How to Measure Your Email Marketing Metrics & Win

If you’re new to the world of email marketing or just don’t know how to optimize the list you already have, we can help. Email marketing is a powerful tool, & when used in conjunction with great products, copy, messages, & other efforts, it enables you to earn more sales. But just like any other marketing tool, it needs measuring to know what’s working & how to win big. 

Not sure where to start? Here’s a run down of what to measure & how it can impact your ecommerce business.

Monitor Your Sign-Ups

The first step to email marketing success is determining how many sign-ups you have. It’s normal to see a trickle when you’re just ramping up to your first thousand subscribers. After that, you should start seeing more of a snowball effect with your list growth.

You can help drive more sign-ups by offering an opt-in in exchange for someone’s email address. A juicy coupon code or VIP access is a good trade-off for consumers looking for something to sweeten their purchase deal. Once they’re on your list, nurture them with entertaining emails, discounts, & valuable information. Otherwise, you’ll see people hopping off & on your list to snag that initial discount code.

Look at Your Open Rates

Once you’re seeing some movement on your list, you want to make sure they’re actually opening the emails you’re sending. Research shows a good email open rate for ecommerce is 15.68%, but it also depends on what you’re selling & your audience. If your open rate only climbs to 10%, but most of them are converting to sales, you’re still on the right track. But if you have a 20% open rate & only 5% ever buy anything, there’s a disconnect between your products, email marketing, & conversions.

You should A/B test your emails & sales to see what moves your inventory. You can also experiment with your product designs without carrying inventory or spending a dime. Upload your favorite designs to CustomCat & apply them to any of our hundreds of products. Grab one of our easy integrations, & when a product sells, we fulfill it & ship it out on your company’s behalf, so you earn as you go.

Get started with CustomCat here.

Check Your Conversion Rates

It doesn’t matter how many people sign-up or open your emails if you don’t see any sales. Make sure your conversion rates are aligned with the growth & activity on your list to get an idea of what’s going on. If people are signing-up in droves, you know your opt-in offer to get people on your list is working. If emails are opening, you know your subject heading is also performing well.

But when no one is buying, it’s either:

• Your email copy
• Your email offer
• Your product & prices
• Your email list segments (for example, don’t send emails designed for busy moms to teenagers on your list who just want funny T-shirts).

Experiment with all of the above & make notes about where you’re seeing movement in your conversions. It’s a good idea to start slow with one thing at a time before making tweaks to multiple items all at once. You won’t know what worked & will have a harder time implementing those improvements in your next email marketing campaign.

Double-Check Your Email Bounce Rates

Sometimes, bounce rates pull down everything going on with your email marketing analytics. When your email marketing provider tries to send out your campaign & it’s rejected, that’s called a bounce. This problem can happen if someone mistypes their address, gives a fake address, or their email provider sees your communication as spam.

There are a few ways you can improve your bounce rate. When your customers get your email confirmation, what does it say? Use it as an opportunity to tell customers to add your email address to their contacts ([email protected]) or check their spam. For example:

Thanks for signing up! You’ll get periodic email updates with sales, news, & other valuable information. Please add [email protected] to your contacts or double-check your spam or promotions folder to make sure our emails land in your inbox. 

Consider the Bounce Rates Off Your Landing Pages

What if your bounce rate, open rate, & everything else about your emails look good, but you’re still not making any sales? It could be your landing pages or product pages. Open up your ecommerce selling platform’s analytics or Google Analytics & see what’s going on. If people are showing up to your pages for just a few seconds & leaving, you’ve got a problem & need to study everything with a critical eye.

• Are the product photos clear & professional?
• Does the product copy get to the point, engage, & educate?
• Does the landing page align with the offer in your email?

Make sure everything is in agreement between your email & the page you’re sending it to. If you’re announcing a huge holiday sale for your unique hoodies, make sure that’s reflected on your site & they’re going to the right page.

Assess the Engagement Rate

Sometimes everything looks mostly okay with your emails, but you’re not sure if anything you’re messing around with is making much of a difference. Double down on anything you seem to be doing right, like sending out emails on a Thursday at noon instead of Saturday afternoon after realizing the open rate is higher.

But you can also look for things that aren’t as easy to measure. Do people respond to your emails? Do they send you LOLs over something you wrote or tell you how much they look forward to your emails? Do your campaigns make the rounds on social media & get shared? Sometimes, email marketing is about how it impacts your brand awareness & how people perceive your online store. Even if that’s harder to measure, it’s still email marketing gold.

How do you measure your email marketing metrics? Let us know by leaving a comment below!