Email marketing has been and continues to be a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their customers and foster brand loyalty while driving growth. However, it takes more than just a clever copy and bold graphics to drive campaign success. To truly leverage the potential of email marketing, it’s important to understand key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide insight into the effectiveness of campaigns and how they relate to customer journey stages.
Email Marketing KPIs
Before diving into the relationship between KPIs and customer journeys, let’s establish what email marketing KPIs are and why they matter.
KPIs are measurable metrics that allow email marketers to gauge the performance of their campaigns and efforts. These are data-driven insights that let you know how you’re progressing towards achieving your goals.
Understanding the significance of these metrics as well as the variety of metrics you can measure are paramount for building successful campaigns and optimizing your strategies. Here are a few of the many essential KPIs to be aware of:
Email Delivery Rate
You want to ensure messages are reaching your recipients’ inboxes. The delivery rate measures the number of emails that successfully made it to their intended audience.
Open Rate
This measures the percentage of those who opened your email and helps you assess if your subject lines and sender names resonate with your recipients.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
This rate measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link in your email. It gives you an idea of how effective your content and CTAs are.
Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)
This tracks your email opens against your email click-throughs and lets you know how in sync your messaging is. For example, if you had very few opens but a lot of clicks or vice versa, you gain insight on the effectiveness of your subject line and content.
Bounce Rate
This signals the percentage of emails that did not get delivered successfully. A higher bounce rate can negatively impact deliverability, so this is good to keep an eye out for. Hard bounces indicate permanent delivery failures while soft bounces point to temporary failures.
Conversion Rate
Conversion lets you know how many email users completed a desired action whether that’s following a CTA or clicking on a link.
List Growth Rate
This measures the rate at which your email subscriber list grows. Long-term success relies on reaching wider audiences so focusing on quality growth is vital for email marketing.
ROI
A return on investment is measured in all sorts of settings and gives insight into the profitability of your campaigns. It should consider the revenue that’s been generated by campaigns offset by the costs associated with the campaigns.
Unsubscribe Rate
This rate tracks the percentage of subscribers who have opted out of future communications from your brand. It can help you gauge engagement and interest among your list.
Email Sharing Rate
Social shares and forwarding are examples of how you can track the email share rate. These account for how many recipients have shared your email or email content with others.
How Email Marketing KPIs Relate to Customer Journey Stages
Gaining an understanding of where your customers are in their journey is crucial for tailoring email campaigns to their needs. Next, we’ll explore how email marketing KPIs align with different stages of the customer journey.
Awareness
This is the stage where potential customers become aware of your brand and its offerings. Your goals here are to generate awareness for your brand while also piquing interest in your products or services. A KPI that can be focused on here is your open rate. However, due to software privacy updates in recent years, open rates can be unreliable in certain email clients like Apple Mail.
Consideration
In this stage, customers are evaluating your offerings and doing research to decide whether you’re a potential solution to their problems. One email KPI you can keep an eye on here is your clickthrough rate. A high CTR could indicate that your content is compelling enough to drive email recipients to explore your offerings.
Conversion
The convert stage is where the purchasing decision happens. Conversion rate is the critical KPI here and signals whether or not you’re effectively persuading recipients to make a transaction. With the goal focused on generating sales, it’s important to reach your audience with the right message at the right time whether that’s an abandoned cart email or a competitor comparison nurture.
Loyalty
After you’ve convinced your recipients to convert, your focus is on retaining them as customers and keeping them engaged. An important KPI to track here is retention rate. You may need to tap into the power of re-engagement campaigns or personalized offers to maintain a loyal customer base.
Advocacy
This is a satisfying point to reach with your audience where customers become brand advocates and happily promote your brand. Advocacy relies on reach so evaluating KPIs like shares and forwards can indicate that your customers are excited to spread the word.
How emfluence Can Help
We specialize in email strategy and marketing automation and are here to help businesses make the most of their email campaigns. We not only understand the importance of tracking and optimizing email marketing KPIs but also building out a solid customer journey to align campaigns to.
If you’re looking to improve your email marketing strategy and harness the power of KPIs and the customer journey, we invite you to reach out to our experts. They can assist you in setting and achieving email marketing goals and ensure your campaigns drive tangible results.
