7 Important Email Marketing Statistics You Need to Succeed

You have probably been told before that email marketing is important to every business. Sending emails to well cultivated email marketing lists are the heartbeat and blood flow of most freelancing operations.  BUT… what are the important details that seems to fall through the cracks?  If you attend a “Build Your Business Through Email”-type training, you will probably be told that you need to build your list because you can sell into your list and then you win. It seems that a few steps get missed along with how to track the success of such a “winning strategy.”  The following statistics are the most important metrics to track for any successful email marketing process.

The 7 Key Metrics to Track for any Email Marketing Campaign

1. Delivery Rate – This metric counts the number of emails delivered versus the number sent (aka “the bounce rate”). This is an important metric because if you have a high rate of “undelivered” emails it could lead to spam blacklisting and bad reputations.  If you notice that this Delivery Rate percentage is decreasing you may need to process your list to purge any emails that continue to fail in the delivery. You may be surprised to learn that some people sign up for email lists with bad email addresses.
2. Unique Open Rate – It is very important that you don’t rely on the simple “open rate” metric in any email system.  Many email clients “open” every email every time the app is activated, scrolled, etc.  Plus just because a single user keeps having trouble with his email client and ends up opening the email 87 times in a row doesn’t mean that you are having a wider reach with your email blast. In the illustration above the “open rate” of this email is deceiving because it says the email was opened 5,274 times but in reality there were only 3,519 individual emails that opened the email. This metric can be increased simply by learning how to write better email subject lines in your email marketing campaign.
3. Unique Click-to-Open Rate – This metric is similar to the previous one but is WAY more important. This metric shows actually how many of your readers took action and clicked on something within your email. While the #2 metric can give you indications of how well your Email Subject Line is being received, this click-to-open metric tracks more of your call to action INSIDE the email.  If you want to increase this metric you may need to rework your content, the voice you use in the email, or even modifying the length of the email marketing campaign.
4. Conversion Rate – To be successful in tracking your email marketing blasts it is important to also track what occurs with each visitor who clicks on a link in the email once they reach your website (intended link location).  Are the visitors actually downloading the ebook? Are they purchasing the product? Are they completing the survey?  Most people use a separate website analytics program like Google Analytics to track their email marketing campaigns through funnels.
5. Unsubscribe Rate – How quickly are subscribers fleeing the ship.  This metric could be an indication that you may need to change up the content or method or frequency of your emails.  There are a number of things that can be done if this number keeps rising but the first thing you may want to consider is to send an informational email to the list describing to people who are on the list what the list is for and what benefits they may receive by being a part of the email list. By keeping the recipients of the list informed as to the nature of the emails they are receiving you can make sure that only those that WANT to receive your emails WILL receive your emails.
6. Clicks to Social Accounts – Another key area to include in your emails are links to your social accounts. Encouraging users to connect up with your social accounts will enable you to “continue the conversation” on a more regular basis.  So therefore tracking this metric is important to know if your email subscribers are wanting to stay in communication with your brand.
7. Revenue – Make sure you keep an ongoing track on how much it costs to send emails versus how much revenue is generated by email subscribers. It would be my wish that every freelancer eventually builds their email lists to the point that they HAVE to start tracking costs vs. revenue for each email list. (This would mean you all have large enough email lists that it will cost money to send to the entire list.) Remember to treat your readers well and they in turn will take care of you through your calls to action.

Once an email marketing individual is able to have consistent knowledge of each of these 7 email marketing metrics and how each one of these stats affects the success rate of any email sent you can begin looking at the wide array of additional statistics and metrics that are available when you send an email.

What are your most important metrics that you track in your email marketing?