Once you’ve sent your email campaign, it’s normal to look at your statistics even though the only relevant information you’ll be able to get is whether it has been delivered and whether anyone’s opened it yet.
Let’s take a detailed look at analyzing your campaign’s performance and what all of those different figures mean!
Analyze Email Performance
Check the Open Rate
With email campaigns, this is one of the most commonly scrutinized metrics. It mainly measures the success of your subject line and how your recipients engage with your communications.
Open rate is measured by dividing the number of emails opened by the number of emails delivered: % open = number of opens/number of emails delivered.
Be aware that certain platforms differentiate between the unique open rate (or the number of openers) and total opens (which considers the same subscriber opening an email several times).
Check the Click Rate
The click rate measures an email’s overall performance: strength of subject line, target engagement, relevance, and effectiveness of the message.
You calculate this rate by dividing the number of clicks by the number of emails delivered: % click = the number of clickers/number of emails delivered.
Again, be mindful of the difference between unique clicks and total clicks. While this second figure might be notable, it’s the first that you should focus on.
Check the Click-to-Open Rate
Often known as the CTO, this is an excellent indicator of email performance.
It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of opens: % CTO = the number of clicks/number of opens.
Again, note the difference between unique opens, clicks, and total opens and clicks.
Other Email KPIs
You’ll use these three metrics to judge the pure performance of your email, but there are other useful KPIs. In part 5 of this course, we’ll look at deliverability metrics (bounces, spam complaints, destination, etc.). In the meantime, here are a few other metrics that might be of interest to you.
Create a Heat Maps
The idea is to get a visual representation of the areas in your emails that triggered the most clicks.
In the above email, you can see that 11 links have attracted clicks from readers - and some are more popular than others - especially that fourth image and its associated text.
Heat maps give you a better understanding of how your clickers behave, helping you plan how you can optimize.
Check the Delivery Environment
Emails have gone mobile! According to numerous studies, mobile opens regularly account for 85% of an email’s opens. Be aware of these stats to optimize your email design and HTML to suit how your subscribers read your emails.
Except for Gmail, you can find out the type of device used to open your email, the name of the email client or browser, and, in some instances, the email client version.
Use Filters
Another way of working with opens, clicks, and click-to-open rates is to analyze them using filters, allowing you to check how your messages performed with different audiences.
Let’s return to the airline example. It might be interesting to compare the previous campaign results promoting a new destination to different audiences:
Long-haul vs. short-haul travelers .
Those living in big cities vs. more rural settings.
Type of family unit (young with no children vs. with children vs. elderly, etc.).
In this way, you can check your target and message content. If your comparison shows there aren’t big performance differences, there’s no need to differentiate the targets. However, if you realize that city-dwellers have outperformed other segments, you’ll need to draw lessons from this for future campaigns. Varying the content by home location might produce better results!
Measure Conversion
You have opens and clicks, but then anything after that – strictly speaking – leaves the realm of email because clicks take the reader somewhere else. The idea is to measure the action you’re hoping to elicit, such as:
Making appointments.
Placing orders.
Downloading a catalog.
But this doesn’t mean that conversion rates are unimportant - far from it. Think back to your campaign goals - getting your recipients to make a purchase may be the most important goal, so it’s the most critical thing to measure!
The conversion rate is most often measured by: = number of actions completed/number of emails delivered.
Compare Your Performance to the Competition
As you’ve already learned, the margin for what constitutes a good result can be pretty broad. For example, average open rates might be anywhere between 12% and 40% for most companies.
It might be helpful to compare your performance to your competition to understand just how well (or poorly) you’re doing.
Here are a few helpful studies:
Sendgrid’s Global Email Engagement Benchmarks for 2019
Acoustic’s 2019 Marketing Benchmark Report
Let’s Recap!
Monitor your basic metrics: open rate, click rate, and click-to-open rate.
Take a look at a heat map of your emails to understand click behavior.
Work out the format in which your emails are read.
Move beyond the realm of email metrics and work out your conversion rate.
Research market stats!
Next chapter, we’ll focus on the dissatisfaction rate. You’ll use this to understand how satisfied your subscribers are with your campaigns.
