4 Critical Email Metrics to Monitor

As the business world moves more on-line and email marketing becomes the norm in business, understanding your email metrics can be confusing but is also necessary in determining if your email campaigns are effective. Most email service providers (Constant contact, Aweber and Icontact) provide you with statistics that allow you to track the performance of your digital marketing. There are four measurements that allow you to gain a solid understanding of the effectiveness of your campaigns, they are:

-Open Rate

Open Rate tells you if your audience found your subject line compelling enough to open up the email read your message. You have less than 3 seconds to grab the attention of your readers so your subject line has to be amazing. It has been proven that subject lines with less than 35 characters are opened more often that longer ones. According to a recent Money Mailer report, the average open rate is 12.52%.

-Click-through Rates

This metric measures the effectiveness of your ads and how many times your readers found your offer compelling enough to click through to the sales page. If you were a retailer, it would be similar to once you have drawn potential buyers to your store front, how many times did your offer compel them to walk through your doors.

-Conversion Rates

This metric is the most important one since it tells you how many people did you convert to customers. You will use this metric to track your return on investment and the actual effectiveness of your marketing campaign. If you conversion is low, try other tactics: New copy, new offer, send out different days and different times.

-Unsubscribe Rates

The Unsubscribe rate tells you how many people originally signed up to receive your emails but have decided to unsubscribe for a variety of reasons. Most often, you are either not offering them the value they expected or do not associate you with your emails. You will always have people unsubscribing from your emails, some sign up to receive a free promotion and then unsubscribe from future emails. This is common.

To obtain the best rates and to effectively use email marketing, you must commit to attracting the right potential customers to opt in to your mailing list. Once you have them on your list, you must do two things: Continue to bring value and be consistent. Decide what your core market is and continue to feed your audience your valuable content. It has been proven that you attract a higher quality of customer when you continue to educate, bring value and offer resources.