Measure, Evaluate, and Test Your Email Campaign

The first step to measuring your email campaign is to set up your measurement plan.

According to bant.io,

To create your management plan, you must consider the following;

Establish a clear goal and objectives that you can achieve with your email campaigns. Your goals must guide your KPIs and help you determine the success of your email campaigns.

Snov.io reports that 89% of marketers use email as the primary channel for generating leads. Some of the email campaign goals include; lead generation, brand awareness, sales generation, relationship building, etc.

Key Performance Indicators are a form of performance measurement metrics used to measure the performance of an email campaign. Some of the examples of KPI metrics to consider are open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, etc.

According to Snov.io, emails are 40% better at converting than Facebook and Twitter.

To get these results, you have to continuously measure your email performance. You can't improve what you don’t measure. Similarly, with your email campaign, you have to define your KPI metrics and measure this against your email goals and objectives to determine your email campaign’s performance.

With your clearly defined goals and objectives, KPI metrics, and data from your campaign performance, you should combine all the information and analyze the results to get valuable insights from your campaigns.

Based on the result, you can either intensify or improve your email campaigns for better effectiveness in future emails.

Here are some of the most important metrics to measure to determine the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Open rate is the percentage of your email recipients who opened your email. This metric helps you determine how your email is performing based on the number of subscribers that are opening and reading your emails.

According to Campaign Monitor, the average open rate of the email was 18%

Formula: Total emails/Emails delivered

Best time to track: Weekly

Factors that can affect your open rate: Sender’s name and email subject line.

The Click-through rate is the percentage of your email recipients that clicked on a link in your email. Most times, adding a link in your email is a way to move your leads/prospects through your sales funnel, hence, it's important to measure your email CTR for success.

Campaign Monitor reports that the average click-through rate of emails was 2.6%

Formula: Total links clicked/ Email Delivered

Best time to track: Weekly

Factors that can affect your CTR: Link’s anchor text, the location of the link in your email, the number of times you included it in your email, and the email copy.

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on the “unsubscribe” button in your email.

The average unsubscribe rate of emails was 0.1% - Campaign Monitor, 2022

Formula: Total Unsubscribes/ Email Delivered

Best time to track: Weekly

Factors that can affect your unsubscribe rate: Wrong “From Line”, Misleading subject line, Too frequent or irregular emails.

Conversion rate is the percentage of your email recipients who successfully completed your desired task (make a purchase).

Formula: Total conversions / Email Delivered

Best time to track: Monthly

Factors that can affect your conversion rate: Non-optimized website, or landing page, and wrong email campaign tactics.

The spam complaint rate is the percentage of your email recipients who marked your email as spam. According to Campaign Monitor, the average spam rate was 0.02%

Formula: Total spam complaints / Email Delivered

Best time to track: Weekly

Factors that can affect your spam complaints rate: Using a purchased email list, emailing too frequently, not including an unsubscribe link or button, an outdated email list, and sending too many irrelevant emails.

Bounce rate is the percentage of your emails that did not deliver to your email recipients.

The average bounce rate was 0.7% - Campaign Monitor

Formula: Total Bounces / Email Delivered

Best time to track: Monthly

Factors that can affect your bounce rate: Sending emails to non-existent email addresses, the email recipient’s full inbox, or if the recipient has blocked the emails.

Forward/Share rate is the percentage of your email recipients who forwarded or shared your email to their friends or connections by clicking on the share button in your email.

Formula: Total Forwards/ Email Delivered

Best time to track: Monthly

Factors that can affect your forward rate: Wrongly nurturing your email recipients.

The list growth rate is the rate at which your email list has grown over a certain period of time.

Formula: New Subscribers - (Unsubscribed + Complaints)/ Total Subscribers (Over a specific period of time e.g 7 days, 30 days)

Best time to track: Monthly

Factors that can affect your list growth rate: Not building your list constantly.

Campaign Return on Investment (ROI) is the overall return of investment on all your email campaigns.

Formula: Amount of Sales - Total money invested in campaigns/ Total amount invested.

Best time to track: Monthly

Factors that can affect your campaign ROI: Not adhering to the email campaign best practices and not tracking your emails correctly and regularly.

Testing your emails allows you to evaluate the performance of your email based on how your email recipients interact with your emails. By testing your emails you can detect what’s working and what’s not working in your campaigns.

For your email effectiveness, here are the five (5) elements you should test in your email campaigns.

An email subject line is a text that describes an email's content. Using A/B testing, you should test the following elements in the subject lines;

(Image Source: AppSumo)

• The length: Test short email lines vs. long email lines
• The topic: Develop two different topics and test them to determine which one of the two topics interests your recipients.
• Personalization: Test your subject line for personalization (first names) to measure its performance.
• Promotion/Offer: Include some discounts or promotions in your subject lines to evaluate the performance.

An email pre-header is the snippet or summary that follows a subject line when an email is previewed by the recipients. You should test the following elements in your pre-header;

(Image source: Campaign Monitor)

• Including a pre-header: Test an email with a pre-header and the one with a pre-header to measure which is more effective.
• Topics: Develop different topics for your email pre-header to test which engages your recipients more.

Time and day of sending emails are critical to the success of your email campaigns. Sending your emails at the wrong time or day of the week can affect the success of your emails.

Contrary to the email general rule of sending emails by 8:30 - 10 AM, 2:30 - 3:30 PM, or 8:00 - Midnight according to Optinmonster, you should send your emails at different times and days of the week to test the best performing times and days of the week for your emails.

For example, if you send an email on Tuesday, at 10:00 AM, also send it on Wednesday at the same time to measure your email performance.

A call to action is a written instruction added to an email to direct your email recipients to the next line of action. The elements to test in your call to action includes;

(Image source: Optinmonster)

Call-to-action copy: Craft different compelling call-to-action copies for your emails and test which works best for your click-through rate.

CTA Design: Design different CTA buttons in your emails and test to see which design has a higher click rate to use for your future emails.

An email body is the main content of your email campaign. Test the following elements in your email body to determine your email effectiveness;

(Image source: LOCALiQ)

Length: The general rule for your email body length is between 50 - 150 words. Develop different emails within the recommended length and more than the recommended length to test which one performs better for you.

Personalization: It is common knowledge that personalized emails perform better than generic emails.

Personalized email marketing is reported to generate a median ROI of 122% - Instapage, 2022

As a result of this, develop personalized and generic emails and test them to determine their effectiveness.

Contrary to general rules and beliefs, you should test your emails to determine what works for your kind of industry and target audience. When you run an A/B test on the above-listed elements, you can determine your strengths and lapses to get the best results out of your email campaigns.

To determine your email campaign effectiveness, there are a few best practices to consider;

1. Clearly define and understand your “What” (what you want to test in your emails) and “Why” (what you stand to gain from your email testing) before testing your emails to determine the best email success. Test your subject line, email body, “From” line, call-to-action, and email sending times to identify your best performing elements and improve your least performing ones.
2. Stick to the rule of two: To gain a better understanding of your email performance, always test two variations of your emails at a time to determine which one is performing better between the two emails.
3. Make actionable decisions with your results: After testing your emails, develop an action plan on how you will put your results to good use. Your campaign result should be used to improve your emails.
4. Test your emails again and again: The success of your email testing lies in your ability to run your email tests repeatedly to identify your lapses and improvements for better campaigns. Email testing is an ongoing process, do these at regular intervals for the best results.