Email marketing is more than just sending out a message or two to your subscribers every week.
You’ve got to analyze data as well.
If you’re not checking the statistics, how do you measure the success of each campaign?
Look, I get it.
There are lots of numbers on the Internet, and you may not know where to start.
I’ll steer you in the right direction.
I can show you which statistics are important to check weekly.
Email yields a significantly higher return on investment than other direct marketing mediums do.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Check your own data from each email marketing campaign.
- Compare this information to general email marketing trends.
Doing just one or the other isn’t enough.
You need to check both if you want to analyze the information effectively.
Why?
It’s always important to know how you are doing.
You may think you’re lacking in certain aspects of your strategy based on the campaign data.
In reality, however, you may be outperforming the industry standards.
It’s impossible to know this unless you compare statistics.
If you don’t, you could end up wasting time, money, and effort in an attempt to improve certain areas of your campaign that are more than satisfactory.
And you may end up neglecting the parts that actually need improvement.
These are the top 5 email marketing statistics you should check at least once a week.
1. Unsubscribe rates
You’ve got to see how many of your subscribers are opting out of your email list each week.
If these rates are high, you have to determine why your customers are unsubscribing from your messages.
The above are the top reasons why consumers opt out of promotional emails.
Compare these reasons to those in your campaign.
Are you doing any of these things?
You have control over everything on this list.
Don’t spam your subscribers.
Emailing people too much is a huge turn off.
To prevent this, you can ask your customers how often they want to receive messages when they initially sign up.
Segment your customers based on their responses.
Do they want to receive a daily update, weekly newsletter, or monthly coupon?
Allow them to decide, and then you can avoid unsubscribes based on that top reason.
If the customer loses interest in your brand, that’s because you haven’t kept them engaged.
Ultimately this means you’re faltering in more than just your email campaigns.
You’ve got to stay relevant and avoid falling behind your competition.
Use competitor analysis tools to keep up with other players in your industry.
If your emails aren’t optimized for mobile devices, you are making an enormous mistake.
Mobile open rates are trending upward:
More people open their emails on mobile devices than desktop computers.
You’ll lose subscribers if your email marketing campaigns are not optimized for mobile phones.
Check your unsubscribe rates every week.
Understanding these numbers can help you improve your campaign and retain subscribers.
2. Open rates
Okay, so you’ve spent some time crafting the perfect email message.
It’s got a ton of quality content. You can’t wait to send it out.
But here’s the problem.
Your message is useless if your subscribers don’t open it.
Checking your open rates each week needs to be a priority.
You can compare them to the average open rates in your industry.
Aim to be better than average.
How can you increase your open rates?
Personalize your message.
If you have a personalized subject line, your email has a 22% greater chance of being opened than the one without it.
However, only 70% of businesses are personalizing their messages.
Why?
It could be for a couple of reasons:
- they don’t know how;
- they aren’t checking email marketing statistics on a weekly basis.
This is your time to shine.
Learning valuable information like this can help you increase your open rates, which can ultimately lead to more conversions.
Create a sense of urgency in the subject line.
You can use the words on this graph as a reference while brainstorming the subject of each campaign.
Using a word like “important” can help increase your open rates.
There are other ways you can create a sense of urgency without using those trigger words in the subject line.
You can imply urgency with a timeline or expiration of something happening.
Here’s an example from JetBlue:
It’s a highly effective strategy for getting higher open rates.
This subject line and message creates FOMO—the fear of missing out.
“The deal ends tonight.”
If the subscriber doesn’t open the message now, they will miss out on the deal that’s expiring in less than 24 hours.
Keep an eye on the number of subscribers opening emails from each campaign.
You can use some tips, like the example above, to increase your open rates.
Remember, your content may be great, but it’s useless if nobody is reading it.
Monitoring your open rates on a weekly basis is an absolute necessity.
3. Click-through rates
Once you get your subscribers to open your message, the next step is getting them to click.
Are they doing this?
Have you been tracking these statistics?
You should be.
Apparently, 15% of marketers do not track email clicks.
Only 23% of marketers track what happens after a subscriber clicks on an email message through integration analytics with their website and email software.
These numbers are very telling for a couple of reasons.
First, it seems like the majority of marketers understand the importance of tracking clicks.
Hopefully, you’re not in the bottom 15% who aren’t checking these numbers on a weekly basis.
If you are, that has to change immediately.
With that said, even though marketers understand the importance of clicks, less than 25% actually monitor what those clicks turn into on their websites.
How can you improve click-through rates?
Give your subscribers a reason to click.
What’s the goal of your email marketing campaign?
Each message may have a different goal.
For example, one week your objective may be to increase the download rates of a free PDF e-book on your website.
Another goal may be to improve social media shares of your latest blog post.
For an ecommerce company, the primary goal would be to increase sales with each marketing campaign.
Regardless of your goal, it needs to be clearly established before you create and design your message.
Now, you can create a perfect call to action (CTA).
An effective CTA will improve your click-through rates (CTR).
The majority of businesses use CTR to measure the success of the email marketing campaigns:
So, let’s take a step back for a second.
Obviously, you can’t measure the success of your CTR if you aren’t tracking it.
Making sure you check these statistics every week is the first step.
Now, let’s say these numbers are unsatisfactory or declining.
What can you do to improve this rate?
Create interactive emails.
Here’s an example.
Delta used real-time marketing to increase CTR by 132%.
How?
They gave their subscribers a reason to click within the message.
This is a perfect example of how interactivity can increase clicks.
These clicks can ultimately increase sales as well.
It gives the customer a chance to click on a seat, which may be more expensive than their initial purchase.
But it’s so easy to do.
The subscriber doesn’t need to visit a website, enter their login information, search for their flight, and select a seat.
Instead, they can upgrade to a seat with extra legroom or a first class ticket with just one click.
Interactive emails can help you boost revenue through upselling in addition to improving CTR.
All of this can be accomplished by checking your click-through rate statistics each week.
4. Length of engagement
Your email marketing software may or may not track this information.
But it’s important you understand how long your subscribers stay engaged with each message.
Here’s an excellent visual representation of these statistics:
What does this information tell you?
It looks like people have a short attention span.
If you send an email that’ll take 10 minutes to read, chances are it won’t get read.
That’s okay.
Use these engagement statistics to your advantage, and structure your campaigns accordingly.
Here’s an example from a blog post that I wrote.
We can apply this method to your email strategy.
Let’s pretend the title is the subject line and the introduction is the message in the body of the email.
The goal of this campaign is to generate more views on this blog post.
We can generate curiosity with the email.
Don’t give out the answer right away.
I didn’t come out and say, “You should focus on SEO before PPC.”
In this case, the subscriber would have no reason to open the message.
They already know the answer.
Remember what we said earlier?
The average length of engagement is low. You only have seconds to capture the reader’s attention.
So the introduction to that blog post is perfect for the email message. It’s quick, and it still doesn’t give away the answer.
Now the subscriber is even more curious.
So they’ll click through to the blog.
Mission accomplished.
If you weren’t checking the recent statistics regarding the length of email engagement, you might not have known to apply this psychological tactic.
Stay up to date with this information on a weekly basis to see if there are any significant changes with the trend.
5. Bounce rates
Monitor your bounce rates.
Your email marketing software most likely has a feature that helps you determine the risk of a message getting filtered as spam.
Here’s an example of what it looks like on Constant Contact’s platform
Make sure you check this before you send out your message.
If you have a high risk for getting filtered as spam, you’ll end up with a higher bounce rate.
Take a look back at your past campaigns to see what the bounce rates were.
If these statistics are high, it’s time to figure out what you’re doing wrong.
Here are some possibilities.
You might have invalid addresses on your email lists.
If that’s the case, it means your new subscriber rate is also thrown off.
Why are people entering an invalid email address?
Was it an honest mistake? Did they do this intentionally?
Look back at your subscriber acquisition strategy to analyze possible flaws in your system.
Emails could also bounce if the recipient:
- has a full inbox
- is on vacation with their auto-reply turned on
- blocked your email address
Keep an eye on your bounce rate statistics each week.
If the numbers are too high, you’ll need to determine the problem.
Conclusion
You need to monitor email marketing statistics every week.
Compare your numbers to trends in the marketing industry so you can effectively measure your results.
This will help you determine how successful your campaigns are.
You’ve got to understand the tendencies of your subscribers, such as their mobile habits.
Staying up to date on these numbers will make you a better marketer.
Here are some of the top email marketing statistics you need to check each week:
- unsubscribe rates
- open rates
- click-through rates
- length of engagement
- bounce rates
If your unsubscribe rates and bounce rates are high, you’ve got a problem that needs to be addressed.
The only way to know whether you’re trending in the wrong direction is to check this data each week.
Even if your message gets delivered, it’s useless if the subscriber doesn’t open it.
Once it’s opened, you’ll need to make sure the recipient clicks on your call to action, leading to conversions.
Use some of the tactics I outlined in this post to increase open rates, lengthen engagement time, and improve click-through rates.
Which weekly email marketing statistic do you think is the most crucial to improving conversions in your business?