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If you are a regular reader of our blog (thank you!), you know that we are big, big fans of using carefully crafted emails to keep in touch with your customers and followers. And, as important as the content found in your emails is—and believe us when we say it is very important—keeping track of the metrics created as a result of your email campaign is even more crucial. After all, it doesn’t matter how informative your email is if people aren’t opening it…or if they never receive it in the first place.

And so, we decided to share with you our list of the top 4 email metrics you should be checking to determine the overall success of any email campaign. Let’s dive in!

1. Open Rate

The open rate is the number of people who open your email. For example, if you sent an email to 10 people and it was opened by 3 of them, that email has an open rate of 30%.

According to the gurus over at Mail Munch (isn’t that a great name?), a good open rate varies from 17 – 28%. If you find your open rate is landing squarely in the 30% range or higher…well done! You have crafted an email people can’t wait to open. If, however, your email is floundering with a 10 – 15% open rate, it’s time to do a deeper dive into the metrics to determine why.

2. Bounce Rate

If you find your emails plagued with low open rates, check the bounce rate as a potential source of the problem.

The term “bounce rate” is used to describe those emails that have been returned by servers as undeliverable. Returned emails are returned as either a hard or soft bounce. Soft bounces happen when an email is temporarily undeliverable. The recipient may have a full inbox, or their server may be down for a short period of time. Hard bounces, on the other hand, mean your email has been permanently rejected. This can happen if someone mis-entered the email address (the one you used simply doesn’t exist), if someone left their place of employment and their email was deactivated, or if their server blocked your email.

The average bounce rate (calculated by the number of bounced emails divided by the total number of emails sent) is less than 2%, and it’s important to note that hard bounces are much more detrimental to the sender since they negatively affect your sender reputation score (you can read more about email reputation score by clicking here).

The trick to minimising bounces of either kind is to maintain the health of your email list. It’s always a good idea to use a double-opt-in process to ensure people genuinely want to receive your emails. And you should regularly remove email addresses that come back with a hard bounce or just seem dormant (are never opened). Doing so should lead to a lower bounce rate for future email campaigns.

3. Click Through Rate (CTR)

The email you’re sending should serve a purpose and compel the receiver to do something—sign up for an upcoming event, visit your website, make a purchase, or read your latest blog. And within the blog should be a call to action telling readers to perform said action.

The CTR measures how many people clicked on the links and/or buttons in your email. Click-through rates will vary depending on whether the email was opened on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device, so it’s important to break your data up accordingly, but an average click-through rate is 2.62%.

Your CTR matters because it tells you just how engaged your audience is with your emails.

4. Unsubscribe Rate

It’s hard not to feel the sting of rejection when someone clicks that little unsubscribe button at the bottom of your email as it initially feels like the digital version of an “it’s not me…it’s you” breakup.

Ouch.

But the truth is, people unsubscribe for a variety of reasons—your product/service solved their problem and they don’t think they need further communication, your emails look less professional and more like spam, you’re inundating their inbox with too many emails, or offering too much (or too little) content in your communications.

An average unsubscribe rate is 0.5%…anything higher means you need to do some digging to find out why readers are jumping ship. This may mean creating more segmented email lists to ensure your audience is only getting the information they are interested in or giving subscribers a choice as to how often they hear from you.

And so…

Understanding email metrics can help you determine whether you’re meeting your marketing goals. But we understand that this can be a time-consuming process, and you may be better off passing this task to professionals so you can focus on your business. If you’d like help in measuring your email metrics, contact us at Digital Canteen. Our team of email marketing experts will craft emails that engage your audience and bring in stellar metrics you’re going to love.

Thanks for reading,
Digital Canteen Team
02-9025-4304