It’s well known in digital marketing land that, although email is one of the oldest e-marketing channels out there [if you call 44 old], it’s still an extremely cost-effective way to generate revenue. If you want your dollar to make an impact for your business, you can’t go far wrong with EDMS…or can you?
Although email marketing has the potential to reel in conversions and high revenue, there are so many ways to get it wrong. From poor design to bad timing, EDMs won’t serve your business or your customers if they’re created without strategy. Part of that strategy means delving into your EDM analytics in order to improve. But which EDM metrics should you be looking at?
The current state of email marketing
Global email direct marketing [EDM] revenue is continuously rising, with some reports putting the figure at $9.6 billion USD [up from $7.5 billion in 2020]. By 2027, that figure is expected to reach a crazy $17.9 billion!
With 4 billion daily users, and smartphone users preferring to receive brand communications via email, it’s obvious that leaving EDM out of your digital marketing strategy essentially means opting out of conversions.
Tracking and analysing EDM metrics
Evaluating your email marketing performance is the best way to get to know your audience, figure out what works and create a more robust digital marketing strategy. Your email marketing metric analysis should be included in your marketing campaign from the very beginning. Here’s what you need to look at:
- Open rate: the number of emails you’ve sent out versus the number that were opened.
- Click rate: the percentage of recipients who clicked a link in your email.
- Bounce rate: the number of emails that were rejected by the server.
- List growth rate: the rate at which your email list is growing [or shrinking].
- Unsubscribe: how many people have opted out of receiving your emails.
- Device: which device [like mobile or desktop] thay customer viewed the email on.
- Spam score: the rate at which the person has marked your email as spam.
- Conversion rate: the percentage of customers who clicked on a link that lead to a purchase or another desired action [such as a download].
- Overall ROI: the return on investment for your email campaign.
Turning metrics into real improvements
So, you’ve got an impressive click rate, a low unsubscribe score and all of your customers opened your last email on a mobile device. Now what do you do with that information? Answer: you use it optimise your future campaigns.
Your chosen email platform should report on your chosen metrics, but the best analysis is still a human, expert digital marketer. Why? Because a digital marketing professional will take a look at your wider business goals, how your email campaigns fit into your overall digital strategy and come up with creative, well-informed ways for you to make improvements. Whereas one email stat [like sky-high click rates on one link over others] might help one business hit their KPIs, for another it could be irrelevant or even undesirable.
Test, test and test some more
Just like with search engine marketing [SEM], social media marketing and whatever other campaigns you’ve got running, testing your improvements is key. You can use A/B testing to figure out which call to action [CTA] is more appealing to their audience, which subject lines generate the most opens and whether one day of the week outperforms another. Here are some other EDM A/B testing ideas:
- Does sending an email in the morning or evening get the most opens?
- Do GIFs or static images generate the most clicks?
- Does using the customer’s name lead to higher unsubscribe rates than not using it?
Need a hand wrangling your EDM metrics?
As a digital marketing agency, we’ve sent thousands of email sequences on behalf of our clients and then strategically analysed the results to help them improve. The best part is that your EDM stats don’t just speak to how effective your emails are – they can reveal audience behaviour patterns to help you optimise your entire digital marketing strategy.
Get in touch with the award-winning 3 Phase Marketing team for a no-obligation chat about growing your business using effective digital marketing.
