by Beccy Stanley, CraikJones

One of the key benefits of email is the fact that it offers immediate, highly measurable results. Results can be analysed to evaluate myriad aspects of your campaign offering the opportunity to test alternatives, highlight potential issues and improve the ROI of your email communications.

This leaves the question – what should be measured and how will analysis of these metrics help improve future communications?

Key metrics

There are several basic metrics that should be tracked for every email campaign:

Evaluation opportunities

As well as monitoring these key metrics against benchmarks (more on this later) and previous campaign performance, you can, through testing, evaluate individual aspects of your campaign such as:

Campaign targeting

• Monitoring key stats for different audience segments e.g. do customers respond better to certain messages than prospects?

Campaign timings

• Do emails perform better when sent at a particular time or on a specific day of the week?

Message content

• Effectiveness of ‘From’ address and subject line. Does changing these e.g. including company name in subject line, increase open rates?
• Preview pane optimisation. Does increasing message clarity in the prime real estate displayed in a preview pane increase open rates?
• What recipients are interested in – what are they clicking on and where are those links located within the message?

Message relevance

• Recipient engagement – monitor open
• click and unsubscribe rates over time to guage how emails are being received by the audience – do they open and click more for certain types of messages and is this the same for different target segments?

Metrics as a diagnostic tool

As well as demonstrating campaign success or where improvements can be made, email delivery metrics also work as a diagnostic tool highlighting potential delivery issues.

Data hygiene

Any drop in delivery rate is cause for concern. While 100% delivery is rarely achievable, rates should be monitored to ensure deactivated / bad email addresses are deleted to avoid getting trapped in ISP ‘honey-traps’ (deactivated emails taken over by ISPs to identify spammers).

ISP management

A significant drop in delivery rates can also signify that emails are being blocked by ISPs. Action should be taken immediately to address this and avoid ‘blacklisting’ – a blanket ban for all emails sent from a specific IP address to that ISP which can devastate an email campaign.

Recipient email fatigue

Falling open and click through rates and rising unsubscribe rates can be indicative of recipients tiring of emails for whatever reason. Include an option for unsubscribing recipients to explain why they no longer want to receive emails to help understand and quantify any issues, and consider reactivation emails to those who no longer open messages to reinvigorate them into an active recipient.

Industry benchmarks – and a word of warning

Given the metrics that email generates and the speed in which it does this, it is understandable that email marketers are anxious to review their results against industry standards such as those found at EmailLabs and the DMA.

These provide at least a stake in the ground when launching an email marketing programme and are also beneficial when reviewing trends over time e.g. a decline in your open rates mirrored in benchmarks indicates a larger industry issue, not necessarily a problem with your specific email.

However, a note of caution. While these benchmarks may be a good starting point, heavy reliance should not be made upon them to determine campaign success.

There are many different types of email and each has it’s own objectives and definition of success e.g. an offer based acquisition email may be focused on generating high volumes of clicks and conversion to sale whereas a regular enewsletter may be more concerned with simply keeping recipients engaged with the brand so it is front of mind when they are again in market.

The metrics of these 2 types of campaigns may differ wildly but the emails themselves may prove equally successful in their own right. These nuances are unlikely to be reflected in standard industry benchmarks to allow for direct comparison with your own results.

In short, use them as a very general guide and to monitor overall industry trends, but develop your own benchmarks based on your ongoing email marketing programme to monitor success specific to your business and goals for the programme.

Email metrics as part of overall campaign evaluation

As mentioned previously, email can be a very powerful tool, but is also only one part of your marketing mix. To establish its true success, you should ensure that these results are combined with relevant reports from other areas of the customer journey. Website metrics, for example, as well as any uplift it may have provided to other channels such as offline DM. Only then can you determine emails true ROI to your business.