The center of all B2B sales and marketing is the target customer. In order to secure their attention and business, we rely on data, kpis and metrics to ensure that our initiatives are personalized and hyper-targeted. And email marketing is no different.
Kpis in email marketing help measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. It can tell you what you are doing well, what you are not and what needs attention for generating better results. Simply put, metrics help you sell and market better so you can nurture your ideal customers and move them along their customer journey.
Let’s take an example.
You have a list of 100 potential customers that you are planning to share a case study with. Once you have crafted the email content and sent out the emails, here’s what you’d like to track -
1. Open Rate - As the name suggests, an Open Rate is - how many people actually opened your email (not everyone will).
Formula - Total # of opened emails/Total number of emails sent
Industry Benchmark - 22.7% (Source: Campaign Monitor for IT industry)
2. Bounce Rate - Bounce rate indicates how many emails were undelivered. Why, you wonder? Wrong email addresses, full inbox, server problems can be the leading cause of it.
Formula - Number of bounced email/ Total email sent x 100
Industry Benchmark - 0.7% (Source: Campaign Monitor)
3. Click Through Rate - Often referred to as CTR, it is the most important metric in email marketing. It reflects how many recipients clicked on one or more links contained within the email content.
Formula - Total clicks/ Total number of emails delivered x 100
Industry Benchmark - 2.0% (Source: Campaign Monitor)
4. Email Share Rate - If your email was shared with others, you’d want to know that. An Email share rate will help you understand the engagement as well as your advocacy rates.
Formula - Number of shares/ Total number of email delivered x 100
5. Conversion Rate - Does your email contain a call-to- action such as - Schedule a product demo or Start a free trial , as the next step after the recipient views your case study? How many acted on it, that is your conversion rate.
Formula - Number of people who completed call-to-action/Total number of emails delivered x 100
Industry Benchmark - 1.22% (Source:Kinsta)
6. ROI - Organizing this email campaign costed money and you also generated revenue. Both of these figures will give you your total return on investment.
Formula - Total Revenue generated/Total spend x 100
Benchmark - $36 for every $1spent (Source: Constant Contact)
Besides the above email metrics for this campaign, if your goals are to - increase your email subscribers list, generate leads and convert more customers, you also want to track -
7. Unsubscribe Rate - Whether it is during this email campaign or at another time, you may notice that people hit the unsubscribe button and wish to be removed from your mailing list, this is known as the Unsubscribe rate.
8. Unengaged Rate - There might be folks that have subscribed to your offerings such as a newsletter etc. but over time you realize they don’t engage with your emails - whether it is opening them or taking any other action.
9. Spam Rate - There might be times when recipients deliberately sends your email to the Spam folder. To ensure there isn’t anything technically wrong with your emails, you would want to keep a close watch on this.
10. List Growth Rate - Is your email list growing? To get a true picture, you want to subtract the unengaged and unsubscribed from your total subscribers. Formula - New Subscribers - Unsubscribed Subscribers/Total subscribers x 100
11. Engagement Over Time - Want to know When is the best time to send emails to your subscriber base? This may vary and so it is best you track that.
12. Mobile Open Rate - With customers using mobile to open emails (60%), you would want to track this rate. https://blogs.constantcontact.com/email-marketing-statistics/
13. Mobile CTR - Just like you tracked this on your desktop, you would want to know how many subscribers clicked through links in your email on their mobile.
If you are new to email marketing, there are many email platforms that allow you to create, send, manage and track your efforts. Some top ones B2B email marketers use are - MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Hubspot and Constant Contact.
Choosing the right kpis and metrics for email marketing campaigns will help you gain insights into user activity, determine the results related to your efforts while keeping you focused on the objectives and goals of your current as well as future campaigns.
