Which Email Mar­ket­ing Met­rics Do You Need To Be Tracking?

Email mar­ket­ing is still an in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful way to reach prospects and cus­tomers. How­ever, if you aren’t track­ing the im­por­tant as­pects of your email mar­ket­ing cam­paign, you might as well be blindly send­ing out emails.

Data is everything.

You need to track im­por­tant email mar­ket­ing met­rics so you can see how your cam­paign is per­form­ing, test dif­fer­ent tweaks, and make more in­formed decisions.

The good news is that with the right on­line CRM soft­ware, track­ing the key met­rics in your email mar­ket­ing cam­paign is sim­ple. You’ll have all the in­for­ma­tion you could ever want or need right there at your fingertips.

So, with that in mind, what are they key email mar­ket­ing met­rics you need to track in your campaign? 

• Open rate—How many peo­ple are ac­tu­ally open­ing your emails? This is just about the most im­por­tant met­ric of them all. Af­ter all, if peo­ple aren’t open­ing your emails, your cam­paign stands no chance of be­ing suc­cess­ful. Get­ting that open can be tough, so you have to track this met­ric care­fully and make ad­just­ments to your sub­ject lines and ap­proach as you go.

  With a good on­line CRM sys­tem that of­fers email mar­ket­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties, you can eas­ily track who is open­ing your emails and who isn’t.

• Bounce rate—Bounce rate is the per­cent­age of emails that don’t get de­liv­ered to sub­scribers. Every email list will in­clude a num­ber of bad email ad­dresses that don’t of­fer suc­cess­ful de­liv­ery. It’s al­ways im­por­tant to dou­ble-check your con­tacts’ in­for­ma­tion to make sure it is all cor­rect.

  Bounce rate can also be help­ful in main­tain­ing and prun­ing your email list as you can re­move email ad­dresses that re­peat­edly bounce back.

• Clicks—Are the links and of­fers in your emails ac­tu­ally get­ting clicked? Which ones are get­ting the most clicks and which seem to be get­ting ig­nored? Re­mem­ber, clicks are how you’ll likely be mak­ing your money. Your emails will be dri­ving read­ers to land­ing pages with the ul­ti­mate goal of a rev­enue gen­er­at­ing con­ver­sion.

  Track­ing click-through rates is im­por­tant so that you can ad­just your link­ing and call to ac­tion strat­egy to gen­er­ate the best pos­si­ble results.

• Opt-outs—Over time, peo­ple will opt out of your email list. It’s un­avoid­able. And it’s okay – just so long as you don’t have an alarm­ingly high opt-out rate. If you start to no­tice a trend where more and more peo­ple are un­sub­scrib­ing from your email list, you need to take a se­ri­ous look at what might be the prob­lem.

  Are you email­ing too of­ten? Not email­ing enough? Are you giv­ing your sub­scribers the in­for­ma­tion they want? Are your of­fers not ap­peal­ing enough?

• Con­ver­sion rate—At the end of the day, it’s all about con­ver­sions. If you aren’t con­vert­ing re­cip­i­ents into cus­tomers, your email mar­ket­ing cam­paign isn’t do­ing its job.

  You may need to track con­ver­sion rate us­ing your own web­site an­a­lyt­ics pro­gram in con­junc­tion with your on­line CRM soft­ware, but it’s key that you mon­i­tor this so you can see what vis­i­tors to your land­ing pages do once they arrive. 

By dili­gently track­ing these key met­rics and act­ing on the data, you can get bet­ter re­sults from your email marketing.

About the au­thor: Craig Klein is CEO and Founder of Sales Nexus, a lead­ing on­line CRM soft­ware provider for small busi­nesses and sales teams. Craig’s a sales process guy. His pas­sion is help­ing small busi­nesses hire, train, mea­sure and man­age sales peo­ple through their en­tire sales process. Fol­low Craig on Twit­ter to keep in touch.