Measuring the Results of an Email Campaign

Measuring is a key aspect of any marketing effort to ensure you are using your resources in the most efficient manner. Luckily, most mass email providers provide detailed metrics about each campaign you send. Below are the most important email metrics and what they mean.

Important note: Many metrics have a variation of “unique” or “total”. In the majority of instances, we are interested in the “unique” metric, not total. For example: If an email campaign was only opened once by 100 people, the unique opens would be 100 and the total opens would be 100. If the same campaign was opened twice by 100 people, the unique opens would be 100 and the total opens would be 200. When multiple metrics are compared against each other, the unique metric should be used.

Open Rate

Open Rate, which is expressed as a percentage, is the amount of people who opened your email (unique opens), relative to the amount of people it was sent to (total sends). This metric is most useful when determining the efficacy of your subject line and pre header. Even if the recipient likes you, if the subject/preheader does not interest them, they will not open it. This metric is also affected by the frequency of your campaigns. If the recipient believes you are sending too many or too few emails, they will stop opening them.

Open Rate = Unique Opens ÷ Total sends

What is a good open rate?

Click Rate / Click Through Rate (CTR)

Click rate is a measure of how many unique individuals clicked on your email (unique clicks) relative to the amount of total emails sent (total sends).

Click Rate = Unique Clicks ÷ Total Sends

Click through rate (CTR) is a measure of how many individuals clicked on your email (unique clicks) relative to the amount of people who opened your email (Unique Opens).

CTR = Unique Clicks ÷ Unique opens

CTR (and to a lesser extent Click Rate) is the most useful metric provided by your email service and is an indicator of how engaging your content is. Remember, a good subject line gets people to open the email, and engaging content gets people to click on the email.

What is a good open rate?

Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate is how many people completed the desired action of the campaign relative to how many emails were sent. Your email’s conversion rate is the most important metric when gauging the efficacy of a campaign and it will not be provided by the email service. The email service can’t provide it for two reasons; they do not track what the people who click on your email do after they leave the email, and they do not know the overall goal of your campaign.

For example: If the goal of your campaign is to convince potential customers to purchase a good or service, you would divide the number of purchasers by the total amount of emails delivered.

Conversion rate = # of people who completed your desired action ÷ the amount of emails delivered.

What is a good conversion rate?

Bounce Rate

An email bounces when it cannot be delivered. These are distinguished as “soft” or “hard” bounces. A high bounce rate will negatively affect all of the metrics above, as well as your bottom line. Your mass email service charges you based on emails sent, not delivered.

A Hard bounce occurs when an email address is not valid. Either it no longer exists, or it never existed. Sometimes users will give a fictitious email, or they misspell it. This also occurs frequently with purchased email lists. Most mass email services automatically blacklist any hard bounces and will prevent you from sending to that address in the future.

A Soft bounce occurs when the recipient’s mailbox is full, or their email service is down, or a whole host of other random issues. It is usually not permanent; however, it is extremely important to watch this number as every soft bounce is a wasted email that you paid for.

“By the way, if your email lands in the recipient’s junk/spam it will count as delivered, not bounced.”

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a very useful strategy to narrow down what does and does not work on your campaigns so you can iterate more effective campaigns. A/B testing means sending two slightly different versions of an email (an “A” version and a “B” version) to a random sampling of your email list.

For example: Lets say you have an email list of 10,000 people, but you can’t decide between two subject lines…send both! Send subject line A to 1,000 people on that list (randomly choose the people), send subject line B to another 1,000 randomly chosen people and then compare the results. Let the data choose for you and send the subject line with the best result to the remaining 8,000 people.

In order to A/B test effectively you want to change 1 variable in the email. It could be the subject line, or the pre-header, or even the color of the button that takes them to your website (the color does actually matter!)