Measure the Results and Optimize your Strategy

Measure the Results and Optimize your Strategy

In order to determine whether or not your email marketing campaigns are working, you need to analyze the data from your campaigns. The marketing measures, when all is said and done, always serve to achieve a pre-defined goal, and whether or not you've achieved that goal can only be determined by using the proper KPIs (key performance indicators).  
The results that you obtain can also help you to decide whether you can expand your budget for your email marketing strategy.  
  
Also, data analysis is an essential part of being able to optimize your email marketing campaign continually. The only way that you'll be able to gauge the success of your email marketing campaign at all is if you examine and analyze the most critical measurements on a regular basis. 

Delivery Rate and Bounce Rates 

Among other measurements, email marketing tools will measure the delivery rate, as well as the bounce rate of your emails. Such two measures are complementary to each other and rely on different factors such as technical conditions and credibility of the sender. If you want a successful campaign, the bounce rate of your emails should always be less than one percent. If your bounce rates are higher than this, then you'll need to do some maintenance on your list, and determine which email addresses are no longer valid and remove them from the email list. 

Open Rate 

The refers to the percentage of subscribers who open the emails you send to them. This figure can be based either on the total number of emails opened, or the number of recipients who opened the email. The latter number is more important and is regarded as a "unique open rate." 

Click Rate 

The click rate is the combination of the recipients clicking on at least one link in an email and the number of emails sent. This test can be used to assess if your email copy and call-to-actions are sufficiently persuasive to get users to act. This is the most important measure for you in your email marketing campaign to keep track of.

Click-to-Open Rate 

This measurement is the ratio of the number of unique clicks to the number of unique opens. The reference value, in this case, is not based on the total number of recipients, but rather the number of recipients who opened the email.  

If your click-to-open rates (CTOR) are small, it may mean that the email content does not meet the expectations of its subject line. It means that the email was opened by a large number of your subscribers, but considered the email content uninteresting and did not click on any of the links.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is the number of recipients at the end of the process who performed the desired action. This could be all about buying a product, downloading an e-book, or signing up for a webinar.
You can use this measurement to determine the final success of your email marketing campaign.  

Unsubscribe Rate 

It is quite reasonable with email subscribers to unsubscribe to an email list because they don't want to get news from the company anymore. The unsubscribe rate defines the unsubscribe ratio to the total number of sent emails. For each mailing, you should typically expect to have a cancelation rate of approximately 0.25 to 0.50 percent. As stated previously, it is essential that you include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in every email and to implement an unsubscribe process that is clean and simple. 

Email List growth rate 

The growth rate of the email list reflects the net increase in the number of email subscribers over a given period of time. Accordingly, this value is negative when a mailing list is shrinking.

Spam Complaint Rate 

This measurement shows how many delivered emails were marked as spam. Your spam complaint rate shouldn’t go higher than 0.3 percent. Anything higher than that and you can expect email providers to institute penalties when you try to deliver future emails.  

Return on Investment 

The return on investment (ROI) is the financial formula used to calculate a company strategy's return. This calculation compares the gain to the capital invested. When used in email marketing, the term refers to the ratio of the costs required for an email marketing measure to the revenue generated by it. 

Defining The Goals 

You need to decide the goals of your email marketing and what you are going to calculate before you send your first emails and start reviewing the results. You can set goals such as gaining new clients, increasing revenue, or raising brand awareness, or a combination of goals. For identify specific goals, you will also need to set the correct KPIs.

Measures such as the rate of clicking, the rate of transfer, and the rate of growth of the email list should always be on the metrics list. Nonetheless, depending on the goals you want to accomplish, you also need to define and track the correct KPIs. Of example, if your aim is to attract more subscribers, you need to concentrate on the level of email growth as well as the rate of subscription/unsubscription. 

If your number one objective is to increase revenue, you need to concentrate on the conversion rate.

Continuous Optimization

It is a never-ending process to analyze the data associated with your email marketing campaigns. These should be used to identify potential areas for improvement in your email marketing campaigns and should flow into your corresponding campaign planning immediately.

You will need to compare the measurement results that are achieved by your different email campaigns to get a better sense of what did and didn't work. 

Try different subject lines as you refine your email marketing plan, send emails at different times, position different call-to-action buttons, and so on until you find a working formula. When you discover that the results of precise tests are not acceptable, then you need to do some research and find out the cause so that you can better refine your emails to get the results you want.