Are you finding it difficult to see just how successful your lead nurturing strategy is? The experts at Campaign Monitor give us 10 great email metrics to help you track your lead nurturing!
Email marketing won’t get you far in terms of conversion rates if you don’t use data to track your results.
When you utilise data in your email marketing strategy, not only are you more likely to increase profitability, but it also puts you on a faster track for qualifying and identifying hot leads for your sales team.
61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales, but only 27% of those leads are qualified. What does this mean? It means marketers are wasting the time of the sales team by not tracking metrics properly and/or not using metrics to properly vet leads.
With the help of tracking the right metrics, however, email marketing teams can identify which email marketing practices are working, which are not, and make changes to capture more qualified leads. This, in turn, helps optimise the sales cycle.
To experience success with email marketing and lead nurturing, it’s important to know which metrics to track. Here are the 10 metrics that will never lead you astray.
1. Email Open Rates
Email open rates is a metric must for every marketer. This metric is so important that most email service providers will automatically include this in their reporting dashboards.
Email open rates tell you exactly how many subscribers saw your email and clicked it to open it. This gives you a good idea of how engaging your subject lines and preheader text are to help you reach the right audience.
2. Email Click Through Rate (CTR)
Email CTR is another telling metric you don’t want to forget about. Email CTR tells you how many subscribers clicked through to your offer or promotion. You can measure this by tracking the links you include in your emails. This will tell you how enticing your offers are and how well your offer buttons are performing.
Smart marketers will A/B test different copy for the same offer to see which results in higher click through rates.
3. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is another one of those metrics that email service providers often include automatically in reports. Bounce rates will tell you how many email addresses didn’t receive your email for whatever reason. When an email bounces it can indicate a permanent or temporary problem with an email address.
High bounce rates indicate you don’t have that high quality of a list. If you make a novice mistake like purchasing an email list, you may see high bounce rates. If you do see high bounce rates, it means you need to make more of an effort to clean up your subscriber forms and get them to the right audience.
4. Unsubscribers
Unsubscribers is a metric that will tell you how many people opted out of your list. While it may seem like a metric you want to ignore, because no one likes subscribers, it’s actually a helpful metric.
High unsubscriber rates mean you aren’t targeting the right audience with the right messages. This can indicate you need to work on segmenting your lists, personalising your content, and cleaning up your subscriber forms.
5. Conversion Rates
Conversion rates are not only an important metric to track, but they are a fun metric to track. Conversion rates tell you how many people clicked on a link and then completed the desired action. For example, you may send an email with a link to a 50% off purchase. A conversion would be someone who clicks on the link and makes a purchase.
High conversion rates show you’re doing something right when it comes to email marketing and you should keep doing it. When it comes to lead nurturing, conversion rates are the money spot. Conversions that come from well-executed email campaigns are typically hot leads for sales teams.
6. Spam Reports
Spam reports tell you how many subscribers marked your email as spam. You want to aim to keep this number as low as possible. If spam rates get too high, you can get in trouble with your email service provider.
You can reduce these numbers by including an “unsubscribe” link in a visible place in your email. Some marketers include it at the top of the email while others include this link at the bottom. Both are acceptable. When subscribers can unsubscribe from your email easily, they are less inclined to mark your email as spam.
7. Revenue/Sales Rate
Revenue/Sales rate tells you how many sales were generated from a specific campaign. This is different than conversion rates. Conversions can be any action. For example, the goal of your campaign could be to get someone to sign up for a webinar. The end sales goal, however, may be to get someone to purchase your products.
When you measure revenue/sales rate, you are measuring how many actual sales were generated from that campaign. If you have your marketing and lead nurturing systems down pat, these numbers should increase quickly.
8. Forwarding/Share Rate
Tracking the forwarding/share rate will tell you the percentage of people that shared or forwarded your email to someone else. This is a good metric to track because it tells you more about the potential reach of your marketing efforts.
When you have high share and forwarding rates, you know that your content was engaging enough to warrant a share from your subscribers. This can indicate you have more brand advocates than you realised.
9. Engagement Over Time
Interested to know the performance of an email over a specific period of time? Then, engagement over time is the metric for you. This metric can be particularly helpful for measuring holiday campaigns like Black Friday deals, Christmas promotions, and more.
Engagement over time will tell you how well your campaigns perform and which days are the most productive out of the time period you selected.
10. Return on Investment (ROI)
Everyone wants to know how their campaign performed in terms of associated costs. ROI measures this and you can calculate it by dividing the total revenue by total spend.
Email marketing has the highest ROIs out of any digital marketing strategy. In fact, some marketers experience ROIs of up to 4400%, or $44 for $1 spent. Start tracking your ROI now and see if you can beat that.
Wrap Up
There you have it! These are the top 10 metrics every marketer should track if they are looking to improve their lead nurturing process. Each of these metrics gives marketers insights that will help them fine-tune campaigns to reach more prospects with the right messages. The infographic below provides a quick review of the top metrics email marketers should track, for your reference.
Source: 10 Metrics Every Email Marketer
