Email marketing metrics – What to track beyond CTR and Opens?

Email marketing is yielding some really wonderful results for most email marketers globally. As we discuss email campaign management, there is so much to track right from the email list engagement, past purchase data, propensity of unsubscribe, open rates, click and click to open rates, spam complaints, etc.

But, with an advance in the technology, as email marketers; we ought to track many other metrics which in turn might help us send better targeted campaigns.

So, in our today’s post we will walk you through some of the other email metrics apart from the basic CTR and Open rates which might help you achieve heavenly email ROI.

Open and Click to Smile Rate

How many of your campaigns could bring a sparkling smile on the face of your recipients? Do you have some counts for the same? Identify the kind of campaigns that attract more recipients and bring a smile to their faces. It could be simply with relevant personalization, offer or discount or may be a witty Johnson box. Identify what is the open to smile rate and further more click to smile rate if you have an associated landing page with the email campaign. You can always calculate the overall gratification and happiness shared through a quick feedback.

Trend estimation and CUTR

Well, the name speaks it all. Trends can change your email ROI drastically. Right from the batch and blast to dynamic content insertion, campaigns have changed radically over the years. Even within the span of three years trends are changing from scalable to responsive to mobile first to wearable focused campaigns. Estimate the upcoming trends before planning your campaigns. Identify the recent in vogue with what’s new that buzzing around. You can also measure your CUTR (Catching up with the Trend rate) to see if your campaigns are built with a forward looking approach or they aren’t even catching up with the latest trends. You can also run a model or hire a statistician to predict trends for you.

Click to Convert Rate

Sounds very basic, but most marketers view CTOR or CTR separate from Conversion rate which isn’t the right way. To get the most out of the data, as marketers, we don’t just need to who clicked on the links, but also who all got converted from those clicks. With this you can classify users who click everytime, but don’t get converted and those who click specifically to convert. If your click to convert rate is low, it can be because of an attractive email, but not so attractive landing page, offer or problems with checkout, payment options, shipping and other factors related to the UX.

Open and Click Transition Over Days

Well, we know open and click rates quite well, but at most times we only track open rates and click rates soon after we launch the campaign and do not measure the transition in the statistics over the period of time. It is vital to measure the open and click transition to certain days. Your open or CTOR might be 10% on the first day of email campaign, but it might increase to a good over 25% on the third day. It is important to measure the transition in open and click rates from the day of send to over a next few days. Ideally, an email gets opened within 3 days it gets into recipient’s inbox.

Email Forwarding Rate & New Forward Subscriptions

With every forward, you get an opportunity to attract new contact on to your database. The rate at which your subscriber or recipient is forwarding an email is important. Further if you can track how many of those forwarded contacts subscribed to your newsletter or emailer it would add a great deal of value to your campaign.

Are you aware about other metrics that email marketers can put to use apart from those open and click rates? If so, do share with us in the comments below: