How to measure your email marketing campaign 

As marketers, we know how important it is to accurately measure any campaign that you carry out. Without, you miss out on the precious insights that show you what works, how your audience engages with your brand and, importantly, guides how you better develop a strategy that works and delivers that all-important return on investment. 

With email marketing, we’re often focused on the key metrics that most – if not all – marketers and brands know to monitor. These include your open rate, click through rate (CTR), unsubscribe rate and many, many more. There’s no denying that these are important to measure, but when looked at on a surface level individually, you can’t get the deeper insights that really help guide marketers. 

So, here’s our guide on how to better measure your email marketing campaign, plus a handy glossary of terms. 

Understand the goals of the campaign before you start 

Many marketers are really good at this, but it’s still worth mentioning the value of establishing your goals well in advance of starting the campaign. This will help with knowing which metrics to measure and how to frame the copy and will give you the basis to know that your campaign is performing. Are yu hoping to have website visits? Or perhaps you want to capture data/receive phone calls. Defining this will shape your campaign.  

You should have multiple metrics to monitor 

Framing the email marketing in context of the goals of the wider brand, as well as other marketing activity happening alongside it will help ensure that you are monitoring the right metrics. It’ll also help you spot if your email campaign is supporting the success of another channel, allowing for accurate attribution. 

For example, if your aims include growing your datafile and raising awareness of a new product or service, you might be inclined to measure only signups, open rates, CTR and unsubscribes. Yet it’s also worth looking at how your website traffic changes following an email campaign, and how long people spend on the page you direct them to from the email. If they are spending time on your product/service landing page, you can infer that your email campaign is performing. 

Check that your emails are offering value 

When measuring your email campaigns, an excellent way to check that they are adding value is to review the forward or share rate of your emails. This metric is super important if you are aiming to establish your brand as an industry leader or raise brand awareness and trust. 

You should also check how many of your emails are being reported as spam. If your emails are regularly being reported, it’s a fair assumption that your content is not interesting or useful to your audience.  Not only should you check spam complaints for monitoring content value, but if your spam complaints are high, it will impact your deliverability. 

Changing results 

Measuring email campaigns has changed in recent months with the changes introduced by IOS 15. With the new software, marketers have found that open rates have been impacted and there is lost geo-data from IOS users. If you’d like to find out more about how the IOS updates impacted marketing metrics, read our blog here. 

Our handy glossary 

Open rate 

The number of emails sent which are opened.  

Bounce rate 

The percentage of your emails that cannot be successfully delivered 

List growth 

The number of new subscribers you gained, less the unsubscribes 

Spam score 

The percentage of your emails which are reported as spam 

Click through rate 

The percentage of people who click on a call to action, usually a button or link, to find out more information from your email. 

Conversion rate 

The percentage of recipients who complete a desired action and ‘convert’ – for example, this might be to fill out a form 

Forward/share rate 

The number/percentage of recipients who are forwarding or sharing your email with other people 

Unsubscribes 

The percentage of recipients who unsubscribe following an email campaign 

In summary, don’t forget to widen your measurement net. There are plenty of opportunities to better track your email marketing campaigns by deep-diving into other metrics to get a better overall picture. Taking a broader look at the overall campaign can also give you a better idea of what’s working for your audience. Ensuring you have an integrated plan in place which encompasses a wide range of activity, will create a better outcome for your email marketing campaigns.  

If you’d like support on your email campaigns, why not get in touch?