Email Marketing – Advanced Metrics to Measure Your Success

If you understand the basics of email metrics and how to measure them, you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of those who don’t utilise this strategy.

You can learn about them by reading our article entitled ‘Email Marketing – Basic Metrics to Measure Your Success’.

To drive your email marketing success even further though, you can keep reading below to learn about some of the more advanced metrics used by professional marketers to give their clients that super sharp and shiny edge.

Some of these metrics may seem hugely important and some may seem less so, but when used together, they can help you develop amazingly successful email campaigns that give unstoppable conversion rates!

The bounce rate tells you how many emails bounced back (were not successfully delivered) from your subscribers. These bounces can be categorised into either a ‘soft bounce’ or ‘hard bounce’.

A soft bounce refers to an email sent to a legitimate recipient that has been bounced back due to temporary issues with delivery.

This could be caused by things like a full inbox, an ISP restricting emails over a specific size or throttling too many emails coming from the same server in a given time period. It’s recommended to unsubscribe emails if there are more than around 10 bounces in a row, as these bounces can affect your delivery rate, which may eventually cause email service providers (ESPs) to consider your emails spam.

Hard bounces indicate a more permanent reason and can happen when the server either rejects the email or is unable to deliver it, if the domain doesn’t exist or if there is no mail server at the address.

These can be as a result of a mistyped or fake email or if a subscriber deletes their email account. Emails that hard bounce should ideally be immediately added to your suppression list so that they cannot be re-added to your recipient list again or deleted.

The majority of ESPs do this automatically for you.

Most people are aware of the ‘mark as spam’ button within their own email program, but many don’t realise that it doesn’t always just mark these emails as spam within their own email system, but also within the ESPs system too.

This is one huge reason to always make your unsubscribe link clear and visible, as otherwise, you may get people marking your emails as spam because they can’t easily find your unsubscribe link.

There are a myriad of reasons that your emails may be marked as spam, but to minimise this, only send emails to subscribers who have opted in, make sure it’s relevant and sent at an expected rate.

Make sure it’s easy for subscribers to unsubscribe if they wish and don’t send further emails to those who have unsubscribed.

You may at first think that the reasons for wanting to know where subscribers are located is obvious, but there are so many facets to this that the topic potentially needs its own article.

To narrow it down though, location data can help you inform your segmentation strategies, it can help you determine your design and copywriting techniques and of course, it can help you determine the best time to send your emails.

While there’s no such thing as a perfect time to send out emails, it definitely helps to not send them out during the middle of the night, so even just that information can be immensely helpful in optimising your campaigns.

Read time data can tell you how long a subscriber kept your email open.

This is obviously a great metric, as it indicates how engaging your emails are. Generally, if a large proportion of emails are quickly closed, it indicates a problem with the content and if a large proportion are kept open for a longer amount of time (depending upon the email length etc) it indicates that your emails are being well received.

It’s best to measure this metric in line with other metrics like your clickthrough rates, as sometimes a long read time can mean other things, such as a difficult to read email or subscribers not being able to find the CTA.

This data is another often misunderstood gem. Having the knowledge of which devices, email platforms, programs and apps your subscribers are using allows you to create emails that perform perfectly, consistently and aesthetically for all readers.

For example, if a large percentage of your subscribers use their mobile phones to read your emails, then you’ll know to create emails that are compatible and work well in phone format. Similarly, if many of your readers use Outlook, you’ll know to be careful with using animated GIFs for example.

This data could also help you to determine which products to market if there is a lack of other information (i.e., Apple accessories to Apple product users)!

Knowing how and how often your emails are shared can help in a number of ways. If a specific campaign sees a high number of forwards or prints, then it’s possibly due to your content ‘going viral’ or being valuable to subscribers in some way.

For example, a voucher email might see a high number of forwards and prints while an email about an online competition might only see a large number of forwards.

You can utilise this information for future campaigns by doing things like rewarding people who frequently forward your emails with a loyalty program.

While not usually measurable from within email metric programs, you can measure the social media mentions caused by your emails via some social media monitoring platforms (such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social to name a couple).

Doing so will let you know whether your campaigns are achieving a viral status, which content is shared more frequently and which segments of your subscribers are most likely to share.

Depending on the circumstances, measuring the email replies from your subscribers is usually very enlightening.

If you’re personalising emails and building rapport with your subscribers, you’ll likely receive a response when you ask a question or ask your subscribers to let you know whether they have any questions or feedback.

If you measure the responses of a current campaign against those of similar past campaigns, you should be able to see a developing trend, but don’t just analyse the quantitative data – the qualitative data is even more important and can guide you in future communications.

As you can see by this article – as well as its companion article ‘Email Marketing – Basic Metrics to Measure Your Success’ – there are so many metrics that allow you to measure your email marketing success and improve on it.

The most important aspect of a successful email campaign though is to use empathy and honesty with your customers to really put yourself in their heads and hearts so that every subscriber finds value in what you’re sending. By doing this, you’ll be sure of success, no matter how many metrics you analyse.

When it comes to the best email marketing software Australia, your business needs to weigh up your needs and balance them against your country’s data security laws.

It’s one thing to commit to a piece of software that has all the functionality and features you desire, but it’s another thing completely to find a software that stores your data legally and securely.

We hope our comparison helps you find the best email marketing software in Australia for your business and your goals.

Swift Digital’s templates help you effortlessly create stunning emails and events communications using our drag-and-drop email and event builder.

You can raise engagement with embedded images, videos, polls, article feedback, and emojis and schedule messages to send at the right time.

Government departments’ unique marketing requirements are covered with Swift Digital, and full compliance with all anti-spam and privacy laws is guaranteed. Swift Digital is also ISO 27001 certified.

Swift Digital is Australia’s leader in marketing automation software and event management working with organisations like the NSW Government, ATO, and companies like Westpac Bank and Qantas.

Find out why we’re the Australian government department’s number one choice for their professional communications and events.

To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our team today.

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