This week, we have been talking about email marketing. We started it out by telling you your open rates don’t matter as much as you might think. Email marketing is a big deal. It’s been a big deal in B2B for a long time. But there’s a confidence gap between B2B marketers that know they need to be using email marketing and those who are confident that their efforts pay off.
Today, we’ll dive into the metrics you should be tracking with your email marketing campaigns. They might be different than you expect. But trust us, we know our stuff.
XX Email Marketing Metrics Every B2B Marketer Should Be Tracking:
- Clickthrough rate. As a content marketer, you might consider this your bread-and-butter metric. This is the one that can show you how engaging your content is and how effective your calls-to-action are. CTR can be an incredibly useful metric in A/B testing as well as comparing campaign performance side-by-side.
- Conversion rate. A marketer with no conversions is hardly a marketer at all. Your primary metric to determine ROI of your email marketing campaigns will be how many visitors you can convert on a content offer. Did your reader complete the action you wanted them to? The higher your conversion rate, the easier time you’ll have justifying your investment in email marketing.
- List growth. There’s a natural decay that happens to email lists — people change companies, they get new email addresses, etc. Is your list keeping up with that natural loss rate or is it shrinking in size month over month and year over year?
- Bounce rate. I’ve found that bounce rate is something B2B marketers really care about tracking, but few of them know what it means in the big picture. There are two types of bounces you can track. Hard bounces occur when you send to a non-existent or invalid email address. Always remove hard bounces from your list. Soft bounces occur when there is a temporary problem with an email address. The higher your bounce rate, the more you look like a spammer to ISPs. A lower ISP rating typically results in a lower delivery rating, as most email clients will try to protect their users from spammy IP addresses. In the big picture — this metric can tell you a lot about the quality of your list. Did your company buy a crappy list years ago that you’re still trying to clean up? Are your users entering fake information in your forms because they don’t want to be contacted by you? If your bounce rate is high or is rising with each email send, you have some list cleanup to do. You may also need to reasses the way you deliver content and reach out to downloaders if you’re getting a high number of new bounces from a recently cleaned list.
- Number of leads. If your primary goal is lead generation, be sure your CTAs and your email content are set up for success. Are you taking your subscribers to a responsive, optimized, gated landing page with a valuable download? How many leads do your email efforts generate every day? Every month? Every year? You’ll need to know that number before you can move on to the next metric.
- Return on Investment. This isn’t new. Every marketer has one twitchy eye focused on ROI at all times. How does email marketing impact your conversion rate? Are the contacts you are generating with email marketing quality leads? How do conversions translate to revenue in your organization?
Effectively track these six email marketing metrics and you’ll be well on your way to proving the value of your time and resource investment in email. Need some help? Learn more about The Starr Conspiracy Tech Unit and how they can help you get your marketing automation ducks in a row.
Check out the recent white paper, “Marketing Velocity and 5 Keys to Making the Cash Register Ring” now.
