As you work toward building a strong and highly converting email list, one of the ways you can know you’re doing things effectively is to track the numbers. Your metrics are the key to knowing what works and what doesn’t work for your unique situation. The following metrics should be tracked.
- Click-Through Rate – Knowing how many people who open the email are clicking through to at least look at whatever you’re trying to communicate with them helps you know if your initial messaging is persuasive enough.
- Conversion Rate – Knowing how many people answer your CTAs compared to how many people are clicking through is a number that is important to know because it helps signal whether you’ve done an excellent job targeting your ideal customer or not.
- Bounce Rate – How many of your emails are bouncing and not being delivered? That can signal an issue with your email messages and might signal a problem with how you’re collecting email addresses if they don’t work.
- List Growth Rate – How fast are you growing your list? If you know this number, you can project based on your activity how fast you can grow your list to where you want it to be.
- Sharing / Forwarding / Engagement – One key performance indicator that helps you know if you’re doing a good job targeting your audience is how many of them want to share, forward, or engage with your messages compared to how many who open them.
- Return on Investment – How much money can you trace directly to your email messages and email list compared to how much you have invested or spent on the system?
- Open Rate – Out of all the emails you send, how many are opened on average? If you send out one email to all 1000 subscribers, what percentage opens it? How does this number compare to the industry standard?
- Unsubscribe Rate – When you send messages to your audience, how likely are they to unsubscribe? Sometimes marketers get nervous about causing their subscribers to unsubscribe and stop sending messages. This is a mistake. You want your messages to segment and weed out uninterested parties. If your unsub rate is high, you may have a targeting issue.
- Spam Compliance – Your email autoresponder has a way to test each message for spam issues, plus you can look in the back office and find out if anyone’s complained about your messages. Understanding what triggers spam issues can help you avoid this problem.
- Revenue Per Email – Knowing how much you earn on average for each email you send to your list subscribers can be very motivating to help you send even more useful messages to them.
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- Revenue Per Subscriber – How much revenue on average do you earn per subscriber on your list? This number will go up as you get better at targeting and is a great number to be aware of so you can understand how much you need to invest to reach your goals.
Check your numbers before each campaign as well as periodically during the campaign to ensure that you are doing what you can to achieve your goals. The only way to be sure is to get the data because your hypotheses can be wrong. It’s always better to know exactly what is working and what is not working rather than make assumptions.