Metrics to Measure the Success of Your Email Marketing
Email is critical yet today in business marketing online. The key is getting recipients to open your emails, and then to act on something in your email.
Your emails can and need to bring leads to your business and return the investment you’ve put into them.
But how do you know if your newsletters are, over time, being open and giving you clicks throughs to your website that result in leads?
The key is measurement! You need to measure the results, i.e., what happened during and after a particular email campaign.
Here’s the metrics you need to measure to discover if your campaigns are reaching the audience you want and creating the actions you need.
1. Lead Generation, the share and forward rates of emails
Did a recent campaign increase exposure to a new product or the company? Is a promotion going viral? Use numbers of new subscribers or email responses, and leverage an email checker to accurately measure these metrics.
Be sure to check link clicks on specific product links you had. Which ones had the most? You will also want to look in your email marketing reporting area and see how many times your newsletter has been shared.
2. Campaign Tracking
Google Analytics offers UTM tags, they allow precise tracking of web page visits from email clicks.
This means you can know exactly that a web visitor came specifically from a link click in that one specific email you sent out!
This traffic can be segmented on Google Analytics, and its behavior studied, to improve site flow and optimize landing pages and navigation menus.
3. Conversion Rates
How many recipients performed an action as a result of clicking a link, such as completing a rebate form or making a purchase on your website?
Customized UTM tags, landing pages, and/or website cookies can measure these numbers and when it comes to improving these metrics, consider leveraging specialized conversion rate optimization services. Google Analytics is a key tool to help you measure where traffic came from and conversions on your site related to email marketing traffic.
4. Revenue By Response Attribution
ROI (Return on Investment) can be tracked to specific email marketing campaigns by analyzing conversion rates and dividing the revenue of the sales by the total cost of the campaigns.
Be sure to include all expenses of running a campaign, including creative, mailing list costs, outsourcing, etc.
5. Aggregating Data
One online “touch” via email may not be enough to get a consumer to make a purchase.
Sometimes a prospect needs to be teased with a promotion, so they follow up to get more information and make a purchase at a later date. Often this process needs to be nudged along using a series of emails.
Ideally, companies want to track as many of their online touchpoints as possible. This can be accomplished using CRM software, such as InfusionSoft, Snov.io, or Salesforce, or custom database tools, and aggregating that data to see how effective the email part of the marketing strategy is.
Third-party email services like MailChimp and Constant Contact will have built-in reporting you can access.
And marketing platforms like Marketo and HubSpot will help you gather your statistics for your email and website in great detail. This will give you a more holistic picture of email campaign effectiveness.
Email measurement technology has come a long way since its inception. The days of end-to-end (E2E) email marketing measurement are just beginning.
In the future, expect even more bridges to be built between email tracking services, CRM’s and database software to give you a clear picture of the effectiveness of your email marketing.