How to Understand Email Analytics
You’ve been checking the data, reading the analytics and noticing which emails perform better than others, but haven’t a clue what to do about it? What do all those email analytics actually mean? Let’s talk about how to understand your email performance data and learn how to do more of what’s working and stop doing what isn’t. Email analytics made easy.
There are a few main parts of email analytics that are important for a basic understanding of your email performance.
OPEN RATE
How many emails were opened as a percentage of how many were sent. If this is over 30%, you are awesome.
If your open rate is good, this means your Subject Lines and Preview text are working. Keep doing what you are doing.
CTR (CLICK THROUGH RATE)
How many people are clicking from the email to your website. Ideally, you want this to be 3% or higher.
If your CTR is good, your email design (aka your buttons and call to action) is good.
CONVERSION RATE
How many people from the email made a purchase. In reality, this is the most important. Are we selling anything?
In e-commerce, 2% or higher is considered great.
If your conversion rate is good, your website is good. If they aren’t converting, there could be an issue with your links. Are you pointing them to the same product from the email or just to the home page or category page? Look at the customer experience on the website, is it hard to navigate? Is it easy to make a purchase or are there too many steps?
Open rate, click through rate and conversion rate are your main metrics, but they aren’t the only ones you should pay attention to. Here are a few more to add to your email vocabulary.
BOUNCED RATE
These are emails that bounced, aka couldn’t be delivered. This could be because they have a full box (I don’t know how that happens, I have over 20K emails just in 1 box…don’t judge, I’m saving them for research) or the email address is wrong (aka old work email) or they are spam. Keep a look out for weird addresses (you know the ones), misspellings of common handles (mgail.com instead of gmail.com) and clean your list regularly to avoid this.
UNSUBSCRIBE RATE
This is how many people are unsubscribing from your email list. This one is super important. You don’t want Google to think you are spam, so always monitor this.
If this number is creeping up past 0.1%, try to figure out why. Are you sending too many? Is this a one time kind of thing, like you ran a giveaway to get subscribers? It is natural to have a few more than usual subs fall off afterwards.
Remember: NEVER send an email to someone who has unsubscribed.
Add an option next to your unsubscribe link at the bottom where they can update their preferences and try to hold on to them. Ultimately, if they don’t want to be here, let them go. If they love you, they will come back, I mean resubscribe.
SPAM RATE
This is how many people in your email list marked your email as spam. This is the super bad one, once you start getting marked as spam, Google and the big boys will start automatically putting you in spam folders. It’s hard to get out once you’re in there, so let’s avoid it.
If your SPAM RATE is high (over 0.1%) or starting to increase there are a few reasons:
No unsubscribe link. This is generally on every email. Make sure it is clear and easy to see in your footer text. If it is too hard to find, people will mark you as spam because it is easier. Make it easy for them to find. Having someone on your email list that doesn’t want to be there is good for nobody.
You might be sending too many emails. People get annoyed and overwhelmed if you are sending too much content they don’t want. Give people an option to adjust their preferences to receive less emails or reevaluate how many you are sending. You might actually be sending too many.
You might not be truthful (either on-purpose or by accident) in your subject line or links. (Big sale on t-shirts, and in the email is about a new product launch. Or most of your links in the email go to a random page.) This upsets your subscribers or causes them to lose trust and they will mark you as spam.
Now that you have had a brief overview of email analytics, its time to look at some campaigns. Notice which emails are performing well and also what isn’t working. Which ones are selling the most? Which are getting opened but not getting any clicks? Once you start analyzing the data, you can make improvements and really start utilizing email as one of your revenue generators. You could potentially pull in thousands on top of your regular website traffic. Who wouldn’t want that?
Feeling overwhelmed? Why not try an email audit? I can dig through your data and tell you what’s working, what isn’t and give you actionable items that you can use in your email campaigns to increase performance and get those clicks. This could be the year your business really takes off, are you ready?