Email marketing: How to measure your success
If you want to optimize your newsletter, you should pay attention to key performance indicators. There are countless metrics in email marketing.
Lars Tinnefeld, an email marketing expert at Trusted Shops, provides online store owners with an overview and explains what’s important when analyzing results.
1. delivery rate
How many recipients does your email actually have? The delivery rate will tell you. Emails that cannot be delivered are called bounces (see also: bounce rate). Hard bounces are emails that were rejected immediately. Common reasons for this include a missing domain or a missing account. In contrast, soft bounces can only be temporarily undeliverable, such as when an inbox is full. To calculate the delivery rate, subtract the number of bounces from the total number of emails sent, divide the result by the total number of emails sent, and multiply by 100.
2. opening rates
The open rate indicates, as a percentage, how many of the emails sent or delivered were actually opened. The open rate can be calculated as either total or unique. For the total open rate, the number of total opens is divided by the number of emails delivered, and the result is multiplied by 100. For the unique open rate, only emails opened exactly once are counted.
3. click rates
The click-through rate measures how many clicks actually occurred relative to the number of emails delivered. For example, the total click-through rate is 14.3 percent if, out of 1,000 emails delivered, the content was clicked 143 times. In addition to the total click-through rate, the unique or effective unique click-through rate can also be used.
4. conversion rate
The conversion rate measures the actual number of actions taken by the recipient after clicking on an email on a website. This can be, for example, a sale or a download using an email address (lead).
5. deregistration rate
This key figure is used to determine the percentage of newsletter recipients who unsubscribe from a newsletter after it has been sent.
6. bounce rate
Bounces are notifications of undelivered emails that are automatically sent back to the sender. This is the percentage of emails returned by the mail servers in relation to the total number of emails sent.
7. benchmarks
All the figures you have calculated won't help if you don't set yourself personal goals by which you can really measure your success in the end. Therefore, set yourself realistic goals: what do you want to achieve, with what effort and by when?
