Email Analytics Metrics
Analyzing your emails can help you level-up your association’s email marketing efforts. This will give you a clear and accurate picture of what does and does not work in your email campaigns. The analytics metrics will provide you plethora of data to help improve your email marketing strategy.
For example:
- Increase members’ loyalty and engagement by measuring analytics and testing your strategy
- Observe behavioral pattern of members (how they engage with your emails, the types of subject lines the pique their interest, etc.)
- The weaknesses and strong points of your email content, blog posts, copywriting, CTAs, and more
Email analytics can help your association grow by providing real data insights into your members.
Open Rate
The open rate is the number of emails opened out of the total number of emails sent. In general, we think of open rates as being a measure of how interest piquing a subject line is. But you should also factor in your From line information and your preview text.
Why is it important to associations?
Associations are known for sharing a wealth of information. But if no one is opening your emails, how will they ever know? Getting your email opened is the first hurdle in email marketing.
Click-through Rate
Click through rate indicates how many of your email recipients clicked on the links within your email. Most email service providers will show you the total and unique click rates. The total click rate will include duplicate clicks on the same link, whereas the unique click rate will only count the first time a link is clicked in an email.
Why is it important to associations?
Click rates can often be a good signifier of engagement. If your emails have high click rates, that means your audience is interested in engaging with whatever you sent, be it registering for a webinar or reading the rest of a blog post on your website. Engagement keeps members excited in your association and fosters growth through referrals and renewals.
Conversion Rate
A conversion rate can mean many things, but it is essentially when a goal is achieved. When talking about this rate through the lens of email marketing, this might mean the number of registrations for a webinar from an email campaign invite or the number of new memberships from a drip sequence.
Why is it important to associations?
Conversion rates, though sometimes harder to calculate, can be the most important metric of all for associations. You can spend all day everyday trying to improve your open and click rates, but in the end, those are just the rates of engagement with your email and not necessarily the true goal you’re aiming for.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate depicts the total number of your undelivered emails that bounced back from your send.
There are two kinds of bounce; a soft bounce and a hard bounce.
A soft bounce can occur for many reasons, though they are all considered temporary. Those reasons are things like the recipient’s inbox is full, the server needs maintenance, the email is too large or it is blocked based on the content and so on. A hard bounce is more permanent issue and refers to when a recipient’s domain name or email address is invalid.
Why is it important to associations?
As you know, email is an important tool for associations. And while a low bounce rate is to be expected with most emails, if your bounce rate begins to grow, that can damage your future email deliverability making it more and more difficult to get into the inboxes of members and potential members.
Email Deliverability
This represents the number of emails that gets delivered into the recipients’ inboxes out of the total number of emails you sent. This number is effected by your sender reputation and your email service domain authority.
Why is it important to associations?
Email deliverability is important for associations that use email as one of their primary sources of communication. If your deliverability isn’t good then your emails won’t get into inboxes which means your messages won’t get through to members and potential members.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate is the number of subscribers who clicked on the unsubscribe link to opt-out from receiving any more emails from your association.
Why is it important to associations?
The unsubscribe rate is important but should be taken with a grain of salt. It can be easy to assume that any unsubscribes means your email campaign was unsuccessful, but instead, you should think of it as people weed themselves out because they are not the right fit for your association. If your unsubscribe rate continues to grow exponentially, you should consider adjusting your strategy.
