Measuring the Performance of Your Email Campaign
Do you want to implement an email marketing strategy, or has your company already experimented with this communication solution? To succeed with this strategy, it is essential to set up a performance report for your email sends. Among the essential steps to take, it is necessary to calculate KPIs, which are key performance indicators that allow you to analyze the impact of your emailing in detail. Discover the main performance indicators, their definition, and calculation methods to successfully measure your performance.
1/ Email Open Rate
The first essential KPI is the open rate of your email sends.
What is the Open Rate?
This is the most well-known KPI because it allows you to know the number of internet users subscribed to your newsletter who have opened your email. Thus, if the open rate is high, it’s a good sign because you manage to pique the curiosity of your subscribers with the subject line.
Calculating the Email Open Rate
To know the open rate of your emails, you need to perform this simple calculation: number of email opens / number of emails sent x 100.
2/ Email Click-Through Rate
Another KPI widely used to know the performance of an email marketing strategy is the click-through rate.
What is the Click-Through Rate KPI?
The click-through rate allows you to focus on the number of subscribers who have clicked or not on the links in the sent email. With this calculation, you will know if your email campaign is performing well and encourages internet users to visit your site. If this rate is high, it means that your email has piqued the curiosity of newsletter subscribers.
Calculating the Click-Through Rate
The calculation is also simple to apply since you need to divide the number of clicks on a link in the email by the total number of emails sent. Then, you multiply this result by 100 to get the click-through rate.
3/ Reactivity Rate
The reactivity rate is less known, but it is just as important.
Definition of the Reactivity Rate for Your Emailing
This calculation considers the percentage of clicks related to the links in the email, also taking into account the open rate. This KPI, therefore, uses the calculation of two rates in one for more precise results.
How to Calculate the Reactivity Rate?
You need to divide the number of clicks on a link in the email by the number of email opens and then multiply this result by 100.
4/ Email Bounce Rate
Among the essential KPIs to measure the performance of your strategy, don’t forget the bounce rate.
What is the Bounce Rate in Emailing?
The bounce rate ensures you know if your emails have been received in your subscribers’ inboxes. Consequently, this number should be low. If the bounce rate is high, it means that many recipients are not receiving your emails.
We distinguish two types: soft bounce rate: in the case of a temporarily unavailable email address hard bounce rate: if the address no longer exists or has never existed
Regardless of the origin of the problem, your email has not been received by the recipient.
Calculating the Bounce Rate
You need to calculate the number of undelivered emails / number of emails sent and multiply the result by 100. A rate higher than 6% is generally the source of major problems. It is recommended to stay below 3%.
This rate can be optimized before sending!
Thanks to OxiBounce, you can prepare your send by “cleaning” your address list. OxiBounce will remove dangerous and invalid addresses from your list and allow you to carry out your email send in the best possible conditions.
5/ Complaint Rate
This calculation is less known, even though it is one of the main indicators used by operators to decide whether you arrive in the inbox or in spam.
What is the Complaint Rate?
This KPI specifically refers to the spam complaint rate. These calculations are essential to know the percentage of emails that have been reported as spam by recipients. Your emails may be reported as spam if the recipient has never given permission to send emails or if your marketing pressure is too high.
How to Calculate the Complaint Rate?
The complaint rate should be low because if it is high, it means that the email campaign has negative repercussions on recipients. The “classic” formula to know this result is the number of emails reported as spam / total number of emails sent x 100. But it can never be applied as is because some operators do not report spam reports. Routers like Oxemis, therefore, make an approximation by calculating complaint rates per operator.
Be aware that the more your emails are reported as spam, the more your company risks landing immediately in the spam of other recipients, which greatly limits the impact of your email campaign. A recommended “maximum” complaint rate is below 0.3%!
6/ Unsubscribe Rate for an Emailing
A crucial indicator and terribly scrutinized by operators, the unsubscribe rate should be followed carefully.
What Does It Consist Of?
The unsubscribe indicator analyzes the significance of unsubscribes caused by subscribers to your newsletter. The recipient can, in fact, decide to unsubscribe via the last email received from you.
Several situations can lead to this unsubscription:
- your emails are not interesting
- you send too many emails
- the recipient is simply no longer interested in your products or services
This calculation is essential to know the relevance of your campaign and measure its impact.
How to Calculate It?
Here is the formula to know: (Number of unsubscribes / number of emails sent) x 100. Your goal is to minimize the result obtained to lower the number of unsubscribes from your newsletter.
7/ Distribution of Opens and Clicks
In addition to the KPIs we have just mentioned, other key figures ensure you know the performance of your email send as best as possible.
Distribution of Opens
You should be interested in the distribution of email opens according to the hours of the day. Specifically, by looking at these statistics, you will know precisely when your recipients open their emails during a day.
This knowledge allows you to best target the sending time to increase the chances of opening the email. For example, you may notice a peak in openings in the morning, before 7 a.m., or sometimes around noon. This way, you should quickly modify the time at which you send your emails to send them in these time slots.
Distribution of Clicks by Location
The links in your newsletter are placed according to the recipients and their habits. You should consider the statistics related to clicks by location to increase the chances of clicks on a link.