renting a 3rd party database

If it is your existing database you should include unsubscribe % in your KPI’s. If it is a 3rd party database, the data used won’t belong to you and individuals will unsubscribe from the data owner.

The following KPI’s should always be reported on:
  1.  Deliverability:
  • Are your emails reaching the inboxes. It is pointless to have a database of 500 000, but only 100 000 are delivered.
  • By monitoring the deliverability, you’ll be able to see if there is a sudden dip in the amount of emails delivered. If there is a big difference from the previous sends, you will have to investigate, e.g. could be a blacklisted ESP.
  1. Open rate:
  • Getting into the inbox is step 1, but now you need individuals to open it.
  • Track trends in your Open Rate and adjust accordingly, if your Open Rate is always high and now suddenly low, investigate and see what was done differently. Look at the subject line used, when you broadcasted etc.
  • Have a look what the industry standards are and use those as benchmarks.
  1. Click through rate:
  • This indicates how many individuals clicked on your links in your email and what they thought of your content.
  • If you have more than 1 click in the email, measure the amount of unique clicks on each mail. This can guide your future content strategy.
  1. Click to open rate:
  • This will allow you to monitor the amount of individuals who opened the mailer and clicked on it.
  • This will tell you how your subject line and content are working together.
  • If your subject line created a high open rate, but your clicks are low, then you know there is a disconnect.
  • If your subject line is high and your clicks low, re-look your content.
  1. Conversions:
  • This is probably the most important one of all!
  • Depending on the campaign objectives, a conversion can be a sale, a registration to an event, downloading content etc. It all depends on the email campaign’s objectives.
  • You need to know and understand what you are measuring and why you are measuring it.

KPI’s will be different for every single business based on their objectives, but the above-mentioned email marketing KPI’s will give you a good idea of how successful your email marketing is. Email marketing is widely considered as the most effective online channel, so it is important to track and optimise its performance.

 

 

References:

https://blog.dotmailer.com/email-marketing-evolving-knowing-kpis-important-ever/

https://www.maropost.com/blog/email-marketing-metrics-kpis/