Email KPIs to Monitor
2021 will bring many opportunities for small businesses. If maximizing online business opportunities is one of your goals this year, knowing which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track is critical for improving your successes.
For businesses sending out email communications, there are some important KPIs to watch. These are:
Bounce Rate
First and foremost, monitoring your email send bounce rate is one of the most important KPIs to monitor. Understanding what percentage of your emails are reaching their destination (your customers) is critical. Bounce rate is the total number of bounces divided by the total number of emails sent.
Bounce rates come in two distinct types: Soft and hard email bounces. A soft bounce means your recipient’s email box is full or otherwise temporarily unavailable. While a hard bounce means you have a bad email address, which can happen for a multitude of reasons.
Your email bounce rate should not be higher than 2%. Outside of your customers not actually getting your emails, a high bounce rate can impact your sender reputation. This is a whole different problem to deal with, but there are a few different items you can explore to reduce your bounce rate. These include:
- Make sure your email list is not stale
- Don’t purchase email lists
- Regularly remove invalid email addresses
- Use a double opt-in system
- Avoid spammy content
Open Rate
An email open rate refers to the number of successfully delivered unique emails opened, compared to the total number of emails sent. This excludes the number of bounces. This is an obviously important metric to watch for your general email marketing strategy success. You’ll want to shoot for an email open rate in excess of 20%, but this is highly dependent on your industry.
The number one way to make a positive impact on your email open rate is to craft a great subject line. Many email recipients judge whether an email is spam simply by the subject line. Did you know that having the word ‘newsletter’ in your subject line can reduce your open percent by 18.8%?
Click Through Rate (CTR)
A click through rate (CTR) is a measure of how many email recipients have clicked on a link in your email after having opened it. While it’s fabulous to have your emails opened, your business goal should be to drive your customers to your website, where you’ll want them to take the desired action. To calculate your email open rate, divide the number of email clicks by the number of delivered emails and multiple by 100.
A good goal is to keep your CTR above 4%. To improve your CTR look at your email design and your call to actions (CTA). Work to keep your CTAs direct and clear, and viewable without having to scroll.
Conversion Rate
While monitoring your bounce rate, open rate, and CTR are important, understanding your conversion rate is at the heart of measuring the success of your email efforts. Your conversion rate tells you whether your email recipients are actually taking action (made a purchase, signed up for a webinar, called your sales rep, etc). If your customers are opening up the emails and clicking to your site, but not taking an action, you’ll need to review your landing page’s efforts and how your email marketing funnel can be improved.
You can track this important metric by integrating your third-party email application (we recommend MailChimp) into Google Analytics.
Email Return on Investment (ROI)
Your email ROI is a ‘must know’ metric for understanding the base success of your efforts. This is a measure of how much revenue you’ve generated in comparison to how much money you’ve spent, within your email campaign. Did you know email currently enjoys one of the highest ROIs in the industry? Email generates $38 for $1 spent.
To measure your email ROI, subtract your email campaign costs from the revenue generated from the campaign, then divide this number by your campaign costs, and multiply this number by 100.
While there are other email campaigns metrics you might want to monitor, these are the most important email metrics.
Contact Keystone Media today to start your successful email campaign.