Five Most Common Types of Email Marketing Data Always Worth Tracking

Email marketing has rightfully taken the top place as the most effective way of digital marketing. Did you know that each dollar you spend on email marketing actually generates $38 in return? This is just one among various amazing data on how effective email marketing campaigns can be. By becoming more familiar with the data, you’ll be able to reach your goals faster and significantly improve your company’s performance. Most of the existing email marketing services have quite a simple metrics for understanding valuable email marketing data. It goes without saying that each business has unique marketing goals that should be taken into consideration when examining particular marketing data. However, these five types of data are always important no matter what business you’re into. Let’s check them out.

Open Rate

Email marketing campaigns are extremely effective at promoting your business in front of a large number of potential customers. Nowadays, even though there are many different social media that directly connects you with the audience, good email marketing campaigns still get the highest number of subscribers. Check out the results of this survey:

• brands on Twitter usually reach around 4% of the targeted audience;
• in 2016, the effectiveness of Facebook business pages fell to 6%;
• the average email open rate is around 20%, depending on the industry.

Bear in mind that this is only an average open rate and that you can improve it even more. Effective subject lines not only attract more potential consumers but also keep the existing ones interested in what you have to say. By writing a more catchy subject line, while avoiding spam trigger words and phrases, you also make sure your emails don’t end up caught by the spam filter. Furthermore, you should optimize the time for sending your email campaigns, as it gives your campaign a more professional appeal.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the total percentage of your email recipients who opened an email, clicked on the link and completed the desired action (e.g. to download a resource, buy a product, sign up for an event, etc.). In other words, this rate tells you how successful your email marketing has been and if you’re reaching your goals. In order to measure the conversion rate, you need to integrate your email service with your web analytics. Start by creating unique tracking URLs for all your email links. Also, your email and website should be hosted by the same company.

Click-to-Open Rate

CTOR (click-to-open-rate) is an excellent metric you can use to measure how effective your email content is. The click-to-open-rate shows the number of people who actually opened the email you sent them and clicked on a link within it. You can get more useful data by using CTOR than by focusing on the CTR (click-through-rate), as the CTR only shows the number of people who received your email and clicked on the link.
The CTOR can be calculated quite easily if the analytical section of your email service doesn’t include it:

Click-to-open rate = unique clicks / unique opens × 100
Overall ROI
Your ROI (return on investment) can be calculated in different ways, one of the most common being:
($ in additional sales – $ invested in the campaign) / $ invested in the campaign × 100

The best way to present the value of email marketing is to show what impact it has on the bottom line. You need to track ROI in order to see which periods during the year are the most profitable and why. This will help you make better and faster decisions concerning how, when and to what extent you should use email marketing in the future. You need to pay attention to the information regarding when your ROI was highest, since this will show you how to organize email marketing campaigns in order to get best possible results.

List Growth Rate

For a successful email marketing campaign, it’s of utmost importance to track your subscriber’s list growth and loss. You, of course, want this list to constantly grow. There are various strategies you can use in order to attract more subscribers and keep them interested in upcoming emails: send a newsletter with relevant content on a regular basis, write catchy subject lines and learn how the email spam filtering systems work. Also, you need to bear in mind that email lists usually decay by almost 23% each year and that this is quite normal as people tend to change their email addresses. This is yet another reason you need to work hard on growing and tracking your subscriber list at all times.

Final Words

Using these five metrics while experimenting with email marketing will slowly but surely help you improve your ROI. In addition, you can experiment a little bit with A/B testing and email segmentation. Step by step, you’ll see that analyzing email marketing data can be fun, as well as efficient. So, now when you know why, there’s no time to waste. Do your best and the results will surely be greater than you expect!

Guest article written by: Amy Chapman – A writer with a degree in marketing. Interested in digital marketing, social media, start-ups and latest trends.