Do you track any email marketing metrics? How can you use your email marketing analytics to improve your email marketing?

If this is a topic you've been avoiding, the great news is that looking at metrics, understanding them, and using them to your advantage isn't as hard as it might sound. Just collect the right data, and you'll be able to spot opportunities for improvement and growth. And yes, that means more money!

So let's get into it. 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:19 ) Join our FREE Facebook group.

(2:59 ) Why do email marketing analytics matter?

(4:18 ) What email marketing metrics should you look at?

(7:59 ) What can you do if your open rates are low?

(11:55 ) The truth about your click-through rates.

(13:25 ) How to increase your click-through rates?

(20:51 ) What can you do when your conversion rate is low?

(25:12 ) What can you do when your unsubscribe rate is high?

(30:15 ) How can you use your email marketing analytics data?

(32:44 ) Why you should always calculate your EPSPM.

(35:46 ) Subject lines of the week.

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Why do email marketing analytics matter? 

Email analytics help you figure out where the biggest levers and opportunities for your email marketing are. When you look at the right metrics, you can get more from your emails. Plus, the analytics you need to track and understand aren’t that complicated and can (mostly) be found inside your email marketing platform.

You probably think that one of the biggest metrics we suggest you track is the growth of your email list. And while that’s something you should look at, other metrics will tell you whether you have a well-refined engine that’s working for you. By knowing which email campaigns are doing well, you'll find out where you have room for improvement.

What email marketing metrics should you look at?

Open rates

If you find that one specific email in one of your campaigns has a zero open rate, you’ll want to look at that. As we always say, open rates aren’t reliable, as such. But they’re still a good indicator in comparison to each other.

So if you see a surprisingly low open rate one day or on one specific email, you may want to investigate. Could it be the timing? Or the subject line? This matters because if no one opens an email, it means they haven’t seen the link to your offers. In other words, if no one opens your emails, you won't be able to influence your click-through rate. 

Click-through rate

Click-through rates are shown as the percentage of people who’ve clicked on your links based on how many people you sent the email to.

They used to be shown as a percentage of the people who opened the email, which isn't great and something systems have moved away from. This is because the way open rates are tracked is broken. So it’s best to look at the percentage of people who clicked on your links based on how many people you sent the emails to. Email platforms have switched to this method of tracking, so if you’ve recently seen your click-through rates drop through the floor, that’s probably why - the way they're being tracked has changed. But that's a good thing!

Conversion rate

Another metric you want to track is your conversion rate. How many people took action as a result of you sending an email? When we talk about 'taking action', that could mean buying your product but also registering for a webinar, for example. It's about whatever action you're asking your subscribers to take in that email.

Bounce rate and unsubscribe rate

You'll also want to track your bounce rate, which looks at how many email addresses weren't deliverable.

And finally, you want to track your unsubscribe rate. Every time you send an email, some people will unsubscribe - that's just a fact. That’s the cost of your email marketing but also the reason why there should always be some kind of offer in every email you send. 

Tracking your email marketing analytics

If you’re inside our membership The League, you’ll know we have a piece of training that takes you through how to track your email analytics in great detail. So once you set up any email campaign, you can take a look at the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate of each campaign and, overall, at the bounce rate and unsubscribe rate of your email marketing.

This means you then have levers that you can start pulling on to improve your email marketing. So let's look at each metric in more detail.

What can you do if your open rates are low?

If you have a low open rate (10-30%) on one of the emails inside a campaign, it could be that the subject line needs tweaking. Otherwise, you should be looking at your engagement.

A lot of our clients, when they first come into our world, may have massive email lists, but they'll tell us they've never done any engagement management. Once someone subscribes to their list, unless they leave of their own accord, no action is being taken by the list owner to keep an eye on who’s opening the emails, who’s clicking on the links, or who’s doing anything.

Are you implementing good email list hygiene?

Ordinarily, what we see when people join our programme and start implementing our campaigns is that the frequency of their emails increases. And the first thing we advise our clients to look at is who is likely to open those emails.

If you have a list of 10,000 people and 1,000 of them open an email you send, you have a 10% open rate. But if only 5,000 of the people in your list are even using their email addresses (because all the others aren't valid anymore), you’re only really sending your emails to 5,000 people – not 10,000. The others are dead emails, spam traps, or people who no longer engage with you.

This is why it’s important to look at your business and let go of this vanity metric of how many subscribers you have on your list. It only matters if you take the time to regularly try and revive or re-engage the people who aren’t paying attention and then delete them if they don’t re-engage with you. Deleting people might sound painful, but it’s the best possible thing for the hygiene of your list. Once you start doing that, you’ll see your click-through rate go up, and you'll be able to get your list to a point where your subscribers are people who care.

The truth about your click-through rates

What happens if your open rates are good, but people aren’t clicking on the links to your offers? Typically, when you first present an offer, you’re going to see a higher click-through rate compared to the people who've gone through an entire email campaign that talks about your core offer. 

Over time, people will click on different versions of that offer, and the click-through rate will improve. Then in your day-to-day email marketing (i.e. the email you send live each day), you’re going to see a lower click-through rate when talking about that same offer.

That's because the whole point of the longer-term relationship-building you’re doing with your daily emails is about waiting for the right time for people to want to buy your product. If they had an urgent need for it, they would have bought it during the first 60 days of you emailing them through your campaigns. Because that’s what those campaigns are designed to do.

The reason why people haven’t bought from you yet is that it’s not yet the right time for them. So you can expect a lower click-through rate, which, of course, means a lower conversion rate too.

How do you increase your click-through rates?

If you want people to click on the links in your emails, make them really obvious that there's something to click on. Spell out “Click here to do X” – no matter what action you want your subscribers to take. Let people know they can click and make sure that your links look like links (i.e. blue and underlined).

To make them stand out even more, you can even put them on a separate line. If your click-through rate is super low, you could use the most obnoxious-looking link for a few weeks to make sure people see it. You could even temporarily add some chevron arrows in front of it and put it all in capital letters. Once you know people are seeing it and are clicking on it, you can then dial things down again and remove all the extra bits.

We’re literally obsessed with getting people to click on the links in our emails, which is why we put together a resource called Click Tricks, which you can get for FREE. It includes 12 creative ways of drawing attention to the links in your email so people don't scroll past them. We did some testing a couple of years ago, and we found situations where a lower open rate could still lead to a higher click-through rate because of what the links in your emails look like. So we know it works!

Why you want to increase your click-through rate and not your open rate

Think about sales calls. You're better off having fewer calls but with higher-qualified leads than lots of calls with people who aren't necessarily interested. You'll get more people buying that way. Having loads of sales calls with just anyone and everyone isn't as effective b