One of the key benefits of Email Marketing is its accountability. However, understanding what key statistics actually mean and how the affect your business is crucial – here’s a quick guide to the key statistics you need to know.
Open Rate:
This statistic shows the number of unique users who’ve opened your message. Don’t settle for a system that simply counts every time anyone opens your message, you need to make sure you only see unique opens. Otherwise you don’t know whether 100 different people opened your message or the same person opened it 100 times.
What it tells you: The number of unique people that actually loaded up the images in your campaign. This could be by properly opening your message or viewing it in the preview screen of their email client.
What it doesn’t tell you: How many people actually read your email. Just because someone opened your message doesn’t mean they read it. Also, because open rate tracking relies on the user loading images, some people could have read your message but not loaded in images.
What it’s good for: Getting an overall impression of the success of your campaign compared to previous campaigns and showing you how well the subject line worked in getting people to at least preview your message.
Open Rate by Time:
This statistic shows you what time of day people are actually reading your message. Usually displayed hourly for the 48 hours after you send your campaign. The same rules apply as for opening rates as regards accuracy.
What it’s good for: Assessing whether you’re sending your email out at the optimum time. If most people read your email in the afternoon but you send it in the morning you could try sending your message later and see if that increases response.
Bounces:
These are the number of messages which didn’t make it to the subscribers’ inboxes. There are two types of bounces:
Hard Bounce – this is caused by a permanent problem with a recipient’s email account – for example that email account is no longer active or the server doesn’t exist.
Soft Bounce – this is a temporary issue with the delivering to the recipient – commonly caused by their inbox being full or a delay caused by network issues at the recipient. It usually means that the message reached the recipient’s server and was then rejected. Sometimes a soft bounce message will be successfully delivered later, or may become a hard bounce.
What it tells you: How many people definitely didn’t get your message. For regularly used lists this should remain fairly constant for each campaign as people change email addresses or go on holiday it’s normal for a proportion of messages to any given list to both hard and soft bounce.
What it doesn’t tell you: There is no set standard for defining a bounce because the recipient’s system determined your message to be spam, so you can’t get an accurate measure of this from bounce rates.
What it’s good for: If you see an unusually high bounce rate for a campaign to a list you use regularly, it’s likely that spam filters are the cause; if you see a large number of soft bounces, perhaps a lot of your list members are on holiday.
Link Clicks:
Your email marketing package should be able to show you detailed information on who clicked the links in your campaigns. Vital information you need to be able to see:
Number of unique users who clicked links: Make sure this is the number of unique people, and not just an aggregate total of all links clicked. This shows you how many people you actually got to perform an action in response to your campaign.
Number of unique users who clicked on each link in your campaign: You should be able to see exactly how many people you got to click on each link in your campaign (and who they are, and what time they clicked). This lets you identify what copy, offers and other devices work best in your campaigns and which calls to action need work. If you can view the individuals who clicked on the link you can even send them specially targeted follow up emails in response.
Link Click by Time: Similar to the open rate by time statistics, this shows you when people actually interact with your message. You can compare this with the open rate by time and see if people reading your message at a specific time are more likely to perform a given action, helping you decide when the best time to send your message is.
Unsubscription Rate:
Any email campaign you send must carry an unsubscription link, and you should be able to see how many subscribers use this link to stop receiving your messages.
What it tells you: How many people no longer want to receive communications from you.
What it doesn’t tell you: Why. It could be that they’ve changed job, or subscribed with another address or it could be that your offers don’t interest them anymore.
What it’s good for: If your unsubscription rate suddenly increases (more than 1% of your list) then you’ve got problems – perhaps you’re not meeting your audiences’ expectations?
