Content marketing remains a hot topic and with email marketing increasingly linked to the provision of useful content – and the mainstay of many outbound campaigns, particularly in B2B – it’s useful to consider metrics that focus on the content of your email marketing.
Email response rates are usually based on the following:
- Deliverability (% successfully delivered) – this is a good indicator of your data quality.
- Open rate (% opens/successfully delivered) – this is more an indicator of the relevance of your subject heading and first few words. It also reflects the relevancy of your brand to your recipients. The open rate can vary from around 16-34% in the UK, depending on which sector you’re marketing to.
- Click-through (% clicks/successfully delivered) – is a good generic response rate that can vary from around 1.5% to 11% again, depending on sector.
- Conversion (how many do what you are asking) is a great benchmark of overall campaign success and should be a metric established at the very outset of your campaign planning.
- Unsubscribes is a good indicator of both data quality, perceived brand value (or rather the value of your communications) and relevancy.
Given that Upshot Marketing is a UK company – based in Sussex and the digital hub that is Brighton – the guideline figures quoted above are for the UK. But if you want to see more detail or figures from the US, Europe or Asia-Pacific you can find out more from a recent Smart Insights post that is really informative.
The figure that we like the most though is click-to-open rate, which measures the relevancy and context of an email – of the recipients who opened the email, how many clicked? This gem of a statistic (around 12% for B2B email marketing) reveals how useful the content was judged to be in an instant.
From this point, you will of course analyse your landing pages using Google Analytics, to measure action taken from this point. And these learnings can inform your next campaign, which will hopefully deliver better results.