Inbound Marketing Insights

Email marketing is not just a tool for communication but a powerful strategy to engage with your audience on a deeper level. By tracking your email performance regularly, you can ensure that your important messages are reaching your prospects and customers and resonating with them. This data-driven approach allows you to optimize your email campaigns, increase open rates, and drive more conversions. Make it an ongoing monthly habit to analyze your email metrics and fine-tune your strategies for maximum impact. Here are the seven most important email marketing metrics you should track to ensure your email program is driving maximum results.

1. Email Open Rate: Your open rate shows how many people opened your email compared to how many people received it. Analyze your overall email open rate across all your email campaigns first, then track your most important emails separately. Analyzing this data separately will show how your comprehensive email program performs and if there were specific emails that performed better or worse than others.
2. Email Click Rate: Your click rate shows how many people clicked on your emails compared to how many people opened them. Similar to your email open rate, track this metric across all your emails and then analyze your most important emails separately.
3. Email Click-Through Rate: Your email click-through rate measures how many people clicked on a hyperlink, CTA, or image within a particular email. It can be calculated by taking the total number of clicks an email receives and dividing that number by the total number of delivered messages.
4. Email Unsubscribe Rate: Your unsubscribe rate provides insight into how many people opt out of receiving emails. This means you will never be able to communicate with them by email again. You always want this number to be small. If you start to see the rate of unsubscribes increase, there is an issue with your content, or your contacts are no longer engaging with your messaging.
5. Email Delivery Rate: Your delivery rate for email is the percentage of emails that are received by the gateway servers of your subscribers' internet service providers (ISPs) and not returned as a hard or soft bounce. It's getting more difficult to get through to your recipient's inbox, so ensuring you use best practices to improve your delivery rate is key. 
6. Re-Engagement from Email: Your re-engagement from email tracks how many contacts have re-engaged with your brand through email marketing. It’s important to see how your emails can reactivate prospects that have gone dormant (i.e., have not engaged with your emails) for months or even years.
7. Email Hard Bounce & Unsubscribe Rate: These are the metrics you would want to decline over time because you want fewer people opting out (or marking as spam) or bouncing from your email. This tells you if you're reaching their inbox and if your content is still relevant.

The following shows how you can visually look at this information and compare it to prior time periods to see your growth over time. This will help you see how your email marketing strategy impacts your overall digital marketing program.

Email marketing is essential to any digital marketing program. Email helps you engage with your prospect and customers and bring them through your buyer's journey. All too often, companies are so focused on lead generation that they forget that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach out to an audience that has already opted in and wants to receive more information from your company. Remember to continually track your email marketing metrics to ensure you're sending the right content that is relevant to your audience and that email is helping to reinvigorate your sales pipeline. 

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