Email Marketing Metrics: The Basic Indicators for Measuring Campaigns

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Nowadays, marketing and product promotion via email is increasingly popular and is chosen by many businesses. That is why we need to learn more about email marketing metrics in order to run email campaigns effectively and with quality. Having email marketing data across stages helps businesses grow their operations and increase profits. So what do we need to know about email marketing metrics? Let's find out together below.

What are email marketing metrics?

In 1978, the first promotional email was sent, and since then the format has become increasingly popular worldwide. Email marketing is the activity businesses carry out to advertise and provide product and service information to customers via email, with the goal of reaching and growing the number of transacting customers and improving company revenue. Email marketing metrics are the figures compiled after using electronic mail to connect with users. They can be indicators such as the number of clicks on a promotional email, or the rate of emails that failed to reach users. Compiling these figures helps make a business's sales and marketing activities better and more effective. These metrics also help businesses select the email marketing strategies that fit their operations. So how do you obtain the email marketing data your business needs? Below, SimERP introduces the basic metrics used to measure email marketing performance.

The basic metrics used to measure email marketing performance

Email click-through rate

The English term for this metric is Click Through Rate. Click Through Rate is the proportion of recipients who click on one or more links in an email they have just received.

Calculating the email click-through rate is quite simple. Just take the total number of clicks, or the total number of unique clicks, divided by the number of emails sent, and multiply by 100.

Note: you may choose either clicks or unique clicks, as long as you use it consistently across reports. For example, if in January you choose total clicks to calculate the click-through rate, then in February, March, and beyond you must also use the total clicks figure.

Example: In January, a Thailand travel service company sent 2,000 emails in total, with 1,000 unique clicks. The company's click-through rate is (1000/2000)*100 = 50%.

Conversion rate

In English, the conversion rate is the metric used to measure the number of customers who click the email and take action after reading it — for example, filling out a survey form, interacting with the business, or making a purchase.

Formula: (Number of users who took action / Number of emails successfully delivered to customers) * 100

Example: A seafood business successfully sent 1,500 emails to customers to survey how much seafood families consume in a day, and 1,000 users filled out the survey form. The conversion rate is: (1200/1500)*100 = 80%.

Bounce rate

Not every email a business sends reaches the customer's inbox. There are two main types of bounce rate: soft bounce and hard bounce. A soft bounce is a temporary issue with a valid email address — for example, a full inbox or a problem with the customer's server. The business can keep a list and try sending again later. A hard bounce results from invalid emails — closed or nonexistent addresses that will never reach the customer no matter how many times you send. Remove these addresses from your business's recipient list. Internet service providers often rely on bounce rates to judge the reputation of an email sender. If your business has too many hard bounces, it will make you look like a spammer in the eyes of the providers.

List growth rate

The list growth rate reflects whether the business's ability to reach customers via email is improving over time. You may not believe it, but statistics show that around 22.5% of a list becomes unusable after one year, for many reasons — customers blocking the business's emails, or complaining about its intrusiveness, for example. That is why you need to grow the number of recipients on your list each period.

Formula:

[(Number of new subscribers – number of unsubscribes – number of spam complaints) / number of emails on the list] * 100

Example: Company X specializes in customer care software. In February 2020, the list contained 2,000 email addresses, with 300 new subscribers and 100 unsubscribes. The list growth rate is: [(300-100)/2000]*100 = 10%.

Forwarding/sharing rate

This is the proportion of email recipients who press the "share" button to repost the email content on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., or "forward to a friend" (sharing the email content with friends).

Formula: [(Number of customer clicks on the "share" and/or "forward" button) / Number of emails sent] * 100

Example: [(500 clicks on the share/forward button) / (50,000 emails sent)] * 100 = 1%. So the customer sharing rate is 1%.

This figure may not be very large, but it is considered one of the important numbers a business should watch, because it reflects the extent to which your business creates new contacts and interactions. Things get even better when you both target customers already in your database and attract and connect with other potential individuals.

Businesses should encourage readers to share or forward emails to friends and relatives if they find the content relevant, and at the same time track how many new addresses the business gains to add to its future mailing list.

Return on investment (ROI)

In English, the term ROI (return on investment) describes how successful a project is. In email marketing metrics, ROI relates to the figures for costs incurred and revenue earned.

Formula: [(Incremental revenue – Investment cost) ÷ Investment cost] * 100

Example: (3,000 USD incremental revenue – 500 USD investment cost) ÷ 500 USD investment cost * 100 = 500% return on investment.

This is the basic formula among the many ways to calculate the ROI of email marketing campaigns, and it depends on the type of business. ROI may be the figure managers care about most, because it relates to company revenue. Will this campaign bring in high revenue, and what can be done to increase it?

Some tips for email marketing campaigns

Pay attention to subject line length

Analysts examined 1,000 emails sent by 100 leading marketers to determine the character count of subject lines. The study found that 82% of professionals send marketing emails with subject lines of 60 characters or fewer. This is unsurprising, since providers will not display the full subject line if it exceeds 60 characters.

Surveys also suggest that most subject lines are around 43.85 characters long. What does this tell us? It shows how important it is to ensure that the subject line customers receive is not too long. Remember that when people view email on their phones, they may find long subject lines uncomfortable because of the small screen size.

Email sending time

Adobe studied in more depth when office workers use email and discovered something interesting: they spend an average of about 2.5 hours updating their inbox at work — and sometimes even more time handling work-related content. In addition, most people check their email accounts before leaving for work and right after waking up. People have thus turned checking email into a habit that fits every point in the day — so you don't need to wait until after business hours to send your marketing emails.

Continuously improve the quality of your email delivery

According to Statista, the volume of emails sent and received in 2022 will keep growing — a very fast growth rate.

So what do those statistics mean for businesses? These figures show the rapid increase in the number of email users. That is a positive sign.

On the other hand, the growing volume of email can also make it harder for your business to make its emails stand out from competitors. So pay attention to the subject line, and make sure the content you send is truly relevant to the recipient. Otherwise, they will never open it.

During email marketing campaigns and results tracking, businesses need a platform to achieve high results while saving time and money. We will introduce several platforms right below.

Platforms that support email marketing and results tracking

MailChimp

MailChimp is used by more than 12 million individuals and businesses to send marketing emails and newsletters every day. Building and maintaining a high-quality email list is also an effective way for a business to increase revenue, and MailChimp helps you do exactly that by making the process easy, professional, fast, and accurate.

We have tried MailChimp on a paid plan to experience all its features; however, they do have a free plan that lets you connect with about 2,000 subscribers. We were able to create plenty of good, useful content, so we believe MailChimp is an excellent choice for your email marketing and results management needs. For newly established businesses, MailChimp's free plan is a perfect way to start. A few MailChimp features include:

• Easily test subject lines and send times with one click.

• Set up many email automation rules quickly and powerfully.

• Timewarp is an effective feature for ensuring your marketing emails land in the inbox.

MailerLite

MailerLite is another excellent email marketing tool we recommend you try. MailerLite currently serves around 300,000 businesses, freelancers, and startups worldwide. It has been around since 2010 and offers many features similar to MailChimp.

If you are just starting with email marketing, one advantage MailerLite has over MailChimp is that you get access to all the tools in the free plan, with about 1,000 subscribers per month. MailChimp, on the other hand, restricts businesses from using advanced tools not included in the free plan. In addition, MailerLite's pricing is much cheaper than MailChimp's. An email list of 2,500 subscribers costs about $30/month on MailChimp, whereas with MailerLite you pay only $10/month.

Some MailerLite features we were genuinely impressed by include:

• Reasonable, transparent pricing! If your business is on a tight budget, MailerLite is the right choice.

• Unique features such as landing pages and resend automation.

• Staff can build or design the unsubscribe page.

• Easy use of RSS to email all new posts published on your business's website.

GetResponse

This is an email marketing tool that can meet all needs, from the basics professional bloggers require to what businesses want. Even better, GetResponse regularly offers users permanent discount programs (discounts that also apply at renewal) of up to around 40%, saving users a great deal of budget.

This is also the email marketing service with the most users in Vietnam, for the following reasons:

• The first email marketing tool to support the Vietnamese language

• Allows you to sign up and trial all features for a month.

• All-in-one features (integrating many other services), such as creating landing pages or webinars, etc.

• And of course, essential features like Automation (auto-sending emails)

• Very complete and detailed statistics, records, reports, management, and user analysis

After the 30-day trial, if you decide to continue, you need to pay for the lowest plan ($15/month) to build an email marketing list of up to 1,000 addresses, with unlimited emails sent.

SendPulse

SendPulse is another option businesses can consider, because it is not only an email marketing provider but also offers push notifications, email service, and SMS. The platform's pricing is not too high compared with many other providers on the market.

If a business has fewer than 2,500 subscribers, it can send up to 15,000 marketing emails per month. Here are a few SendPulse features we found genuinely useful:

• Quickly resend to subscribed users.

• A/B testing of subject lines and content.

• Refunds if you take a different route.

HubSpot

With HubSpot's free signup policy, you can easily create beautiful, engaging newsletter emails and nurture potential customers through marketing automation campaigns.

Moreover, thanks to the simple, fast email creation process, your business can create and design unique emails — and if you don't want to design from scratch, you can choose one of the 20 ready-made templates in the HubSpot software library.

Some attractive email marketing features from HubSpot WordPress include:

• Ready-made templates in the library that you can customize with drag and drop.

• Email content customized for each recipient.

• Send more than 2,000 emails per month at no charge.

Above, SimERP has introduced you to the typical metrics that support email marketing measurement, along with some small notes on using email to promote products. We hope your business will grow and succeed in this activity.

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