How do you know if your email marketing campaigns are successful? Understand and track these three key analytics to assess the effectiveness of your email blasts.

If you scroll through your email inbox right now, how many marketing emails do you come across? If you’re anything like me, and refuse to clean out your inbox, probably hundreds. It’s safe to assume that email marketing is here to stay.

But from a business standpoint, in a world full of flooded inboxes, how do you determine if your email marketing efforts are making a powerful impact? You do it by understanding how to decipher analytics, and there are three metrics, in particular, that you should keep an eye on.

1. Open rate

Of course, you’ll be interested in learning how many people open your emails. But, what constitutes as an “open” in the email marketing world?

An open rate is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens (only once) by the number of emails sent, minus the number of bounces.

It’s important to note that a low open rate isn’t uncommon. In fact, the industry average of open rates for marketing and advertising emails is a mere 17.8% (MailChimp). In reality, anything between 10% and 20% is revered as successful.

2. Click-through rate

So you’ve noticed that your recipients have opened your email, but have they engaged with any of the content? This is where a click through-rate comes into play.

A click through rate is the percentage of recipients that have clicked on any link in your email message. It’s calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks (only once) by the total number of emails delivered.

Much like open rates, it’s advantageous to recognize that a high click-through rate is quite uncommon. Typically, they’re going to be even lower than your open rate. The industry average for marketing and advertising emails is only 1.9% (MailChimp). With it being so low, anything between 0.5% and 1% is doing the trick.

3. Bounces

When it comes to bounces, there are two types: a soft bounce and a hard bounce.

• Soft bounce: Indicates a temporary delivery issue to an address, including: recipient mailbox is full, recipient email server is down or offline, or email message is too large.
• Hard bounce: Indicates a permanent reason an email cannot be delivered to an address, including: recipient email address does not exist, domain name does not exist, or recipient email server has blocked delivery.

Bounces are bound to happen. The industry average of bounce rates for marketing and advertising emails is around 8% (MailChimp).

While it’s not the only factor, analytics play a large role in building an effective email marketing strategy. Continue to refine both your content and mailing list, and try not to let the numbers get you down!