This blog will walk you through the essential email analytics you should be paying attention to. But of course, you knew that wouldn’t be all. I can’t just tell you what’s essential without telling you how to take these important things and make them better for your business. Come on now, what kind of marketing guy would I be if I did that. 

There are some things you should know before starting your email marketing, though. First, you want to be sure that you at least have a group of very engaged customers. Whether they be engaging with content on your site or engaging with you on social media, it’s also a good idea to have a steady flow of traffic to your site. 

If you don’t have the things above, you may focus on that instead of email marketing. But, I’m not going to leave you hanging. Instead, you can check out these articles to help you improve those other channels of your business. 

For those of you who have one or more of the previously mentioned, let’s jump into your email marketing analytics that will help make all the difference in your bottom line.

Open Rate

Your open rate is the percentage of opens from the total number of emails sent. 

It looks like this: 

Opens / Total Email Sent = Open Rate

250 / 1000 = 25% Open Rate

You want to pay attention to your open rate as it will give you an idea of how your subscribers are engaging with your emails. You can answer some questions like, are they looking forward to receiving our emails? Are our emails relevant to our subscribers? You can get a rough idea based on your open rate. The higher the available rate, the better. 

There are a few things you can do to help increase your open rate. We'll discuss them here. 

Subject Line

Depending on the relationship with your subscribers, your subject line can make or break the performance of your email. Let's review some best practices for your email's subject line. 

For starters, you want to be engaging. In other words, play with this. Create subject lines that don't spill every single detail of what's in the email. Here you want to give your readers a taste of what's coming next. But not the whole pie. 

Depending on the type of customers you have, you may want to consider using emojis to make it more engaging. Also, having actual numbers in your subject line helps when applicable.

I recommend that your subject line be 40-50 characters. This way, it won't be truncated in the receiver's inbox. Finally, you also have the preview line. The preview line presents you with an additional opportunity to hook your subscribers and inspire them to open your email.

You should use your preview line to make your hook a little more juicy if the subject line didn't do enough. I recommend that you keep your preview line to 40 characters.

Optimize Your Subject Line

Now that you understand your open rate and what affects your available rate, we can discuss how to optimize your emails to get the best possible results. But, again, that's going to be done with A/B testing. 

You can A/B test your subject line. This is having two different subject lines for the same email and splitting the list of subscribers into two groups. This way, one group will receive the email with subject line A, and the other will receive the email with subject line B. 

Before you jump into creating two different subject lines, however, you want to record your hypothesis and describe your subject lines. You need to pay close attention to the style of writing here. Otherwise, you're not testing something specific. 

For example, You can have one Subject line that addresses a problem your customers have and one subject line that addresses the benefits of your product or service. You want to be sure that you're thinking in these terms when crafting your copy. 

Here are a few examples of the style of subject lines I use: 

Motivation - What motivates your customers to buy?

Pain Points - What problems are your customer-facing? 

Benefits - What are the benefits of your product or service? 

Desires - What is the desired outcome your customer is searching for? 

When you write to fit a particular style, you're able to pinpoint what your subscribers respond to. This will help in the long run as your subject lines will naturally become in tune with your subscriber base. 

Clickthrough Rate

There are two formulas you can use to define your click-through rates. First, there is Click to open and click-through rate. It sounds similar, but there is one key difference. 

First, your click-through rate considers the total number of subscribers who receive your email. The formula looks like this: 

( Unique # of Clicks / Total Sent ) X 100 = Click Through Rate 

( 25 / 1000 ) X 100 = 2.5%

This is one formula we’re going to be using mainly, as many email marketing service providers use this formula when showcasing your email analytics. Still, let’s have a look at the click to open rate formula as well. 

(Unique # of Clicks / Unique # of Opens ) X 100 = Click to Open Rate

( 25 / 800 ) X 100 = 3.1%

Using the Click to Open Rate inflates your metrics. However, you can still use this to understand how relevant your email content is to your subscribers. In addition, it is a more accurate measure since you’re calculating for the people who have seen your email. Rather than accounting for all the people who received your email, some of them did not see it. 

Your goal is to aim for a Click-through rate of at least 2% - 5% depending on your industry. Here’s the latest benchmark report from Campaign Monitor. 

Optimize Your Click-Through Rate 

As I do for many of my clients, like TauriGum, a company that sells Kosher CBD Gummies, and Wholesale Sock Deals, an online general wholesaler, I A/B test their email campaigns and email flows. 

There is the matter of segmentation and relevance, but that is out of the scope of this article. I will get into that shortly and link to that article here. For now, we’re going to focus on the different things you can A/B test to start increasing your Click through rates. 

As you know from the previous section on email open rates, A/B testing allows you to send two different versions of the same email. Here are some test options, but test one thing at a time: 

Copywriting

Images

Wording for CTA

Color of CTA

Placement of Image

Background Color

The Offer

The list does go on. But those are some of the things you can start testing right away to start making improvements on your email analytics.

Conversion Rate

( # of Transactions / Successful Deliveries ) X 100 = Conversion Rate

( 30 / 1500 ) X 100 = 2%

Your conversion rate is an important metric you want to pay attention to when it comes to your email marketing. The truth is, it's the defining element. 

Here's a tip for helping with your conversion rate that some people may skip over.

When you're A/B testing your subject lines or CTA, you will naturally select the winner to send to the remainder of your subscribers. However, if you notice that the losing split test received more sales - you're better off sending that one to the remaining subscribers.

Next, always make sure your Call to Action is clear, links to your landing pages are working, and your content is relevant to the person receiving it. It will not only helps with conversion rates but also help with engagement.

Bounce Rate

Before I tell you how to calculate your bounce rate, I want to explain what it is. It’s different from the bounce rate you see in Google Analytics, and there are different types of bounces. Luckily, most of my clients use Klaviyo’s EMS platform, which suppresses people who bounce more than once. 

Let’s take a look at these bounces. There are hard bounces and soft bounces. 

A hard bounce usually means the email address you’re sending to doesn’t exist, or the email server has completely blocked delivery.

Next are soft bounces. Soft bounces have a longer list of reasons. So, I’ll share this list with you from MailChimp:

• Mailbox is full (over quota).

• Mailbox is not configured correctly.

• Mailbox is inactive.

• Recipient email server is down or offline.

• Recipient email server has been sent too many emails during a period of time.

• Email message is too large.

• Domain name does not exist.

• Email message blocked due to content.

• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s policies.

• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s DMARC requirements for authentication.

• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s anti-spam requirements.

• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s anti-virus requirements.

• Email message does not meet the recipient server’s sender requirements.

• Email cannot be relayed between email servers.

• Email cannot be relayed for unknown reasons.

Unsubscribe Rate

Your unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of subscribers who have opted out from receiving your emails. There are several reasons why someone would unsubscribe from your email lists, such as irrelevant content and over-sending.

Here's the formula for it: 

( Unsubscribes / Delivered Emails ) x 100 = Unsubscribe Rate

( 5 / 1000 ) x 100 = 0.5%

To avoid increasing unsubscribe rates, try segmenting your subscribers to send them more relevant content. You can also create a preferences page that asks them what kind of content they want to receive or how often they wish to receive emails from you. 

Deliverability Rate

As you know, not all of your subscribers will receive your emails. As we discussed, there are hard and soft bounces, faulty emails, and sometimes the inbox filters will not deliver your email depending on the content and your sender reputation. 

Here's the formula: 

( Delivered Emails / Total Sent ) x 100 = Deliverability Rate

( 1000 / 1100 ) x 100 = 90% 

To prevent low deliverability rates, make sure to clean your list periodically. You don't want to continue sending to people who haven't engaged with your emails in some time. The more often you send to unengaged users, the worse your sender reputation will become; this happens over time. So, you want to create a segment of engaged subscribers only to restore your open and click rates which should help your sender reputation. 

Spam Rate

Your Spam complaint rate consists of people who fall into several categories. They either have no idea why they're receiving emails from you, are frustrated with something occurring in their own life when they decide to click spam, or they're too overwhelmed with how many emails they have in their inbox from you that they feel only selecting SPAM would get rid of you. 

Ideally, you want to keep your spam rate at 0.01% to prevent diminishing your sender reputation. The best way to do this is again to avoid over-sending emails to your subscribers, send relevant content, and always clean your list out. You want to unsubscribe people who aren't engaging with your emails. 

Yes, I know, deleting emails from your EMS can be scary. But after all, the goal of email marketing is not to have the most extensive list but instead to have an engaged list. A small engaged list is more likely to drive sales for your business than a giant list of unengaged subscribers.

That concludes this blog on the top 6 email analytics you should be keeping an eye on. But, of course, if you have any questions, you're more than welcome to contact us on our contact page or live chat. 

Also, if you're an entrepreneur and looking to increase your store's revenue with email marketing, you can schedule a call with us to discuss how email marketing could help your business.