3 goals to set to measure your email marketing success

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One of the questions small business owners ask me the most about email marketing is:

How can I increase my open rate?

It’s definitely one of the metrics you can keep an eye on to see how your emails perform. But, really, don’t you want people to do more than open your emails?

I’m guessing you want the same thing I do from email marketing:

More new and repeat business.

After all, what’s the point in putting in all that effort and coming away with nothing? So, in this post, I’ll share with you 3 goals you can set and should measure when it comes to email marketing.

Before we get into that, let’s just recap what we mean by opens and clicks – the two most measured metrics in email marketing.

Open rates

This is how many people opened your email. Read this post to find out what open rates tell you.

But there’s something you need to know about the calculation used. Here’s what it is:

Number of sends – number of bounces = successful sends.

Open rate = proportion of successful sends that resulted in an open.

At this point, the other thing I will tell you is: if people use an email preview pane and they click on your email and then away from it (without reading it), this is classed as an open.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Not everyone in your opens report might have actually opened your email.

Which brings me neatly onto the metric I think has more value…

Click rates

Why do I think you should pay greater attention to click rates?

It’s simple: anyone who clicks on a link is showing interest. This tells you how well your email has performed. Think about it. If you click on a link in an email, you do it because you want to find out more.

How are click rates calculated?

Number of unique clicks/Number of unique opens  x 100

What are good open and click rates?

These are questions I’m frequently asked, especially for opens!

According to Smart Insights, the overall average across all industries is:

Open rate: 16.22%

Click rate: 7.17%

So, now we have that out of the way, what are the metrics to look at beyond opens and clicks? This will depend on your goal (did you remember to set a goal?) Here are 3 examples.

Goal 1: Grow your email list

All successful email marketing campaigns need a list. Having an engaged subscriber list will help you to grow your business.

If your goal is to grow your email list, you need to keep an eye on your contact report. Where are most of your new sign-ups coming from? What drives people to find your sign-up box?

By using your contact list report, you’ll be able to make sound decisions about where to focus your efforts in growing your email list.

You might discover an untapped source that you can take advantage of. Read this blog post for ideas to grow your email list.

Goal 2: Getting traffic to your website

According to Nominet’s domain registration data, in April 2020 there were 147,706 newly registered domains – a record high for the first time in eight years.

If you’re a service provider, like me, website visitors matter. Your website is a window to the way in which you can help visitors. It’s also an important way to find and capture leads.

So, if getting people to your website to buy is important, then you definitely want to keep an eye on the click rates you achieve.

So, the next time you send an email with a link to your website, check to see if there is a spike of visitors to the page you linked to. You can do this with Google Analytics. Check out this post to read about the 5 Google Analytics metrics I keep track of.

Goal 3: Increase sales

If 2020 has taught us an important marketing lesson, it has to be keeping in touch with your customers and prospects is crucial and helps get you those all-important sales.

And, email marketing is more likely to generate sales than social media marketing. According to Constant Contact, 60% of consumers say they have bought a product or service as a result of a marketing email. 

So, if this is your goal, make sure you pay attention to sales after you send out an email. Are those people who have bought on your email list?

Even better, if you use an eCommerce platform, like Shopify, make sure you connect it to your email marketing platform. Once you’ve done that, either system will specify the sales that resulted from an email that you sent!

I love email marketing reports. In fact, I love monitoring all my reporting. It tells me so much about how my marketing is performing.

Setting goals for your email marketing (well, all your marketing) will help you stay focused on what’s important. It will also help you achieve your business goals… because the two things should be connected!

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Here’s what you also get:

• Build relationships with email automation
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• Run Google, Facebook or Instagram ads to get more website traffic, find new customers on social media or grow your email list
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It really is the complete small business marketing platform, and you can try it free for 60 days.

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