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Unleashing the Power of Email Testing: The Metrics Marketers Need to Know

For email marketers, success hinges on the ability to measure, analyze and optimize campaigns effectively. Being a tech-savvy marketer entails that you have at least a base of marketing knowledge when it comes to metrics — otherwise, how would you track the overall performance of your marketing efforts?

Marketing metrics are the quantitative measurements marketers use to assess the performance and impact of their marketing efforts. By tracking and analyzing these metrics, brands can gain insight into the effectiveness of their marketing strategies, while identifying areas for improvement, and making data-driven decisions to drive growth and increase the overall ROI.

The Need-to-Know Metrics

Marketing metrics encompass a wide range of key performance indicators (KPIs) that help evaluate various aspects of marketing activities. There are well over a dozen email marketing metrics to track, but we’ll cover only some of the most fundamental here.

Open rate: An email open rate is the total percentage of subscribers that took the time to click and open your email campaign. The following formula can help you find this percentage: Open rate = (emails opened ÷ emails delivered) × 100

Click-through rate (CTR): An email click-through rate is how many people clicked on a given call-to-action, hyperlink image or video within a particular email. The following formula can help you find this percentage: CTR = (unique clicks ÷ emails delivered) × 100

Unsubscribe rate: An email’s unsubscribe rate is the percentage of subscribers that choose to opt out of receiving any further emails. An email’s unsubscribe rate can be found using the following formula: Unsubscribe rate = total # of unsubscribes ÷ emails delivered) × 100

Click-to-open rate (CTOR): While this may sound like your open rate, it is very different. The click-to-open rate is the comparison of unique clicks and unique opens. The formula to find this percentage is: CTOR = (# of unique clicks ÷ # of unique opens) × 100

Bounce rate: The bounce rate is known as the percentage of emails that are returned as a result of a delivery failure. It can be the result of either a hard bounce or a soft bounce. A hard bounce is an email that has failed to be delivered for reasons such as an invalid address, while a soft bounce is an email that has failed to be delivered for reasons such as a full inbox or a file being too large. To find your bounce rate, you can use the following formula: Bounce rate = (total # of bounced emails ÷ total # of sent emails) × 100

Spam rate: The spam rate is the percentage of emails that have been marketed as “spam” or otherwise unsolicited. These messages can be marked as spam by not only the receiver but by an email client. To calculate your spam rate, you can use the following formula: Spam rate = (spam rates received ÷ emails delivered) × 100

Overall list growth: While your email tracking tools may provide you with insight into how many people have subscribed or unsubscribed, these data points alone don’t tell the whole story about the rate at which your list is growing. To get this number, you must complete a simple equation: (Number of New Subscribers – Number of Unsubscribes) / Total Number of Addresses on List.

Once you have that number, multiply it by 100, and you’ll have your list growth rate. Don’t be discouraged if it’s low. Simply focus on list-building techniques, loyalty strategy, and better content until the metric begins going up.

Return on investment (ROI): There’s a simple formula to follow to see how much money a given campaign has made. Take the money made from a campaign minus the money spent to execute it. Then divide that number by the money invested into it, and finally multiply the quotient by 100. This provides a look at how much return your campaign has generated and may reveal whether it’s worth it to keep going. You can follow this simple formula: (Total Profit – Total Budget / Investment) x 100

Start tracking your KPIs today

By regularly monitoring and analyzing your marketing metrics, you can identify trends, better understand customer behavior and determine the channels and strategies that drive the best results. With this knowledge, you can optimize your marketing efforts, allocate resources effectively and align your strategies with brand objectives.

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