In this article, we’re going to discuss 6 email marketing metrics that you want to understand when working with an autoresponder.

Email marketing is important in building a relationship with your customers but you have to ensure that your subscribers are actually receiving your emails and that your emails are effective.

What Is An Email Marketing System?

If you haven’t yet set up your email marketing system or don’t know where to start, here’s a quick explanation of what a typical system looks like.

• Promote a free download on social media or your website (lead magnet). This could be a checklist, a PDF or an ebook.
• A potential subscriber clicks on the link for the download and enters their email address.
• Your autoresponder sends the new subscriber the link to the free download.
• The new subscriber is now added (automatically) to an email sequence which you originally set up with emails to be sent once or twice a week.
• You can then email this subscriber with additional information and products you have to offer.

This system does take some time to set up but once it’s done, it will work on autopilot for you for ever. All you have to do is go in and tweak things a little every now and then.

This entire system is called a sales funnel and allows your subscribers to get to know and trust you because you keep sending them valuable information.

What Email Marketing Metrics Are The Most Important?

Once you have your autoresponder set up, there are a number of metrics that you can pull up regarding the emails that are being sent out. But which ones should you focus on? Here are the top six.

1. Open Rate

In some autoresponders, you can see the open rate by the hour. This will give you an idea of when people are more likely to open your emails. For example, it could be early in the morning before they go to work or late in the evening after they’ve had dinner.

Generally, you’ll see some type of trend here. Remember, you want your open rates to be between 14 to 27%. This ensures that enough people are actually getting your message. If you can achieve a higher open rate, then you’re doing really well.

So, how can you improve your open rate? One of the reasons that people will open an email is if they see their name in the subject line.

Another reason people are likely to open your email is if it has a catchy subject line. You’ll find that questions in the subject work very well for this. Or, you might include a free offer in your subject to entice subscribers to open your emails

2. Click Through Rate

The click-through rate is when a subscriber opens your email and actually clicks on one of the links in it. This shows that people are actually reading your emails, scrolling down, and then clicking on something that’s caught their attention.

Click through rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of delivered emails and multiplying that number by 100. Here’s an example:

20 clicks divided by 100 delivered emails = 20% click through rate

If you have a low click through rate, it means you either don’t have enough links in your emails that people want to click on or the links are just not enticing enough. You need to ensure that you always have a link in every email that you send out to improve your overall click through rate.

3. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate relates to the number of people who actually purchased a product or service from you after clicking the link in your email.

Of course, your conversion rate is not going to be as high as your click through rate as not everyone will buy something after they click on your links. For example, if you’re selling a high ticket item, you may only get one out of a thousand people who will actually buy it.

And, that’s precisely why you want to build up a huge email list. It’s a numbers game so you want to have a lot of subscribers. So, build your list slowly and then just keep working on it.

4. Bounce Rate

Generally, the bounce rate indicates people opening your emails and then leaving straight away without taking any time to look at your offer or interacting with your content.

You’ll often find a high bounce rate on your website because people are not taking the time to stick around. That’s why sales funnels tend to be more successful in collecting emails than blogs.

On a sales page, there’s not a lot of busy-ness on there. There’s usually just one link where people click and give their email address. Therefore, they tend to have a lower bounce rate.

For emails, there are six different reasons that an email might bounce.

1. It’s not a real email address
2. The email address is undeliverable
3. Your subscriber’s mailbox is full
4. The subscriber is on vacation and has an auto reply in place
5. Your subscriber’s email platform has blocked your email address
6. The email went directly into their spam folder

If you find that certain subscriber’s emails are consistently bouncing, just delete them from your list. This is because the more subscribers you have, the more you’ll have to pay for your autoresponder.

Essentially, you don’t want to be paying for emails that aren’t going to give you any return on your investment.

5. Subscribe Rate

This will help you determine how many people are subscribing from different sources. In your autoresponder, you can tag subscribers who are coming from different offers that you have.

This will give you an indication of which offers are converting the best. You can then focus on creating more of those or improving or deleting the offers that are not converting as well.

6. Unsubscribe Rate

Watching your unsubscribe rate will let you know what’s working and what’s not. Maybe, you find that you get a lot of unsubscribes on the 10th email in your sequence.

If this is the case, you need to determine what’s going wrong. Therefore, you have to look at those emails at that point in your sequence and try and tweak them a bit to see if you can improve your retention rate.

In conclusion, these are just some of the different metrics that you want to watch in your email autoresponder. The autoresponder I like to use is Active Campaign. You can check it out yourself to see if you might like to use it.

You want to make sure that you have great offers and send useful information in your emails so that your metrics are healthy. Doing this will help your email marketing campaigns deliver the results that you want.

You’ve Got This!