Businesses are expected to send 116.2 billion emails this year. That’s 318,356,164 business emails per day! As we reported in 2013, email marketing is not dead! (But by the way, who has time to READ all that email?)
Email marketing that addresses a buyer’s concerns is alive and well and welcomed by today’s digital buyers.They will click on emails that reach them with relevant, engaging content that speaks to them individually.
While many marketers focus on metrics like open rates and click rates, those aren’t the only data points you should be looking at. Such a limited approach to analyzing a campaign’s success can lead to poor decision making, and even result in marketers undervaluing both their email lists and the performance of their email programs.
5 metrics to track for B2B email marketing campaigns
- Delivery rate (# delivered ÷ # sent). Delivery rate tells you what percentage of the emails you sent actually got delivered. With today’s email marketing tools, this number is usually in the upper 90’s, but it makes sense to keep an eye on it. A low delivery rate can hurt your sender reputation and lead to blacklisting.
- Unique open rate (# unique opens ÷ # deliveries). Unique open rate simply indicates what portion of your subscribers viewed you email. This is tied to the relationship you have with them and the strength of your subject line.
- Unique click-through rate (# unique clicks ÷ # unique opens). Unique click-through rate (CTR) measures how many unique individuals clicked on your message, out of the people that viewed it. This is really a measure of how well your creative, content, or offer influenced a subscriber click, and paints a pretty good picture of how your message is performing.
- Conversion rate (# conversions ÷ # unique clicks). Conversion rate shows how many subscribers completed your call to action. Typically conversion rate compares the number of conversions to the number of deliveries, but depending on the goals you’ve established and how you view your conversion funnel, you can also express conversion rate with number of unique clicks as the denominator.
- Unsubscribe rate (# unsubscribes ÷ # deliveries) – Unsubscribe rate lets you know the percentage of subscribers who unsubscribe from your email campaigns. A high unsubscribe rate indicates your message content isn’t relevant to your subscribers.
Meeting your email marketing goals
If the above metrics do not meet your campaign goals (you did set S.M.A.R.T. goals for this campaign, right?), take some time to assess why not. Perhaps your title wasn’t interesting enough? Maybe you forgot to personalize the email? Maybe you need to run some A/B tests to ascertain the problem? Learn from these issues and send more email. . . and keep learning.
Hot tips for using images in emails
Google no longer blocks images in emails, but a recent study shows that 43% of Gmail users read email without turning images on. Outlook and Yahoo both still have images “turned off” by default, so you need to optimize for image-off viewing as many subscribers aren’t downloading your images. Also, be sure to use ALT text for your email images and never put message content in an image (since almost half your subscribers may not be able to see it).
Get those email campaigns on your 2015 marketing calendar so that you’ll have everything ready by the time each campaign is supposed to begin!
