Email marketing can be considered as one of the most convenient methods available for you to get in touch with potential customers. With an email marketing campaign, it would be possible to provide relevant content to the customers. When you are engaged in an email marketing campaign, you send out thousands of emails at a time. But how can you determine whether the emails you send are delivering positive results to your business? That’s where analytics come into play.
Several methods are available for you to determine the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. Here is a list of such effective metrics, which every email marketer should keep an eye on. Then you will be able to ensure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign in the long run.

Clickthrough Rate

When you are sending out promotional emails, you embed one or more links in them. People who are interested in content offered by the mail would go ahead and click on those links. Clickthrough Rate is being used to determine the percentage of recipients who have clicked the links contained within a mail. This can be used as an effective metric in order to calculate the overall effectiveness of the email marketing campaign. If the clickthrough rate is low, it indicates that people are not interested in the content of the mail and they don’t tend to go ahead and click on the link. Hence, the overall effectiveness associated with the email marketing campaign is low.

Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate is another important metric, which is being used to determine the overall effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. Once the recipient of an email clicks on the link, the next thing you expect him to do is to convert. Conversion can be considered as the next step, which the recipient should do after clicking on the link. It can be downloading a free eBook offered by you or completing a form to provide contact information. Conversion Rate determines how many email recipients have successfully been converted via an email marketing campaign. As you can see, a higher conversion rate determines the success of an email marketing campaign.

Bounce Rate

In a specific email marketing campaign, you send out thousands of emails. However, you will not be able to deliver all those emails to the mail boxes of the intended recipients. Some of the mails would be bounced back. Bounce Rate determines the percentage of emails that are bounced back from the total emails that you send in an email marketing campaign. Bounce Rate can be divided into two main categories as soft bounce rate and hard bounce rate. If the emails don’t get delivered due to a temporary issue, such as storage issues in the mailbox, soft bounce rate can increase. But sending emails to non-valid emails can contribute towards hard bounce rate. When the soft bounce rate is increased, it is possible to re-send the mails again, so that they will be delivered.

List Growth Rate

Along with time, the email list would grow. List growth rate indicates the speed that the email list is growing along with time. When calculating the list growth rate, both new subscriptions and un-subscriptions should be taken into consideration. If you realize that the list growth rate is a negative value, it is the high time to act accordingly. It means that more people are unsubscribing your email list and the rate of getting new subscribers for it is lower when compared to the un-subscriptions. As an email marketer, your main objective is to enhance the audience along with time. Therefore, it is important for you to pay special attention towards the list growth rate. If you can keep it at a higher rate, your success in future is guaranteed.

Email forwarding and email sharing rate

When you are sending out email, you embed social media sharing buttons in it as well. Email sharing rate is determined by these buttons. Some people who go through the content of the mail would go ahead and share it on their social media networks. This can deliver enhanced visibility for the content that you have included within the email. Therefore, it can be considered as a great method available for you to determine the new visibility that you go for your emails. On the other hand, some people tend to forward the emails that they get to others. If your emails are forwarded like that, you will be able to improve your visibility. Therefore, email forwarding rate can also be used as an effective metric to determine the overall success associated with the email marketing campaign.

Return of Investment

Last but not least, you need to take a look at the return of investment associated with the email marketing campaign. You are investing your time, effort as well as money on the email marketing campaign. Therefore, you should have the ability to determine the return that is provided for what you have invested. That’s where the ROI comes into play.
As you can see, it is important for every email marketer out there in the world to have a clear understanding about above mentioned metrics. They can assist you to optimize the email marketing campaign along with time. A well optimized campaign can deliver a variety of benefits to you as well. They include increased client loyalty, increased sales, reduced marketing expenses, increase of repeat businesses and ability to generate more leads.

Out of methods that businesses can use to communicate with customers, email marketing has received much attention. However, there is a proper strategy that you need to follow while you are engaged with the email marketing campaign. You will need to focus on your analytics and use the provided information to make the email marketing campaign a better one. Then you will get the opportunity to experience all the benefits mentioned above.