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You’ve mastered the art of email marketing from personalization, targeted segmentation, and email design to compelling content. But how do you gauge the impact of these strategies? Measuring email engagement is key to understanding your audience’s interaction and response to your emails. In this blog, we’ll explore a variety of metrics that will help you assess how effectively your audience is engaging with your content.
(👋 To get your content right, our email marketing best practices and how to use email via the customer journey blogs provide top tactics from our Campaign Management team).
Before diving into these metrics, defining your goals and establishing effective measurement criteria is essential. The most common email engagement KPIs include open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, and conversion rate. Yet, it’s important to avoid common pitfalls such as over-reliance on these metrics without considering context or campaign types.
Recent updates like iOS17 have enhanced the landscape’s complexity, challenging traditional methods of tracking email engagement. In light of these changes, it’s important to adapt and find more accurate ways to gauge interaction. In a noteworthy article, Ricardas Montvila delves into how changes originally introduced by iOS15 impact the accuracy of Email Open Rates reporting. Conducting an open rate analysis is becoming increasingly unreliable, considering that approximately 11% of email opens may be attributed incorrectly. With this in mind, it’s recommended that you look at alternative metrics:
3 EMAIL ENGAGEMENT METRICS TO MEASURE
1. UNSUBSCRIBE RATE: SHOWS EMAIL ENGAGEMENT AND AFFECTS REPUTATION
This metric refers to the number of unsubscribed users from the total number of delivered emails. It reflects your email engagement and can affect your sender reputation. Generally, a 0.05% unsubscribe rate is seen as healthy. People have changing tastes and habits, but if the metric increases or exceeds 0.05%, you’ll want to investigate what is causing people to unsubscribe.
Some common reasons are the wrong content, not being too relevant to your audience, or an overwhelming messaging frequency, which could cause a high unsubscribe rate.
PRO TIP: Dive deeper into engagement trends by tracking how subscriber interactions evolve over time, for instance, use subscriber lifetime value to understand engagement patterns and overall campaign effectiveness. This can help you determine who is most and least engaged with your emails to optimize and target more effectively for higher engagement, while reducing unsubscriptions.
2. DELIVERY VS DELIVERABILITY RATE: LEARN HOW SUCCESSFULLY EMAILS LAND IN INBOXES
Delivery rate refers to the e-mails being successfully delivered to a mail server without information about which folder, such as inbox, spam, etc.
On the other hand, the deliverability rate is a metric that measures the percentage of sent emails that successfully reach the recipients’ email inboxes without bouncing back or getting blocked by ISPs or email filtering systems.
If your delivery rate keeps dropping, it’s important to check your email lists. Next, remember that deliverability measures whether your email campaigns get into your subscribers’ inboxes. As gateway servers don’t let senders know if their emails are blocked by spam filters or sent to spam folders, it’s more difficult to measure your email deliverability accurately.
To improve your deliverability, you need to get familiar with these two factors: email authentication and sender reputation.
Email authentication is the first step in getting your emails delivered, and authentication relies on standards (SPF and DKIM) used to secure domains. If you would like more information on how email authentication works, check our Deliverability Specialist’s article, where we explain how SPF, DKIM, and DMARC standards work.
Next, sender reputation indicates how trustworthy your organization is. ISPs (Internet Service providers) have developed sophisticated algorithms to determine a sender’s email reputation. Our Deliverability Experts shared some pro tips.
PRO TIPS:
Avoid sending emails to previously bounced addresses; keep your email list as clean as possible by removing inactive users or invalid email addresses.
Carefully check your content to avoid bumping into spam triggers. Some practices include avoiding too many capital letters, exclamation marks, spammy words, and phrases. It’s also good practice to conduct a good check on your HTML to clean it from mistakes.
Keep a visible unsubscribe option in the footer to avoid being marked as spam.
Our 9 email best practices will help you keep your emails relevant and engage your audience.
Use a dedicated IP address and private domain. ESPs offer companies the option of having their own dedicated IP address. This is a good way to improve the control that you have over your email reputation.
3. EMAIL CHANNEL AGAINST THE ENTIRE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Customer Journey Mapping helps you understand how different channels, including email, contribute to a customer’s journey towards purchasing. By using Mapp Cloud, marketers can assess the email channel’s impact at various stages: the initial engagement (first touchpoint), ongoing interactions (in-between touchpoint), and the final conversion-driving communication (converting touchpoint). This analysis helps recognize email’s role and effectiveness with other channels. Businesses can fine-tune their strategies to enhance customer engagement and drive conversions more effectively by zooming out to see the broader picture.
Attribution modeling, particularly within our analytics solution, sheds light on the specific contributions of the email channel in terms of engagement and conversion. It evaluates the performance of individual email campaigns, measuring their impact through campaign clicks or generated revenue. This is crucial in comparing the effectiveness of the email channel against other marketing channels.
Example of Attribution in Mapp Cloud
DRIVE YOUR EMAIL ENGAGEMENT WITH MAPP’S PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Mapp’s Campaign Management team can help you build, test, and deliver campaigns on your behalf while effectively reporting on these – all within the Mapp Cloud platform. Talk with our Campaign Management team today to unlock the full potential of email marketing in your customer journey!
This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.