Email marketing has been around since 1978 and is still used by thousands of businesses around the world for good reason. Despite its humble beginnings and the rise of newer online channels such as social media, email marketing continues to be an effective way to connect with leads, nurture them, and convert them into paying customers.
But how do you measure the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy?
In the context of email marketing, the phrase tracking emails means different things to different people. For example, if you are a marketer who provides digital marketing services, you will want to learn how to track emails so that you can monitor their performance and analyse the bottom-line results. However, salespeople frequently track emails directly from their inbox in order to efficiently follow up with leads and clients.
The end goal, however, is the same: you want to know who is opening your emails, when they are opening them, and what actions they take after they open them.
In this article, we will walk you through the process of understanding the complexities of email marketing, its benefits, the metrics you must monitor, and how to track your results so you can improve the performance of your strategy.
What Is Email Marketing And How Does It Work?
First and foremost, let us define the term “email marketing.” The most basic definition of email marketing is the process of targeting your audience and consumers via email. You can turn prospects into customers and casual one-time purchasers into devoted patrons or even brand ambassadors by creating effective and compelling content that compels subscribers to take action.
It’s not spam, a personal email from a coworker, or a friendly reminder about brunch on Saturday. You use email marketing to strengthen an existing relationship with your subscribers and leads by providing them with important and relevant information that encourages them to take action on their objectives. Effective email marketing may help you establish relationships while also making money.
Email marketing can be used in a variety of ways. Some classic uses of email marketing or strategies are as follows:
- Relationship building: fostering connections through targeted messaging and involvement.
- Boosting brand awareness: Many email marketing examples keep firms and their services at the forefront of prospects’ and leads’ minds when they are ready to engage.
- Content promotion: Email marketing is frequently utilised to deliver relevant blog content with subscribers.
- Lead generation: a method of obtaining personal information from subscribers in exchange for promotions, discounts, or other valuable assets.
- Promotion of products and services
- Nurturing leads: delighting subscribers with information that helps them solve problems or achieve their goals.
What Are The Advantages Of Email Marketing?
With the popularity of prominent internet channels such as social media on the rise, some people wonder if email marketing is still relevant and successful.
The short answer is “absolutely.”
Today, email marketing is still the most trusted and effective method of communication, with 78 percent of marketers reporting an increase in email engagement over the last year. When it comes to B2B marketing, 31% believe that email newsletters are the best strategy to nurture leads. Many customers think that marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions, and many marketers say that email is their most important source of ROI and increased client retention.
What are the causes behind email marketing’s benefits?
Email marketing, unlike other marketing platforms, allows you to stay in touch with customers on a regular and continuous basis. When you send them targeted and personalized content, you demonstrate your appreciation for them as customers. In turn, they appreciate it when firms treat them as individuals rather than simply as sources of wealth.
Email marketing has the following advantages:
- Better brand recognition: Email marketing is a terrific technique to create brand identification since it allows you direct access to your prospects’ and customers’ inboxes.
- Increase sales: When customers receive an email informing them that certain things are on sale, they frequently act on impulse.
- Boost sales: Sending promotional codes and email coupons can help increase your sales.
- Stronger customer relationships: A drip marketing campaign guides subscribers through the buyer’s journey until they reach the final conversion stage. These emails feed relevant information, advice, or products to readers over time, offering consistent value while keeping your business at the forefront of their minds.
- Save on time and budget: Creating a professional email marketing campaign is simple, inexpensive, and time-consuming. It is suitable for small firms with limited time and resources, as well as established organisations looking for a new cash stream.
How To Create An Email Marketing Strategy?
With email marketing’s tremendous potential and limitless possibilities, let’s break down a few important steps so you can develop a great campaign that will delight both prospects and consumers. It is important to understand that each of your clients receives a large number of emails each day, including those from your competitors. If you don’t create a good email marketing strategy, you’ll get lost in packed inboxes or, worse, land up in the spam bin.
Here’s an example of how to create a successful email marketing campaign and send emails that people will open and read.
- Define your audience: Create a buyer persona, just like everything else in marketing. An effective email is one that is relevant to the recipient, thus it is critical that you understand what your target audience wants so that you can personalize your campaign to answer their needs.
- Establish your goals: Gain context by researching average email statistics in your sector. You can utilise those as a starting point for your goals. Mailchimp features a comprehensive table that contains all of the industry’s email marketing benchmarks and statistics.
- Get people to sign up: Use lead magnets like eBooks, infographics, webinars, and other types of content to grow your email list. They will need to provide you their email address in exchange for the content you supply. You may also develop an intriguing opt-in form that allows them to join up for your newsletter willingly.
- Make a schedule: Determine how frequently you want to send emails to your contact list. Maintain a steady schedule to keep top of mind.
- Track and measure your results: It is critical for marketers to track campaign data and key performance indicators (KPIs). The main metrics to monitor can be found in the following section.
Email Marketing Metrics To Monitor And How To Track Them
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much you’ve optimised your emails if they arent producing the desired outcomes. Let’s go over the key email marketing metrics you should be measuring and how to measure them.
- Open Rate
Knowing how many recipients opened an email after you send it is critical. It not only tells you if your subject lines are catchy, but it is also the first step in interacting and engaging with your email audience. Depending on your business, the average open rate for an email marketing campaign ranges from 15% to 25%. Anything below this range necessitates rewriting your topic lines.
The importance of tracking open rates cannot be overstated because the indicator indicates patterns over time. For example, do subscribers open fewer emails on a particular day or hour? Open rates also reflect which types of emails elicit the most responses from recipients, allowing you to focus more on such messages in the future.
How to calculate it: Total number of emails opened total number of emails sent
- Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
The percentage of receivers who clicked on one or more links in your email is referred to as the clickthrough rate. CTR is an important email marketing statistic since it provides immediate insight into how many people are engaged with your content and allows you to easily assess performance for each email you send. It is required for analysing the quality of your material and determining whether it persuade subscribers to take action. According to Campaign Monitor, the average CTR across all industries is 4%.
How to calculate it:(Total clicks or unique clicks number of sent emails) x 100
- Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered to the subscriber’s mailbox. There are two types of bounces to track: soft bounces and hard bounces.
Soft bounces aren’t a serious issue because they are caused by transient issues with a valid email address, such as a problem with the recipients server or an overflowing inbox. You can either resend the emails or wait for the server issue to be resolved.
Hard bounces, on the other hand, are caused by closed, non-existent, or invalid email addresses. Remove hard bounce addresses from your email list as soon as possible because they can harm the reputation of your email sending address.
While bounce rates have no direct impact on your goals, it is nonetheless necessary to investigate them so that you do not come across as a spammer in the eyes of an internet service provider.
How to calculate it:(Total number of soft/hard bounced emails Number of emails delivered) x 100
- Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients that clicked on a link in your email and completed a desired activity, such as purchasing a product or completing a lead-generating form. For example, if you sent an email inviting subscribers to download a free eBook, anybody who does so is called a conversion.
If lead creation is your goal, conversion rates are critical since they reflect how effective your emails are at engaging prospects and producing leads.
How to calculate it:(Number of persons that took the requested activity Total number of emails sent) x 100
- Overall ROI
l need to know the entire return on investment for your email marketing strategy, just like you would for any other marketing channel. This enables you and your sales team to determine the value of email marketing as a channel that generates measurable outcomes for your business.
The basic method for calculating ROI is shown below, but there are numerous ways to calculate it based on your sort of business. It is critical to establish goals from the start so that you can determine whether or not you have met your planned ROI for a certain marketing campaign.
How to calculate it:[($/PhP in extra sales made $/PhP invested in the campaign) $/PhP invested in the campaign] 100 times
Does Measuring Email Marketing Metrics Matter?
Yes Of course, yes. As a marketer, you should track numerous indicators because if you don’t track the success of your email marketing campaign, you’re wasting the potential of your plan. It allows you to keep track of critical clients and hot leads. For example, if someone opened your email several times during the day, it could be a good idea to send another one to follow up. You can help deliver the finest content to your recipients’ inboxes by monitoring and assessing the results of your email marketing campaign.
Tracking the above-mentioned indicators should be done after each campaign, whether it was a success or a failure. Over time, you can analyse the analytics to find problems, devise remedies, and create better ways to reach out to your subscribers.
If you are unsure how to track your emails or measure the effects, your email marketing service provider can assist you. They’ll keep track of everything you need to know about your email content, from open rates and bounce rates to CTRs and ROI. They will make it simple for you to examine and interpret the results.
Learn More Foolproof Email Marketing Tips From Stridec
Email marketing evolves and adapts with the times without losing sight of its basic goal: to reach out to your audience in the most personal way possible. You have a better knowledge of what makes a campaign effective now that you know how to launch an email marketing but the most critical metrics to track.
But it doesn’t stop there. Email marketing is a never-ending process that requires regular refining and fine-tuning.
Don’t hesitate to contact Stridec today for more email marketing advice. As the Philippines’ leading provider of digital marketing services, we have the experience and skills to guide you through the process of developing email marketing campaigns that create conversions and enhance ROI.