Overview of Email Marketing
Email marketing is a powerful tool in the modern digital landscape, allowing you to reach your audience directly and engage them effectively.
To make the most of your email campaigns, it's crucial to understand the metrics that provide insights into their performance.
In this article, we'll break down the essential email metrics that marketers need to know, helping you optimize your campaigns and achieve better results.
Open Count - Uses and Limitations
Open count is the percentage of recipients who open an email out of the total number of emails delivered. Open count is tracked through images embedded in your email.
While a high open rate may indicate your email’s first impressions are capturing your audience’s attention. It’s essential to recognize important limitations to open count rates, such as:
- Disabled Images → Many email platforms disable images, so those opened will not be registered as an open count.
- Preview Panes → Oftentimes, recipients will read an email within a preview pane, without opening the email. These will not be registered.
- Accidental Opens → Some recipients may open an email by mistake and not read the content.
- Text-only Emails → Since open count is tracked through embedded images, any recipients that reads your email text only will not be registered
- Multiple Opens → If a recipient opens an email multiple times, it might be counted as multiple opens, artificially inflating the Open Rate.
- Deliverability Issues → If an email lands in the recipient's spam or junk folder, the tracking pixel might not be loaded, leading to underreported opens.
Engagement Metrics - Uses and Availability
While open count gives you an idea of how well your emails capture attention, it doesn't reveal what happens once the email is opened. True engagement involves actions like clicking on links, completing a form and more. These interactions signify a deeper interest in your content and a higher likelihood of conversion.
Within the platform you find a variety of metrics that provide a holistic picture of your email campaign engagements.
For each campaign you find a report that provides the following metrics:
- Click Count
- Unsubscribe Count
- Rejected Count
- Lead Count
The platform also provides an aggregate email report - Email Marketing List report. This report enables you to consolidate your email campaign metrics into an aggregated view, facilitating a side-by-side analysis of multiple campaigns. Empowering you to gauge the success of various campaigns over time and uncover valuable trends.
Evaluate Engagement using Platform Metrics
For every email campaign you deploy, you have a series of metrics available at your fingertips to evaluate the success of your campaign and identify areas of improvement.
In this section, we review email campaign metrics available within the platform. Not only will we define these metrics, but we'll also provide you with insights on how to improve your email campaign score.
Identify the Cause of Email Rejections
Email rejections can be a frustrating experience. However, identifying the cause of the rejection help you troubleshoot email delivery issues and refine your email communication strategy accordingly.
Email rejections are categorized into two main types: hard rejections and soft rejections. These rejections are determined by the response our sending server receives from the recipient's mail server.
Let's dive into each type:
- Hard Rejections → Hard rejections are critical and result in flagging the contact, preventing any further emails from being sent to them. Here are the types of hard rejections:
- Domain Not Found: This occurs when the domain address in the user's email does not exist. For instance, sending an email to john@fakedomain.com would result in this rejection.
- User Not Found: In this case, the domain in the email address is valid, but the specific user does not exist. An example would be sending an email to fakeuser@structuredweb.com.
- Soft Rejections → Soft rejections allow for future communication attempts despite the initial rejection. Here are the types of soft rejections:
- Unspecified Error: The recipient server rejected the email, but the specific reason for the rejection is unclear.
- No Answer from Email Server: This occurs when our email server does not receive any response from the recipient's email server.
- Email Blocked by Spam Filter: The email was blocked by the recipient server's spam filter.
- Mailbox Full: The recipient's mailbox is full, preventing the delivery of the email.
- Remember: these metrics work together to provide a comprehensive view of your email campaign's performance. Use them to fine-tune your email strategies, improve user engagement, and drive the results you're looking for.