Email marketing, especially if it is properly integrated with analytics, provides an abundance of data. The reporting can get really expansive, so it is really important to focus and report on the email metrics that matter most …
1. List Growth
First of all, it is most important to have a statistically significant list (of more than 5 emails), because you want your metrics to be representative for user behaviors, you also want to be able to segment in many different ways. Secondly, you want a healthy growing list. Net growth rate is an important metric to measure. It tells you whether you are doing a good job promoting and recruiting for your email marketing program. Make sure to pass source attribution to your list from any forms you use to collect emails, it is important to know the source from which the list grows the most so you can feed that vehicle more/learn from its success. You want to report this metric as a %growth from last month number.
2. % Unique Opens
Unique opens tell you how many individuals opened your email. One person could keep opening your email 1000 times, but that is not a really important metric. Unique opens tell you how effective your subject line was in grabbing attention and enticing opens. This metric also works best in comparison to the email averages for your email marketing program, so make sure you compare the %unique opens to the %average unique opens.
3. Click Through Rate
% Unique clicks tells you how many individuals clicked through the email to a landing page. But since many website servers block images and disable links, this number is pretty flawed. It is more effective to measure the CTR = clicks/opens. This tells you whether the content of your email was successful in driving people to take an action and get more content from you.
4. Conversions
Your email has to be aiming to achieve something. It could be sales or reservation driven, or aiming for another measurable goal. There must be an action to be taken in the email. This step asks for some critical thinking and math skills. You need to assign a value to each action. If you know that each click generates about a dollar. Then you can estimate conversion per clicks. If your campaigns are properly tagged, you can use google analytics to report the actual conversion metric from your campaign. This metric is also best presented in comparison to both site average and email driven traffic average.
Of course reporting without analytics is not really helpful, so you will need supporting data to evaluate the metrics above. Just contact us using the form on the right if you have any questions!