If you’re not using email marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy, you’re missing out on potential leads and higher engagement with your audience. Email is a powerful way to stay in front of existing customers, reconnect with old prospects and lost customers, and consistently get your message out to new prospects to win their business. Not sure if your email marketing efforts are paying off? Here’s how to measure your email marketing efforts to get the most out of each and every effort.

Not using email marketing yet? Email marketing statistics you should know

Many small business owners are still not embracing email marketing for a variety of reasons. If you’re reading this article and are still on the fence about email marketing, check out these statistics about email:

86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes. (HubSpot)

Email is the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences, behind colleague recommendations and industry thought leaders. ( WordStream )

) 89% marketers said that email was their primary channel for lead generation. (Mailigen)

Email marketing has an average ROI of 3,800 percent. For every dollar invested, the average return is $38. (Salesforce)

By the end of 2018, worldwide mobile email users are expected to total over 2.2 billion. (Radicati)

For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $32 (DMA, 2018).

If you’re not using email marketing yet, the few statistics above should at least tempt you to give it a try.

How to run a successful email marketing campaign

Before you get started on any email marketing, you need to do a little prep work ahead of time. Doing so will make all the difference in how effective your email marketing is and make it easier to measure. First, use an email marketing platform that allows you to easily customize emails, segment your email marketing lists, and measure your results. Mailchimp and Constant Contact are the two favorites out there, but there are many other platforms as well. Second, determine the goal of your email marketing. What are you looking to accomplish with your emails? Drive traffic to the site? Position yourself as a subject matter expert? Alert clients of a new service or product? Upsell existing clients? Get more leads? Entice more calls? Determine what you’re looking to accomplish and then ask yourself: will this email accomplish this? Third, really think about the subject line. People do get a lot of emails in their inbox daily. Make sure people recognize who its from and write a subject line that will get people to open it. Need inspiration? Here are a few ideas of email marketing subject lines that will get your email opened. Fourth, make sure you’re providing information people want, not just content for the sake of content. Target your emails by segmenting your lists. Last, keep it short, sweet, to the point and easy to read, which includes images to break up the text.

Measuring your email marketing efforts

Once you start your email marketing efforts, it’s time to measure to ensure you’re getting the results you want for the time and money you’re putting into it. So how exactly do you measure what a “successful” email marketing campaign looks like? There are several ways that email marketing can be considered a success. Decide what makes the most sense for your business.

Email open rate

If your emails aren’t getting opened, there’s not much chance you’re going to engage with the reader. Your open rate is the percentage of your email recipients who opened your email. This is an important metric to measure because your email campaigns won’t do a thing unless your subscribers are opening and reading them. So, what’s considered a good open rate and how do you find out what yours is? Most email marketing programs will tell you what your open rate is, and then you can compare it to the average email open rate for your industry.

Click Through Rate

Assuming you added links to your email to get people from your email to your website or social channels, you’ll want to see how many people clicked through. Your click through rate is the percentage of your email recipients who clicked on a link inside your email. Most of the time, getting your subscribers to click on a link inside your email will be the main goal of your campaign (or at least one of the goals!), so this is an important metric to measure. Again, most email programs will tell you what your CTR is and many will tell you how you stack up to others in your industry.

Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the percentage of your email recipients who completed your desired action like reading your blog, making a purchase, or signing up for a free demo. Make sure, if you’re sending them to your website, that you have a way to measure what your email recipient did after they clicked through from your email to your website. Google Analytics is ideal for this. You can see how many site visitors came to your site via email by looking at the “Acquisition” report of your website.

Unsubscribe rate

People are going to unsubscribe for many reasons. Hopefully, one of them is NOT because you added them to your list without their permission. Doing that can send your unsubscribe rate through the roof. Always email ONLY to those who gave you permission to do so. Regardless, you’re going to get people who unsubscribe. What you want to do is keep that as low as possible. If you see a high unsubscribe rate, your message is wrong, you’re marketing to the wrong people, or perhaps you’re sending too many emails. Keep an eye on how many people unsubscribe to your emails to help you see how to keep that number low.

Bounce rate

Your bounce rate is the percentage of your total emails sent which weren’t successfully delivered to your recipient’s inbox. This can happen for many reasons, including:

Bad email address

Vacation/out of office filters

Full mailbox

Be sure to keep your email list up to date and clean out bounced emails as appropriate to keep your bounce rate down.

Sharing

When someone receives your email and shares or forwards it to others, this is a big win! Most email marketing programs have this feature to include in your emails. Keep an eye on it to see how often and which types of email messages are shared or forwarded to others.

Social media follows

If you connected your social channels to your email message and readers clicked through to follow you on one or more social channels, this is a great ROI! It means they found value in your content and are open to hearing more from you via Facebook, Twitter, etc.

As you can see, there are many ways in which an email marketing campaign can be successful. If you’re hoping that you can simply send out an email and the sales will flood in, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Email marketing is a great way to consistently market to your audience. Remember, prospects need to see your advertisements seven times before they buy. This applies to marketing too. You need to be consistently in front of prospects to engage them, and always engaged with your current clients to keep and potentially upsell them. Email marketing is a great way to do that but like any marketing effort, you want to measure the results. Not sure how to implement a solid email marketing strategy? Reach out to a small business marketing professional like Strategic Marketing Services to help you craft email marketing that will get you results!