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For many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the pandemic was the push they needed to embrace digital technologies, such as email marketing software. In addition, new challenges such as inflation and labor shortages have left small businesses with the time and resources to maintain a robust marketing program. A recent Act! Questionnaire found that 69% of SMB owners take on all marketing responsibilities for their business. Email marketing technology has quickly become a necessity for SMBs looking to keep up with the competition.
Since ROI is paramount for many of these SMB owners, getting the most out of their email marketing is critical. To do this, companies need to start by setting clear goals, then use the tools necessary to measure the success of those goals and simplify email marketing processes.
Related: Your email marketing is doomed without these 3 essentials
SMART goals
We’ve all seen the acronym: successful email marketing starts with setting SMART goals that correctly define and measure the goals of an email campaign. If you’re not sure what your email campaigns are delivering, ask yourself two questions first:
- Do you have SMART goals?
- Are you effectively measuring your progress?
SMBs often create email marketing campaigns with (at best) ill-defined goals, such as “raising awareness of a new product.” While you may be able to track things like impressions, does that really determine the exposure you’ve created around the product?
Email marketing campaigns should focus on a specific, measurable outcome, such as generating new leads, improving conversion rates, and growing a subscriber list. Failure to properly define and track email campaign goals can lead to missed opportunities and uninformed decision making.
The metrics your team tracks should be determined by the goal of your email campaign. For example, if your goal is to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your website, you should track total time on site (TOS) while monitoring bounce rates to determine whether page improvements are driving users to stay longer. If the goal is to generate leads, teams should track lead source viability over time, leads by campaign type, and average touch points to conversion. To generate successful email marketing campaigns, marketers must first define clear goals and the metrics to track them.
Related: 6 marketing metrics every business should be tracking
The must-track stats
While teams should track certain target-specific metrics for each email campaign, there are key metrics that should be tracked in virtually any marketing campaign.
1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
This is the percentage of recipients who click on one or more links in your email. Many email marketers are obsessed with the email open rate, but the open rate can be a misleading statistic. It’s hardly a success if recipients just open your email without clicking through to the website, whitepapers, or other calls-to-actions (CTAs) you’ve provided. CTR gives teams a much better understanding of how appealing their content was to the recipient.
2. Conversion rate
Your email campaign’s conversion rate goes one step further in the analysis, showing how many recipients both clicked an email link and took the desired action (try a product, complete a survey, fill out a form). The conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to track as it is directly related to the campaign goal. Whether you want recipients to sign up for a mailing list or watch a product video, conversion rate effectively measures how engaging and compelling your email marketing content is.
3. Bounce rate
Bounce rates refer to the percentage of emails that have not been successfully delivered to your recipients’ inboxes. Marketing teams need to track both “soft” and “hard” bounces. Soft bounces are emails that can’t be delivered because a recipient’s inbox is full or because of some other temporary delivery issue. Hard bounces are emails that cannot be delivered because the recipient’s email address does not exist on that server.
While soft bounces usually get to the recipient, hard bounces can be more problematic because ISPs use your hard bounce rate to assess your reputation as a sender. So if your company’s email account has numerous hard bounces, it may be labeled as a spam account by service providers and all your email may end up in spam folders.
4. Return on investment (ROI)
ROI indicates how much revenue an email marketing campaign generates after costs. For example, if an email marketing campaign costs $100 to implement and generates $2,000 in additional sales for your business, you will earn $1,900 and your ROI is 1,900%. It’s important to calculate all costs related to your email marketing campaign throughout its duration to ensure accuracy (such as the cost of the workforce that writes and sends the emails).
While not every email marketing campaign will generate a 1,900% ROI, teams that consistently track these and other must-track metrics will be able to identify needs and continue to improve campaigns based on data.
Related: How to Start Using Email to Market Your Small Business
Simplifying Email Marketing Metrics
Whether it’s goal-specific metrics or metrics you need to track throughout every email marketing campaign, there’s a lot of data to manage. Marketing teams that can simplify the collection and analysis of email marketing metrics prevent valuable data from slipping through the cracks or time wasted on unprofitable campaigns.
One way to organize email marketing metrics and streamline analytics is to integrate email marketing tools with CRM software. Using CRM with email marketing, teams can easily access contact details, leave notes or update customer history directly in their contact details and most importantly, build targeted email lists.
By integrating email marketing with CRM, teams can optimize an end-to-end email marketing campaign, from audience building to collecting and analyzing key metrics, all from a single platform. This eliminates the need to transfer data from one solution to another – increasing the likelihood of data being lost or overlooked – and creates a centralized view of the entire email marketing campaign.
With ongoing challenges, the ability to optimize email marketing campaigns can help SMBs save money while gaining a competitive advantage. SMBs that take the time to set clear goals, understand how to measure the success of those goals, and simplify the analysis of key metrics not only see continued improvements in their email marketing efforts, but also make a positive impact on the profit from their business.
