B2B marketing campaigns are highly dependent on email marketing. However, simply sending the emails to your contact list, no matter how good the content is, would rarely deliver the desired result your content deserves. Leveraging the huge amount of data that your email campaigns generate, you can gain data-driven insights to enhance your email campaign results significantly.
In this post, we are going to explain the ins and outs of email analytics and how it can boost your marketing campaign.
Table of contents
Why do emails still matter?
Emails facilitate establishing uninterrupted and seamless communication all through the buyers’ journey. It enables you to cultivate strong relationships not only with your customers but also with the prospects and even the past customers by directly reaching their inboxes at a convenient time. This is the reason why emails are still popular, especially among B2B marketers. The following graph shows an estimate of the consistent increase in the number of email users all over the world:
Emails when maneuvered with data-driven analytics and correct messaging are one of the most effective marketing channels.
Related Reading; 8 factors that drive digital marketing success
What is email Analytics?
Email Analytics is a data-driven approach that constitutes a set of metrics and KPIs to determine how the subscribers interact with an email campaign. Based on the significant amount of data obtained from the analytics, marketers can improve their email marketing campaigns by determining quantitative as well as qualitative aspects of user engagement, behavioral pattern, content impact, etc.
All of this information allows better segmentation of subscribers who are then communicated in a personalized manner, thus, enhancing customer acquisition and retention. Segmented campaigns improve revenue by 760%.
The following 3 graphs show the importance of email marketing. The first one shows the various email marketing metrics based on the usage by marketers. The second one depicts effective email tactics. And the third one displays the importance of email marketing to increase ROI.
Points to consider before leveraging email Analytics
In this section, we will elaborate on the things you should keep in mind or, rather, the questions you must ask yourself before leveraging email analytics.
What is the goal of your email marketing?
One of the email marketing mistakes that marketers often make is creating an email marketing campaign without having clear goals in the mind. So, before crafting your email campaign, think and mandatorily find the answer to the question: What do you want to accomplish with your marketing efforts? Increase subscribers? Generate leads? Or convert leads into customers?
Another mistake that marketers make is to expect every email to bring revenue. Each campaign is unique based on the goal it wants to achieve. For example, you may send an email to re-engage with your customer with purchasing being on the back-burner happening, maybe, later in the future.
What are the KPIs you must focus on increasing and/or decreasing?
Once you have defined your goals, you need to form strategies to achieve the goals. You can devise strategies with the help of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and email marketing metrics. We have discussed 7 marketing metrics in the subsequent section. The success of your email marketing relies on simply increasing the positive KPIs, like open rate, conversion rate, etc., and minimizing the negative KPIs, like unsubscribe rate, spam complaints, bounce, etc.
How will you track the metrics?
Right from Google Analytics to CRMs, and other Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) or simple marketing automation solutions, there are several ways in which you can track the various metrics automatically. It is, however, also useful to know how to calculate the KPIs manually. For instance, Deliverability Rate is calculated manually as follows:
Deliverability Rate = (Delivered Emails/Total Emails Sent)*100
Manually measuring the metrics sometimes will allow you to understand your campaign better and give you the confidence of double-checking before you proceed.
How regularly will you evaluate the metrics?
Different metrics enable you to achieve different goals. Likewise, the frequencies to calculate these metrics are also different. Some of them, like open rate and bounce rate, must be checked daily. Click-through rates and spam complaints can be checked weekly. And, Open per customer and revenue per customer must be checked once a month.
Related reading; 10 Email Marketing Strategies
How will you prioritize your improvements?
One of the intimidating features of analytics is the sheer volume of information. There are so many indicators that you might end up totally overwhelmed regarding how to prioritize your improvements. It is advisable to start from the bottom of the funnel where your customers reside through to the top where there are prospects.
To have exact answers to the preceding questions, you must know what are the most important KPIs and metrics. And that is what we are going to explain next.
Email Marketing metrics & KPIs, and how to use them?
The following graph shows the most commonly used email marketing metrics used in 2020 by marketers in all the industries:
In this section, we will describe 7 of the email marketing metrics, what are they? And, how to leverage them to enhance the B2B marketing campaign? These 7 metrics are:
Deliverability Rate
The foundation stone of your email marketing campaign is laid down by email delivery. The deliverability rate is calculated as follows:
Deliverability Rate = {(Number of emails sent – Number of emails bounced) ÷ (Number of emails sent)} x 100
How to use it:
A higher delivery rate signifies your list to be clean. In case of a lower delivery rate, the first thing to do is to verify your list. In some cases, however, a marketer may be blocked by the Internet Service Provider (ISP), especially on a shared IP. Another reason for lower delivery rates is double opt-in emails or welcome programs, where a new email address enters your list.
Note: A high deliverability rate does not always signify that your emails are being delivered into the inboxes. They may be ending up in the ‘spam’ folders instead. That is why some email marketers use Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) as a KPI.
Open Rate
One of the most reliable email marketing KPIs is the open rate, which signifies the number of email recipients who open your emails. It is calculated as follows:
Open rate = {(Number of emails opened) / (Number of emails sent – Number of emails bounced)} x 100
The average open rate for all types of businesses all around the world is around 11–50% is depicted in the image below:
How to use it:
To enhance your open rates, you must focus on enhancing your email subject line. A powerful subject line has been found to result in higher open rates. For instance, sending emails with a personalized subject line including the first name of recipients will have higher open rates.
Note: Emails viewed on preview panes are recorded open even if they aren’t actually opened. Also, text-only emails will never be counted open, even if they are opened.
Click-Through Rate
Your email is delivered and opened by the recipient. Next comes the interaction of the recipient with one or more resources in the email. In simple words, whether the user really consumed the content or just opened it, and then closed it immediately after having a mere glance.
Click-through rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links that the email contains. It is calculated as follows:
CTR = {(number of emails clicked / number of emails delivered) x 100}
The average CTR for most of the campaigns falls between 2.5-4%.
How to use it:
To increase the CTR of your campaign, you must include appropriate links at appropriate places throughout your email. The call-to-action button, in particular, must be eye-catching for the recipients to click on and subscribe to your offer.
Note: Clicking on the unsubscribe link is a bad click and must be kept segregated from the click on resourceful links.
Unsubscribe Rate
Some of your recipients might decide to withdraw themselves from being your audience. This is measured by the unsubscriber rate, which is the percentage of recipients from your list who unsubscribe after they receive or open your email. It is calculated as follows:
Unsubscribe rate = {(number of unsubscribes / number of emails delivered) x 100}
The unsubscriber rate is recommended to be below 0.5%.
How to use it:
Every business is in a quest to create a list of engaged users. Those who are voluntarily withdrawing by unsubscribing must be struck off from the list. Also, you must keep a vigilant eye on your unsubscriber rate. A sudden increase, especially after a change in your approach like template redesign or sending reschedule, must be noted down.
Note: Those who unsubscribe have not reported your email as spam. This can simply mean that they might be on the wrong list.
Bounce Rate
It is practically impossible for all of your emails to hit the right inboxes. Some are bound to be lost in oblivion! This is calculated by bounce rate, which is the percentage of subscribers’ email addresses that did not receive the intended email. Bounce rate is calculated as follows:
Bounce rate = {(number of emails bounced / number of emails sent) x 100}
Bounce rate are of two types:
Soft bounces are due to temporary problems, like server malfunction.
Hard bounces are due to incorrect or non-existent email addresses.
How to use it:
It is advisable to pay extra attention to hard bounces since they directly reflect upon the quality of your email list. In other words, it is high time that you perform data cleansing on your email list.
You must also leverage double opt-in or any other email confirmation method to verify the email addresses.
Note: Remove the hard bounced email addresses from your list ASAP because they are never going to work.
Spam Rate
Some of your recipients might label your emails as spam. This is calculated with spam rate, which is the percentage of your emails reported as spam. It is calculated as follows:
Spam rate = {(number of spam complaints / number of emails delivered) x 100}
If the spam rate is more than 0.1%, you must be alarmed because your email service provider may block you if this rate gets too high.
How to use it:
Spam complaints are usually made if your recipient is offended or irritated, or if they cannot locate the unsubscribe link. For the first case, you might reconsider your strategies, while for the latter, you must keep the unsubscribe link simple and easily visible.
Note: You must look at spam rate and unsubscribe rate in combination because some of your recipients do not want to take the trouble to unsubscribe, and simply report the email as spam.
Conversion Rate
And finally the word that is every marketer’s dream come true: conversion!
Conversion rate signifies the percentage of your recipients who have opened your email, clicked on the link, and have taken the desired action like procuring a product or service, or registering for a demo, or downloading a pdf. It is calculated as follows:
Conversion rate = (Number of people who completed the desired action ÷ Number of total emails delivered) x 100
How to use it:
The goals may be different for the email marketing campaigns. When you are measuring conversion rate, knowing why you are measuring is as important as knowing what you are measuring.
Note: Between the goal and conversion lies the call-to-action (CTA). So try to keep the CTA clear and powerful to keep your conversion rate healthy.
Wrapping it up
Emails aren’t dead, and won’t be anytime soon. To keep your emails focused and your messages targeted to the right ears, you must leverage email analytics and let the numbers decide your strategy. Having a clear grasp of the email marketing metrics, and what you need to know before and after utilizing them has been the topic of our discussion. It will enable you to devise effective plans for better campaign results. The list of metrics we have enumerated are definitely not exhaustive, but authoritative enough to motivate you to leverage email analytics to enhance your campaigns.
Finally, have patience and give time to your campaigns. Observe, then apply. And keep iterating the process to keep improving. Do not expect a miracle to happen only after 1-2 campaigns. Go through various resources and learn about the recent industry transformations.