Email Marketing: The Metrics You Need to Consider

In a historical period in which (Web) Marketing activities are increasingly driven by the analysis and interpretation of data , knowing how to constantly measure and monitor the performance of your activities is the only way to understand their value and success.

Compared to other channels, emails have, or rather had, the great advantage of being perfectly traceable from every point of view .

They had, you understood correctly.

That's because the iOS15 shakeup expected this fall is just around the corner and in this article I'll tell you what's about to happen.

All this to say that Email Marketing is not dead : this channel represents the fourth in number of conversions for an e-commerce.

Taking inspiration from Maura Cannaviello's speech, today we will see together which metrics to take into consideration if you use this activity in your Marketing strategy.

Email Marketing: Some Data

According to data from the latest Email Statistics Report , more than half of the world's population, or 4.1 billion people to be precise, own an email account.

A very interesting figure, especially if we consider that the annual growth prospect will be 3% until 2025.

On average, we send and receive approximately 126 business emails every day.

Entering the Italian Email Marketing panorama, and analyzing 2020, compared to 2019, we can observe how the campaigns register a growing interest and greater propensity of subscribers to consider the communications received as relevant.

In essence, these metrics represent a testimony to how email campaigns were considered more interesting and relevant by recipients.

Email is a horizontal channel to the user's Customer Journey as it responds to different objectives such as:

• Intrigue the user, answering his questions, doubts, through blog posts or informative content.

• To bring interest to a specific initiative.

• Stimulate interactions.

• Increase brand authority.

• Build trust with your customers, encouraging them to buy again.

Apple Email Privacy

After the first earthquakes in the spring of 2021, with the first iOS updates with heavy changes in terms of tracking and privacy , which revolutionized the Advertising side, here we are with a new bomb.

In fact, with the update to iOS15 in autumn 2021, Apple users will be able to block the tracking pixel, preventing the recording of newsletter open rates.

Mail Privacy Protection will block the tracking of IP addresses, geolocation and email openings.

If you already do Email Marketing, I recommend you dig into your database data to understand how much this change will impact your lists and contacts.

The loss of the opening rate (in technical jargon, Open Rate) unfortunately is not the only bad news, because it will bring other consequences, such as:

• Domain reputation : not being able to know with certainty whether a portion of our audience has opened the email or not, there will be an accumulation of negative signals, of loss of tracking of openings.

It will also be difficult to clean up our contact lists. We will not be able to understand the real reason why a user does not open the emails we send them: "They are no longer interested in our content, or are they an Apple user?".

• Inability to activate automations on opening/not opening emails: with these changes on the tracking side, it will be difficult to bring back into activity those who no longer interact with us and our content.

• Impossibility to geolocalize openings: it will no longer be possible to know the geographic area of the members from the statistics. The same goes for the best opening hours to schedule shipments.

What will happen to Email Marketing?

How can we respond to these changes?

For the most part, email marketing uses the following metrics:

• Open Rate

• Click Rate

• Unsubscribe

These are quantitative indicators at our disposal that we can use as a reference, which must be combined with other metrics to help us define a strategy, such as:

• Clicks to Opens (Ratio between users who open the email and those who click).

• Bounce rate (Indicator that tells us how many messages did not reach the user's email inbox).

• Conversion Rate (The number of users converted after clicking)

• Deliverability (If you want to delve deeper into this fundamental topic, I recommend this article of ours ).

These are just some of the indicators to take into consideration and analyze, to understand what works and what doesn't.

A very important factor, to avoid iOS15 damaging your Email Marketing strategy is without a doubt the preferences update and now we go into detail, dedicating a specific paragraph to it.

Create a relationship with the user

To encourage interactions, to work on relationships and conversions, you need to act on the entire Customer Journey.

It is necessary to start from the contact acquisition phase, therefore the registration, passing through the Nurturing, the phase in which we try to identify the user's preferences in order to understand their areas of interest and share ad hoc content with them.

Registration form

It seems trivial, but it is not. The registration form is a fundamental element that allows you to populate your database and your mailing lists and must be present on your Website.

In addition to the classic format, we can also use dedicated landing pages and make Ads, or we can use overlay formats such as banners or pop-ups.

Here, I want to dwell.

The latter two formats are often considered annoying by users, because they block the browsing experience.

So, some tests were done on this matter by Litmus, who tried to eliminate the banners on their website that led to subscription to the mailing list, for a month.

Here on the side, the graph that shows the downward trend in the number of subscribers. In essence, pop-ups are annoying, but they are used on a large scale .

Updating preferences

Trying to bring people content that interests them should be the goal of those who work in the world of Web Marketing.

Therefore, it is essential to know the preferences of those who subscribe to our list. Through specific questions, it is appropriate to ask people to specify the following preferences, in order to understand which areas of interest they have:

• Topics of interest

• Product categories/brands

• Preferred language

• Preferred communication channel (If provided for by the strategy, channels such as Telegram, Whatsapp).

• Sending frequency

By doing this, we can define the user's sending preferences, so that they can be segmented into well-targeted lists .

This allows you to respond to the needs expressed by the person, asking your subscribers what type of content they would like to receive .

In conclusion

The success of your email marketing strategy is determined by quality metrics, not quantity metrics. Building a relationship with the user means responding to their requests , both in terms of content and frequency.

Have questions? Join our dedicated Facebook group Marketing For Small and Medium Businesses !