What Makes A Sublime Email Campaign Report? Let’s Find Out!

You have pored meticulously over your email copy to make it crisp and impactful, ensured your design is top-notch, adhered to all email accessibility best practices, made your templates responsive, pruned and segmented your contact list, and delivered your emails after thoroughly testing them across different email clients and devices. Good job! But, that’s only 50% of what goes into a successful email marketing campaign. The remaining half is shaped by how effectively you measure your performance. Sure, email offers a staggering ROI of 3800%, but it’s only up for grabs for those who are ticking all the right boxes. And how can you get there? By having an airtight email campaign report at your disposal.

Here, we are going to show you a host of different metrics that you MUST include in your campaign report. In the process, we will explain how tracking them will allow you to stay on top of your efforts at all times. Excited, already? Let’s dive in!

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

The clickthrough rate is a measure of the number of subscribers who clicked on the links attached in your emails. Suppose you delivered 500 emails and registered 10 clicks, then your clickthrough rate would be 2%. As you can already observe, CTR is an excellent indicator of your campaign’s performance. It helps marketers understand the efficacy of every single email they are sending to your contacts. The CTR sheds light on how much engagement and interaction your campaigns are able to inspire. If your percentage is leaning towards the lower side, treat it as a strong sign to urgently revamp your strategy.

Listed below are a few techniques that can help you fix your CTR.

• A/B test your subject lines. Your subscribers can be convinced to click into your emails only if your subject lines are able to effectively grab their attention. A compelling subject line is a tough nut to crack, and even if you feel you’ve got it right, you still have to test it with your audience to determine if it resonates with them or not. Create at least two versions of your subject line, pit them against one another and use the one which comes out on top.
  
• Pay attention to your link placement. For people to take action against your links, they should first be able to spot them clearly, right? Use your copy and design to guide your subscribers toward them. If your email body has a catchy visual element, try to place your links in that very vicinity. This way, your recipients will face no trouble locating them.
  
  Take a look at this email from Vacasa. The links are as prominent as it gets.

• Keep your copy crisp and to the point. Copy that is long and winding does nothing but exhaust the reader and pushes them to bounce from the email even before they have encountered your offer link. Let your offer link be your email’s primary attraction and the copy, just the compass which guides your customers to it.
  
  Here’s Piecework’s email, for instance. Short, sweet, and thoroughly impactful.

• Include social sharing buttons. So what if a certain user isn’t interested in your offer? They might just know someone who would be. By including a social sharing option, you are basically making it convenient for them to spread the word about your offer. Subsequently, this can give a significant boost to your CTR.
• Send targeted content. Imagine you have two emails in your inbox. You are a recurring customer of both the brands from whom you have received these. The email from the first brand alerts you to a sale where you can avail of attractive discounts across all their products. The email from the second brand also alerts you to a sale, except this one talks specifically about the discounts that are up for grabs on items that you frequently purchase from them. You’d be more tempted to click on the second brand’s offer, wouldn’t you? Well, that is the magic that targeted content casts on customers across the globe. But, to effectively target your customers, you first need to segment your contacts into different pockets based on parameters like age, gender, location, preferences, buying patterns, position in the sales funnel, and the like. This will allow you to discern the unique needs and requirements of each section of your target audience. Accordingly, you can compose your emails.
• Optimize your emails for mobile. At present, as many as 85% of subscribers use smartphones to consume their emails. Hence, if your emails are not mobile-friendly, you will never be able to get your CTR on the right track.

Conversion Rate

Your email’s conversion rate is determined by taking into account the total number of recipients who not just clicked on your link but also went ahead with completing the desired action. For instance, if the link invited your recipients to purchase a particular product, your conversion rate would tell you what portion of them actually bought it. The conversion rate is an extremely critical metric for it helps you understand how effective your messaging is. A high percentage essentially means that your copy, design, and CTA (call-to-action) are all working well in unison to elicit the desired response from your subscribers. Additionally, it provides you with clarity regarding your ROI. It helps you determine whether the investment you are putting into a particular campaign is worth it or not.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate refers to the total percentage of sent emails that did not land in your recipients’ inboxes. There are two kinds of email bounces:

1. Soft bounce- This happens in cases when your recipient’s inbox is full or their server is down. Sometimes, it’ll also occur if your email is too large for their inbox. As you’d have already guessed, soft bounces are temporary in nature and get fixed the moment any of the circumstances cited above get resolved.

2. Hard bounce- Permanent in nature, hard bounces typically occur when your recipient’s email address is either invalid or non-existent.

Your bounce rate is a very reliable indicator of your email list’s quality. Should it happen to be chock full of irrelevant addresses, your bounce rate would go through the roof. When you try to send emails to such addresses, you do nothing but invite the ire of ISPs (internet service providers). This, in turn, can get you blacklisted, damaging your email sender reputation beyond repair. 

There are a couple of practices you can adopt to keep your bounce rate in check.

1. Never buy email lists. Building an email list can be rather challenging. And we understand that. But the best lists out there are those that are constructed organically. It doesn’t matter if it took you a month to add 30 contacts (we’ll talk about list growth shortly); it is better any day than adding 300 contacts from a purchased list. Such lists harbor invalid and non-existent addresses, which won’t get you anywhere. Besides, if at all you are able to mine a few valid addresses, you’ll invariably get marked as spam (if not blocked) upon mailing them because you would be doing so without their consent.

2. Always request your recipients to whitelist you. This will drastically reduce the possibility of your emails getting wrongly classified as spam or junk mail, providing a massive boost to your deliverability in the process.

Sur La Table, in all their emails, include a small request to be added to their recipients’ address books. You can spot it in their footer section. Here’s one, for example.

Unsubscribe Rate

The name’s pretty much self-explanatory, isn’t it? The unsubscribe rate helps you understand what percentage of your subscribers oped out of your communication. Unsubscribes, as any veteran email marketer will tell you, are not necessarily a bad thing. It is always better to have unresponsive contacts unsubscribe themselves than to let them consume your time and energy. 

However, if there’s an alarming rise in your unsubscribe rate, you ought to examine the matter closely. In most cases, people unsubscribe due to either of the following two reasons.

1. They feel overwhelmed by the frequency of your messages. Now, this can be easily fixed. All you have to do is provide them with an “Update Preferences” link so that they can define a frequency they are comfortable with. 

2. They don’t find your content appealing. In this case, you must get to the root cause of the matter to close the gaps in your content game. Of course, you can’t impress all, but your content has to win over the major chunk of your recipients.

Giving your contacts the choice of unsubscribing is as important as onboarding them with their explicit consent. Therefore, your emails must always contain an unsubscribe link.

List Growth Rate

For businesses to survive, they have to focus on continually growing their lists. This makes the list growth rate an essential metric in your email campaign report. It gives you an excellent insight into the potency of your lead generation campaigns. Keep in mind that all email lists suffer an inevitable decay- approximately 22.5% every year. So, take stock of your list growth rate and focus on adding new contacts at a healthy rate.

Wrapping It Up

Crafting an email campaign report by including the metrics mentioned above will allow you to make the most out of your marketing efforts and stay ahead of the curve, always!