Only 4 Email Marketing Metrics Matter: The Cheat Sheet

Email Marketing might be considered a niche marketing by some people but it’s rapidly becoming one of the fastest growing Marketing Channels. Email Marketing is the kind of one on one personal relationship that we all strive for with our users. Email Marketing gives you the chance to be up close and personal with your users on their time. Email Marketing has a lot different tools you can use based on your experience but the most popular tools are Mailchimp and Mautic. Mailchimp is user friendly and Mautic has a learning curve, but Mautic is Open Source.

To know if your campaign is successful you need to set goals and KPIs, the most important metrics to measure are:

Delivery Ratio

Your campaign is useless if your email isn’t being delivered to the people who matter the most; your engaged users. Let’s say you sent out 3 thousand emails but only 2 thousand people actually got your email for what ever reason, this would affect your open rate and click rate too. So what you need to do is clean your email list and remove those emails that aren’t deliverable or bouncing. With Mailchimp and SES being so pricey this will also ultimately lower your costs.

Open Rate

Ok so your campaign was delivered to 2 thousand people, of those 2 thousand people how many people opened your email and looked at your content? I have talked about User Engagement and visibility before. It’s important that people look at your content, for this goal we need to make sure our subject lines are interesting enough and we personalize our communications as much as possible.

Click Rate

Our email was delivered and opened but did the user see our CTA and click it ? Click Rate is important for conversion. If our users are opening our emails but not clicking through to the website, that means either the CTA was not visible or the content was not engaging enough to intrigue users to follow through. A/B Testing might be best for this so we can understand why better.

Unsubscribe Rate

Users are unsubscribing from your emails. Nowadays it’s become very easy to buy email lists to increase your customer base, but if your content is not tailored to your users they will just unsubscribe and leave. Plus in some countries it’s illegal to spam your users and send them emails. Our emails must not be characterized as spam because then even if your emails are delivered they will rot away in the spam folder and will never been seen.

Despite the long post, email marketing is very easy especially once you get the hang of it. Just remember to check and double check your campaigns before they go out because once sent there is no bringing them back. Keep your subject lines, previews and emails engaging ! and bye until next time!

Let me know in the comments if i missed something or if i said any thing wrong.

Resources for Email Marketing:

Marketing Words To Improve Email Campaigns

Email Marketing Laws 101

Mailchimp (Mail Chimp is free for upto a thousand emails per day if you want to start off)

Mautic (Better have a developer on hand if you want to go for Mautic, since its open source you can not expect a lot of support. Mautic Community is great if you have any kind of questions)

Both Mailchimp and Mautic are also Marketing automation tools so dont just use them for sending emails, Mautic can even be used like webengage to fuel popups etc. Both Mailchimp and Mautic also have landing page functionality with drag and drop which is great if you don’t know how to code.