You’ve got lots of email marketing metrics but what should you do?
Where do you focus to ensure email marketing success?
Focus on increasing open rates, minimize your unsubscribes, get more click throughs?
What about bounce rates and spam complaints?
Surely inbox placement should be a top metric to watch?
And when the boss asks what email marketing performance looks like what do you say?
The problem is most email marketing metrics are based on campaigns and not measurements of the email marketing channel as whole nor do they necessarily track email marketing success. The campaign metrics have their place but not for business success.
Why is it campaign metrics don’t align to business metrics? Think about these situations.
If you decrease your email frequency the data shows open rates are likely to increase. Is that good? Will it mean business success? In most case its unlikely (explained here).
When open rates increase, spam complaints tend to increase too. Increasing complaints is a bad thing.
It happens because people complain less about emails they never read. When customers have invested a few seconds of time reading and aren’t happy then because they regret their choice to read, they’re looking to point the finger back at you. It’s your fault they wasted their time – and they are going to tell you with the spam button.
We need to separate business metrics from campaign, or better described as process, metrics and focus on the business metrics that show email marketing success.
Check out which business metrics to watch in the article here