Which are the best KPIs for Email Marketing?

A new whitepaper shows how to prove the contribution of email marketing to the business

Email marketing frequently appears in the top 3 when marketers or businesses are surveyed about what digital marketing channels deliver the best ROI.

The latest benchmarks from Custora from August 2015 looking at to what channels drove the most sales for e-commerce sites demonstrates the continued importance of email as a marketing channel.

There can be no doubting that email is a powerful tool for marketers, especially when you harness the insight collected from subscribers profiles and behaviour to send targeted messages. You can use this data to segment your list based on user behaviour and send personalized emails to each subscriber - no other channels enable this. This will help you generate better results than if you are just broadcasting the same template to your whole audience.

If you have the skills and technology in place you can even track user activity in real time to find out how your email marketing campaigns are going down with your audience, and you can test individual elements of an email and optimize even the tiniest details of each campaign to optimise the open rate, click rate and conversion rate.

Overwhelmed by data about your email marketing?

However the vast amount of data that can be collected via email marketing means you can easily become swamped by the volume of it and spend your time scanning data but never able to infer useful insights or actually do anything off the back of it.

The solution to this is knowing the best KPIs to use to set targets, review performance and complete analysis to improve results. There are 100s of KPIs that could theoretically be used, but only some are really worth tracking.

Cutting through the Vanity Metrics

With email marketing, as with marketing more generally, it is all too easy to focus on vanity metrics such as subscriber numbers and open and click rates instead of what is actually driving business. Big, impressive sounding numbers don’t translate into business results. If you have a huge email list but they aren’t relevant to your audience then you will be plagued by low open dates, low click through rates and lots of reporting your emails as spam. Whereas a much smaller list made up of your target audience is likely to get far higher conversion rates and thus be more lucrative. That’s why knowing the right KPIs to target is so important.

What KPIs to target?

In a new whitepaper, A Guide to Email Marketing KPIs GetResponse recommends the KPIs which are critical for inferring actionable insights and avoiding distracting vanity metrics.

Some key performance indicators they recommend focusing on include: Incremental sales, Customer Lifetime value and engagement. Studying these metrics can be highly useful, both because they can help paint a fuller and more accurate picture of your email marketing campaigns over-all ROI, and because they can inform marketing decisions, such as if a customer loyalty program would be likely to generate strong results.

Discover how to evaluate these metrics and the other KPIs recommended by GetResponse in their new whitepaper.

GetResponse is a Content Partner of Smart Insights who collaborated with us on new research on the State of Email marketing to be published in Q4 2015.

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