Email marketing is an integral part of engaging with your customers to create a stronger brand and client relationship.

But, how do you track your emails to ensure they are working correctly and getting the right engagement you aimed for? Here’s our guide to tracking your emails to ensure they are as effective as they can be…

1. Is Your Open Rate Above 29%?

In your email marketing dashboard, you will be able to see your open rate. Is it increasing as you create more campaigns? If so, then that’s great. Your open rate is a measurement of how many people are opening the emails you send. Therefore, an open rate of over 29% of all your emails being sent, actually being opened is considered a healthy number. You may think that 100% of all emails should be opened, however, 29% is actually an industry standard. This is because some email addresses given to your company may not be monitored, or if customers can immediately see they are sales-based they may not even bother opening the email.

So, if your open rate is lower than 29% reconsider the title of your email. Does it give you a reason to actually open the mail? Is it intriguing or is it all sales-talk? Also, adjust your brief description that accompanies the title. Give your customers a good reason to open the email with the offer of a discount or the promise of something really exciting to read. However, remember, no clickbait!!

When the open rate of your email increases it indicates that your message is more likely being read and that’s the first step to a successful email campaign.

2. Is Your Bounce Rate 2% or Lower?

A high bounce rate can affect your overall deliverability of the whole email marketing campaign. Your email will bounce if the email address doesn’t actually exist or is undeliverable. After three hard bounces for one email address, the address itself will be marked as undeliverable. When this happens you need to remove the address from your database as 1) there’s no point sending an email to an address that doesn’t exist and 2) these affect the metrics and success of your campaign.

To further reduce the frequency of bounce emails you should regularly clean your list. This means you get rid of any spam email addresses that may cause bouncing. This should reduce your bounce rate. Even though it reduces the size of your database, it does improve your metrics and give more accurate data, so clean your address list regularly.

3. Is Your Click-Through Rate at 5%?

Your Click-Through Rate, or CTR, is a more accurate way to see who’s actually reading AND engaging with your email marketing campaigns. The CTR measures the number of unique clicks in an email, divided by the number of successfully delivered emails.

At Image Matters, we know that the more relevant your message is to your audience, the higher your CTR will be. If your open rate is high but your CTR low then you can see that the title of your email was well received, but maybe you failed to deliver with the content you included in your actual email.

A healthy CTR is around 5%, however, if your CTR is above 2% it is actually considered as being average, so there’s nothing to worry about.

To improve your CTR there are a few things you can do;

• Focus on creating industry relationships as business accounts tend to click through and make more purchases.
• Clean your email address list so that you have people who are genuinely interested in your emails and more likely to click-through.
• Look into seasonal trends and theme your emails around these. Also, include discounts to ensure that click-throughs are more likely and enticing.

4. Are You Monitoring Every Report?

After every campaign, you need to analyse and reflect on your results. Look at the three factors we’ve discussed above in detail and record statistics to ensure that you are constantly improving or can clearly see a trend.

There are also some more statistics that you need to consider;

• Glanced or Unread Percentage – The number of emails that were open for less than two seconds, and obviously not read.
• Skimmed Percentage – The percentage of emails that were open for 2 -10 seconds.
• Read Percentage – Emails that were open for longer than ten seconds
• Forward Count – The number of people who actually forwarded your email to another email address.
• Print Count – the number of people who printed out a hard copy of your email.

Consider all of the above when you are looking at previous campaigns and creating new email designs.