In order to know whether your marketing emails are successful or not, it needs to be centered around a measurable goal based on email marketing data. As mentioned in our blog article about setting measurable goals, it is not enough to say that you want a lot of people to open and read your emails.
As your business could be sending a whole lot of emails to large contact lists, as part of email marketing best practices, it’s important that you measure the results of your email efforts so that you can aim for continual improvements over time as you keep sending emails.
One way to find out if your email is relevant and helpful to your recipients is to see if they are clicking on any links that are in the email. What they click on indicates what has peaked their curiosity or what is important to them to learn more about. If your clickthrough rate is low, this could be a sign to review the relevancy of the content.
For example, you may be sending a newsletter to your fresh new leads about how your company just spoke at a conference and you send a link to watch the recording. After sending it, you see that less than 1% clicked on the link.
By doing some analysis, you’ve come to the realization that your fresh new leads are still at the beginning of the buyer’s journey so the video is irrelevant to their current stage of their buying process.
Without tracking the clickthrough rate in this example, you may keep sending emails and never see any of your fresh new leads move forward. In fact, some may even stop wanting to hear from you. Therefore, track the clickthrough rate to ensure that the emails you send are truly beneficial to your recipients.
Calculating the clickthrough rate is important, but to truly see potential clients move forward in the sales process is by their commitment to fill out a form for gate resources such as an eBook, checklist or a private consultation with an advisor. Whenever someone fills out a form for one of these, it is a conversion from their part.
If your email goal is related to converting leads to marketing qualified leads (MQL), tracking email conversion rate is a great metric to keep an eye on. Knowing which emails have a high conversion rate will help you determine what content and type of content drives your recipients to convert.
For example, you decide to send active leads a link to subscribe to a 30-minute webinar about the private capital market but only get a 1% conversion rate. But when you send an eBook of the webinar script, you get a 3% conversion rate.
This information helps you determine that that there is a strong possibility that even though they are active leads, they are more interested in taking their time to read about the subject matter.
It would be great for your recipients to share your email content via email or social media when applicable. There are emails where your goal is related to exposure and getting the word out.
For example, you are planning to do a sales presentation about a new fund offering during a cocktail hour. You want your clients to come and invite people in their network to tag along. After sending the email about the event, it’s important to analyze the email sharing rate to help you gauge their interest in inviting others.
If the email sharing rate is low, consider sending a series of emails about the event and implement within the process so that sales team will call their key clients about the event to obtain feedback.
The key to success with these metrics is to test and improve. There are best practices to follow with email marketing to maximize results but there is no one magic formula that works for all businesses. Take the time to first work on and fine-tune your own marketing strategy, work your way to send useful content to your recipients and then track these 3 metrics to know what works and what to improve on over time.