Forecasts show that the global email user rate is likely to reach 4.6 billion by 2025.
Email marketing might seem like a slightly old-fashioned approach, but it can still be incredibly useful. This will only be the case for your business, however, if you take the right approach. An email marketing KPI is a metric that can help you stay on top of your marketing strategy.
Let’s take a look at some of the key email marketing KPIs that you should be aware of.
Delivery Rate
This is given as a percentage, which represents how many of your emails successfully make it to users’ inboxes. It’s an indicator of how well your emails get through filters. A low delivery rate typically means your emails are being marked as spam or rejected by email servers.
Cleaning your subscriber list will help you improve your delivery rate. It can remove invalid or inactive email addresses. Avoid spammy behavior and try to only send valuable content so that you maintain a good sender reputation.
Bounce Rate by Bounce Type
Email clients can reject (bounce) emails, which isn’t ideal. This could happen as a result of invalid emails, full inboxes, failing servers, or simply if emails are too large.
The main bounce categories are:
- Block
- Hard
- Soft
- Technical
If you can figure out the rate for each type, you may be able to make effective improvements.
Open Rate
Having a high delivery rate is ideal, but emails won’t do much if users aren’t opening them. Strong, engaging subject lines will encourage more users to open your emails.
Note that this can sometimes be inaccurate, as an email that contains images only counts as “open” if the recipient also receives the images. Many users have image-blocking enabled, so your results might not be clear.
Unsubscribe Rate and Complaint Rate
You should always have an unsubscribe button at the bottom of your emails so users have that option. Unsubscribes can be demoralizing, but you can learn from them. You can take note of when unsubscribes increase and determine the cause, then make changes.
A user could also make a spam complaint on an email from you. This will impact your sender reputation and make it more likely that your emails will automatically be marked as spam in the future.
Click-Through Rate
This is the percentage of clicks on at least one of your links after an email has been opened. It will help you get a better understanding of the quality of the content in the email.
You can use this to determine which types of emails your users are interacting with the most. Looking at this alongside your web conversions will help you see if your email and web messaging are well aligned (which they should be).
Email Marketing KPI Importance
Each email marketing KPI will tell you something different, and these all come together to help you craft an ideal email marketing strategy. The best way to get the most out of your email marketing efforts is to work with a professional.
F22 Internet Solutions has been assisting clients with a range of digital marketing services for over 20 years. Take a look at our email marketing services page to find out more about how we can help your business.
