Understanding Metrics

Importance of metrics: what can be measured can be improved

One of the advantages of online marketing over offline marketing is the ability to measure and evaluate the results of our campaigns in real time.

This allows us to continuously optimise: we can measure results, launch the campaign again, measure it again and so on. Thus, we will gain valuable knowledge of our database that will help us to optimise results.

In most ecommerce, email is one of the main sources of traffic and sales. Therefore, the metrics we use will be of paramount importance in the optimisation of our campaign.

Are you lost with all this terminology? Here we explain in a simple way the keys to analyse your campaign and get the best results.

What metrics do we use in email marketing?

Email marketing metrics can be grouped into three areas:

• email platform behaviour.These are the more technical data: how many emails are sent in relation to my contact base, IP behaviour, sending speed.
• Quality of my database and the number of emails that actually reach my subscribers.
• Behavior of emails (or behavioral email).Is my campaign generating sales or traffic? Appeal of my emails and impact on the business.

Metrics by channel: email and SMS

This article mainly explains email marketing metrics. If you are analyzing an SMS campaign, Easymailing adapts the overview to the channel and shows SMS-specific metrics.

How to read the Overview

In the campaign “Overview”, you can review the performance cards at a glance: delivery, opens, clicks, CTOR, bounces, unsubscribes, complaints and order rate.

The cards combine three types of information:

Badges: Good, Attention and Critical

Each card badge compares the campaign metric with the general benchmark or with the industry benchmark configured for the account.

• For metrics where higher is better, such as delivery, opens, clicks or CTOR, Good means the campaign is equal to or above the good threshold; Attention, between the warning and good thresholds; and Critical, below the warning threshold.
• For metrics where lower is better, such as bounces, unsubscribes or complaints, Good means the campaign is equal to or below the good threshold; Attention, above the good threshold and up to the warning threshold; and Critical, above the warning threshold.

The arrow next to the main value compares that campaign with its audience average. For example, if clicks are above the audience average, the arrow points upwards.

Performance cards

Bounces, unsubscribes and complaints

Order rate

The “Order rate” card appears for ecommerce campaigns. If the audience has no store configured, you will see the “Connect your store” message. If the store exists but ecommerce tracking is not enabled, the card will ask you to enable tracking. When data is available, it shows the percentage of orders attributed to the campaign, the number of orders, attributed revenue and average revenue per order.

Delivery rate

The delivery rate reflects the number of emails you have sent to your contacts.

To obtain it, we must also know the number of bounced mails (those that have not reached their destination)

This indicator is useful in order to know if we have a lot of inactive or incorrect addresses in the list. However, it should be noted that it does not inform us about IP addresses that have been classified as spam.

The formula with which we can find out our delivery rate is:

Delivery rate = (delivered emails / sent emails) x 100

Open rate

It is the percentage number of people who open your email. We can calculate the open rate by dividing the number of unique opens by the number of delivered emails and multiplying this result by 100.

Open rate = (unique opens / delivered emails) x 100

So, for example, if we send 1000 emails and 500 are opened, we will have an opening rate of 50%.

How we measure an opening

When we send a campaign, a tracking code in the form of an undetectable image is added to the body of the email. When we open the email, our email provider (Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail...) downloads the image and records this download. This implies that we can only detect an opening if our user's browser is able to display html images or if the user has had some kind of activity (e.g. clicking on a link).

It is important, therefore, to include images in your email to force the download.

Due to these factors, the open rate is not an exact indicator and should be taken as a trend indicator within a campaign, not as an absolute figure. To assess performance more accurately, combine it with clicks, CTOR, unsubscribes, complaints, conversions or orders.

It is estimated that for commercial mailings the opening rate is around 30%.

The opening percentage we get will depend on many factors. Here are some tips to help you increase it:

• Specify a good subject that captures your customer's attention.The average time it takes to capture attention is between three and four seconds.
• Play with the schedules.Send campaigns on different days and times and compare the results.
• The most important content should be in the subject line of your email.The first thing the user does is to look at the email before deciding whether to open it or not.
• Work on your contacts.Periodically update your lists with contacts really related to your product.
• Employ segmentationto impact those users who are likely to respond favourably to the campaign.

Reference table for interpreting opening rates

With Easymailing, you can see your open rate, unique opens and total opens from the campaign “Overview”.

CTR or click-through rate

By Clicks Rate we mean the percentage number of users who click on a link in your email. Either to find out more about your product, to buy it or to read the news of your newsletter.

Together with the opening rate, it is the main indicator that will allow you to find out how interested subscribers are in your brand.

To find out your CTR, do the following:

CTR = (unique clicks / delivered emails) x 100

Reference table for interpreting click-through rates

In Easymailing you can see your click-through rate, unique clicks and total clicks from the campaign “Overview”.

Single clicks

They represent the times a subscriber clicked on a link, taking into account the first time they clicked. That is, it represents exactly how many subscribers have clicked on our link.

Total clicks

They represent the total number of clicks on each link. That is, it counts all the times that the same subscriber clicks on a link.

Bounce Rate

We call a bounce an e-email that could not be delivered to its recipient for some reason. It is possible that the address is temporarily out of service, that the user has problems with the inbox or that there are problems with the server.

There are two types of bounces:

• Soft bounce:the email could not be delivered to the user due to a specific problem. Maybe your server was unavailable at the time of sending or your email inbox was full.
• Hard Bounce:the email will never reach its destination. The email address does not exist, is misspelled or the server has disappeared. The best thing to do is to remove these addresses from your database.

To reduce your bounce rate, we recommend that you always keep your subscriber lists up to date. This means removing incorrect or inactive addresses.

An acceptable bounce rate for a qualified list is set at 0.5%. We should start to worry when the rate exceeds 5%. If your bounce rate exceeds this number, you'll need to review your list. Rates of 8% may indicate a possible illegal (non-consensual) origin of our contact list (link to "the importance of consent in email marketing").

Keep in mind that the higher our bounce rate, the more our reputation will be damaged.

You can find the bounce rate yourself using the following formula:

Bounce rate = ((soft bounces + hard bounces) / sent emails) x 100

So if we send 2,000 emails and only 1925 are delivered, we will have a bounce rate of 3.75%.

Example: (75 bounces / 2,000 sent emails) x 100 = 3.75%

In Easymailing you can see the bounce rate, the total number of bounces and the soft/hard breakdown from the campaign “Overview”.

Unsubscribe rate

It is an essential metric to know if the marketing campaign has been designed correctly. A large number of unsubscribes indicates that our campaign has not been well targeted. Something has gone wrong with email design or segmentation. This metric also shows us how the number of subscribers has evolved.

In the “Overview”, you can also review the unsubscribe percentage, the total number of unsubscribes and the breakdown between subscriber unsubscribe and automatic cleaning.

You can find the unsubscribe rate using the following formula:

Unsubscribe rate = (subscriber unsubscribes / delivered emails) x 100

The card total can also include contacts cleaned automatically, but the rate is calculated from unsubscribes requested by subscribers.