Ensuring a successful email marketing campaign can get surprisingly tricky.
You must keep best practices in mind, optimize emails for increased engagement, and avoid rookie mistakes. But it’s only when you measure the effectiveness of your efforts that you will know what’s working and what isn’t.
So, how can you measure the result of your efforts?
That’s where email marketing metrics and KPIs come into the picture. They let you build and maintain revenue by helping you identify and apply the right strategies that attract attention and inspire action from subscribers.
In this article, we’ll outline the best email marketing metrics you can use to inform your e-commerce marketing strategy and build a dedicated audience for your content.
Measure and analyse your campaigns with retainful.
The Main E-commerce Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs to Track
Here, we’ll be looking at a few email marketing metrics you should track if you want a thriving online business. But don’t use it blindly.
Think about your email marketing goals. Do you want to grow your subscriber database? Do you want more leads? You may want to convert your existing leads into current customers.
Once you know your goals, align them with key metrics to track in dedicated marketing dashboards.
Email Deliverability Rate
Email deliverability is the #1 email marketing metric to track. Think about it: what’s the use of optimizing your campaign if your emails aren’t getting to your customer’s inbox?
As an e-commerce business, a high delivery deliverability rate is significant as you have to send many transactional emails (order confirmation emails, cart abandonment emails, promotional messages).
Also, customers expect to receive certain emails after placing an order. So, if your transactional email doesn’t land in their inbox, it can cause confusion and poor customer service.
You’re probably wondering why your emails wouldn’t be delivered. Sometimes, it’s because of technical issues relating to IP addresses and email servers. Other times, you’re sending emails to outdated or incorrect email addresses.
In both cases, your sender reputation—the reputation your sending email address earns by displaying “good behavior“—falls. Therefore, the better your sender’s reputation, the better your deliverability.
Conversion Rate
All your email marketing efforts and activities are aimed at increasing sales. And your conversion rate tells you how many of your contacts completed the desired action. Think about purchasing, signing up for newsletters, and the like.
That’s why tracking this key email marketing metric is a no-brainer.
Here’s how this works—suppose you send an email to 1000 people with a discount coupon, and 250 people click through your email to visit your website, out of which 50 people make a purchase. This means your conversion rate is 5%.
The average e-commerce conversion rate is around 1.53% as of February 2022. Note conversion rates vary a lot by product category, so depending on the type of goods you sell, it can be between 1.36% (sports and recreation) and 4.17% (arts and crafts).
Click-Through Rate
The click-through rate indicates how many recipients clicked on at least one link within your email campaign. It shows the percentage of subscribers who actively engage with your content beyond opening emails.
There are two ways you can go about this. First, divide the number of people clicking by the number of emails delivered. Second, divide the number of people clicking by the number of people who open it.
The average click-through rate in the e-commerce industry is 2.01%.
Don’t add extra links to your email to optimize this email KP, as it will put you at a higher risk of being flagged as spam. Instead, experiment with your offers and test different CTA text and button colors to catch your recipient’s attention.
Open Rate
Your open rate tells you whether your recipients are opening your emails. Most marketers swear by this email marketing metric because it allows you to cross the first hurdle: to get in front of your recipient’s eyes.
It also helps you determine whether your subscribers are engaged. It indicates the effectiveness of your subject line, pre-header, and ‘from’ line—factors that prompt the recipient to open your email.
The average open rate in email marketing worldwide is around 18%.
While all this is dandy, don’t depend too much on this metric. Under Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, users can disable open tracking, making the open rate a relatively unreliable metric. Despite this, measuring your campaign performance is still a suitable method.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is when your email doesn’t reach the customer’s inbox.
There are two types of bounces: hard and soft. Hard bounces are emails returned from non-existent addresses, and soft bounces are temporary and occur when emails are returned because the inbox is full.
Every email campaign will have a small percentage of bounces. It’s inevitable. But it’s important to keep hard bounces in check to avoid damaging your sender’s reputation.
While your email service provider should automatically remove hard bounces from your file, you should also routinely clean your email list to protect its deliverability. This includes updating and segmenting it frequently and consistently verifying emails.
Pay attention to your metrics to grow your business.
Spam Rate
Your spam rate tells you how many of your subscribers find you—for the lack of a better word—annoying and mark your emails as spam.
0.1% is the average spam rate. If it starts to rise, take it as a red flag and immediately rethink your strategy and clean your email list. Otherwise, you can damage your sender‘s reputation and struggle to make it to your customer’s inbox. You can reduce spam rates by creating great content and being helpful or entertaining in your emails.
ROI
Running an online business is only possible if you eventually make more money than you invest. That’s why tracking your return on investment, or ROI is essential.
The good news is email marketing is relatively inexpensive and super practical, driving an average ROI of $40 for every dollar spent.
To calculate your ROI, you must first understand how much you spend on your email marketing campaign, followed by how much money your campaign brought in. Then plug the numbers into the formula:
(Revenue – Spent)/Spent = ROI.
How To Select the Right Tool to Measure Your Email KPIs
Tracking key email marketing metrics is the only way to maximize marketing efforts.
But you don’t need to put in any more time than you already do, thanks to marketing automation tools. To boost business productivity, they can automate time-consuming and manual tasks, including email metrics and KPI tracking.
Let’s look at tips to choose the best tool to measure your email metrics.
User Interface
Many marketing automation platforms claim to be intuitive and user-friendly, but this isn’t always the case. Ensure the one you choose offers clear navigation, contextual information, and thoughtful features to boost efficiency.
As an e-commerce business, you’ll already have many other priorities, like launching campaigns, fulfilling orders, and launching new products. So, it makes sense to test the user interface of the tool you select to ensure you can get up to speed—and get to work—ASAP.
Features and Integrations
Every marketing automation tool offers a mix of standard and unique features. You want to ensure the tool has the capabilities you need the most. For instance, you’d like the tool to work with your e-commerce platform like Shopify and natively integrate with your existing technologies like Retainful and ConvertKit.
Here are a few questions to gauge a prospective marketing automation tool’s suitability:
- Does it offer the features you need?
- Does it allow you to track critical email marketing metrics?
- Does it integrate with your current tech stack?
Based on your answers, you can rule out tools that don’t match your requirements. Customer reviews are another way to learn more about a prospective tool’s feature set.
Customer Service
Next, check whether the toll offers adequate customer service.
Pick the highest level of customer service that’s available 24/7 and lets you communicate with experts via different mediums (email, phone, live chat) to help solve problems fast.
For example, Retainful offers full-service support, including live chat, free demos, and a knowledge base to help you get started.
Setup and Onboarding
Every tool has a learning curve, so you’ll likely need some kind of assistance getting up and running. The fact that the offered assistance varies between different tools is why you need to research a prospective tool’s set-up and onboarding process.
The following are a few questions to keep in mind:
- Do you have to pay a setup and onboarding fee? If yes, how much?
- Will you need to migrate from one platform to another? Can you expect extra support to ensure all contact data gets transferred properly?
- Will onboarding occur remotely—or will a customer support executive be physically present to guide you?
Measure your campaign by metrics
Wrapping Up
The above pointers should help you choose a reliable email automation plugin for your e-commerce business. If all this feels intimidating, you can skip right ahead and automate your email campaigns with Retainful.
Use the tool to welcome new customers, recover abandoned carts, and drive repeat purchases. From pre-built workflows to valuable features designed to grow sales, Retainful makes driving e-commerce conversions easier than ever.
Excited to check it out? Get started here for free.
Clickthrough rate (CTR) is likely the most important metric to track. It is a “day-to-day” email marketing metric because it lets you quickly calculate performance for every email you send.
Shopping cart abandonment rate, Conversion rate, Customer acquisition cost, Customer lifetime value, Average order value, and Gross profit margin are some of the KPIs used in eCommerce.
Email KPIs are metrics that help you understand how your campaigns perform. This data by your email marketing automation platform in reports shows how your emails perform over time, compared to each other, and against industry email marketing statistics.
To make sound decisions about advertising and other marketing expenditures, You must understand your average order value (AOV), total customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLV)
