ONE of the main worries that businesses who are trying to reach customers through email marketing have is whether the message is going to reach the customer at all. We all receive numerous emails on daily basis, and it’s often impossible to really go through each and every one of them, which is why a certain percentage of email messages is never opened.

In order to fully understand the process of email marketing and analyze its success in terms of goals achievement, every business should analyze the following metrics:

Majority of marketers state that this is the most important metric to analyze in email marketing. It represents the number of people who clicked on one or more links in your email. Using this metric you are able to analyze the performance of your campaign, as you can see the number of people who have been encouraged to take action, in this case clicking on one of the links. As a result, you can analyze the success of your message, as low click-through rate is surely an indicator that your message doesn’t get response you were hoping for.

Click-through rate is also important as a way to get email recipients to visit your website. As you grow your business, your email database will expand. You can be sure that among email recipients from your database, there are those who haven’t visited your website in a while, and email marketing is a great tool to encourage them to go back. More clicks means that more people are interested in your brand, your offer and your content that is shared through email marketing, so this is one of the metrics to pay attention to if you want to improve the performance of email marketing strategy.

Another very important metric for email marketing analysis is conversion rate. Unlike click-through rate, which focuses on the number of clicks, conversion rate is a metric that tracks the number of users who clicked on the link in the email and then completed an action, which is considered a conversion. A conversion can be any action that a business owner deems valuable, such as generation of a lead, filling in a form, completing a survey, claiming a coupon, making a sale, etc. A conversion is actually a goal you set up in your email marketing strategy.

The percentage of conversion rate indicates the percentage of people your email marketing campaign has managed to encourage to perform a certain action, which is why this is a great indicator of whether the email marketing strategy is good or not. Ultimately, this metric helps you determine if, and to which extent you have managed to achieve your goals. As such, this metric is an important element of the process of evaluating the overall performance of your marketing strategy.

Implementation of analytics into email marketing helps you find out the rate at which your emails are shared (or forwarded), which is a very useful metric to have in mind, as it basically shows if the users consider your emails relevant and worth sharing/forwarding.

Valuable and high quality content is one of the basic pillars of internet marketing nowadays, and email sharing rate is an indicator of the content quality in emails that you share with your customers or potential customers through the email marketing campaigns. High email sharing rate is certainly an indicator that the content you send through emails is relevant and informative for the recipients, which is why they consider sharing with their email contacts, resulting in increasing the online influence of your brand. This metric also helps with figuring out which type of content is the most shareable, valuable information that helps you improve your content strategy.

Bounce rate represents the percentage of emails that have never been delivered to the end users. Unlike previous metrics, which help with monitoring success of your campaign and the extent of goal achievement, this metric is important for a different reason.

Internet service providers take into consideration bounce rate as one of the factors to determine the reputation of the sender. This means that if the providers detect that you have a bounce rate that is too high, your emails might get marked as spam. Subsequently this has a negative effect on the email deliverability in the future, as your future emails might automatically be marked as spam, in which case they will completely skip the user’s inbox, ending up in spam instead. In order to avoid this, make sure that you monitor this metric and remove all the addresses that have bounced from your email list. Ultimately, this will help you with email deliverability in the future email marketing campaigns.

Overall return on investment (ROI) is the indicator of the successfulness of the email marketing campaign. As with every business strategy, email marketing requires an investment, having in mind a number of costs that come your way. However, email marketing is also a great strategy to generate revenue, hence making it profitable for your business despite the expenses.

In order to analyze the return on investment, you should divide the total revenue with the total expenses associated with email marketing. The estimates will assist with determining whether to invest more in email marketing, or perhaps you need to focus your efforts on a different strategy.

Finally, email marketing monitoring is essential due to the fact that you’ll be able to access the performance of your email marketing, as well as of any other strategies, such as content promotion, paid advertising etc. Constantly monitoring the metrics results in you being able to adjust and improve the strategy used in email marketing, with the purpose of maximizing the goals success rate. Email marketing doesn’t work as a standalone strategy, and you need to coordinate your goals and your plans with other segments of the company, in order to achieve higher goals and increase sales through online promotion.