Email marketing involves using various metrics at various stages of the sales funnel - from email deliverability to customer retention. There are several steps that enable businesses to interact and engage with users and ultimately enable growth. However, the average success rate associated with email marketing is a mere 14%, making this a challenging strategy to crack - and in turn, affecting business growth.
So how can your business live to speak a success story? Let’s explore the parameters associated with email marketing and how these may be leveraged to help your business achieve optimum efficiency.
Table of contents
Are your emails suffering?
You heard about email marketing and decided to try it for your business. But you quickly realize that despite the effort you put into your campaigns, your numbers are inadequate. If you’re a business unable to generate leads from other business entities, drive conversions, or have poor email deliverability, there’s a high possibility your email performance is suffering, and that’s hindering overall business growth.
Email marketing is one of the highest enhancers of outreach and lead conversions. But to achieve this kind of growth, a lot of effort needs to be driven into your strategy! With the power to deliver your message to a large audience and attract leads right to your dashboard, email marketing can significantly help your business grow.
Numbers you should focus on to improve email marketing
Measuring email marketing growth metrics is key to enhancing performance. Measuring these is a precursor to measuring email marketing success rates. Numbers generated from each of the above parameters indicate the rate at which your business is growing and to what extent it is facing challenges in respect of its digital marketing strategy.
These growth metrics are highly influenced by the quality of email marketing undertaken by your business. For example, if your email campaigns contain poor-quality text and visuals or are unfriendly and laden with too many redirects, users may resort to marking the emails as spam/ junk or unsubscribing from your database, leading to untimely failure of your business marketing strategies.
Engagement metrics include assessing numbers associated with -
open rates (number of emails opened),
click-through rates (number of emails that were clicked and directed users through the intended journey),
bounce rates (number of emails that bounced), and
unsubscribe rates (number of users that unsubscribed from your mailing list).
How are these email marketing numbers tied to your growth engine?
The main strategy while evaluating this is to understand how a business’ growth numbers depend on these email metrics. So how can you tell if your business is performing adequately using these email metrics? Let’s take a look.
1. Monthly website traffic
Website traffic numbers are equivalent to the email outreach that a campaign has had. The dependence on an email marketing campaign for this number can be understood as follows:
- Proportional to the volume of cold, promotional, and transactional emails
- Proportional to the deliverability of these emails
- Proportional to the Open rate and CTRs of these campaigns
Takeaway:
If your sales strategy involves driving prospects to your website and this traffic is low, consider sending out emails to reach out to potential clients and interested businesses.
Next, track the number of users that are visiting your website from these email campaigns. If this number is negligible, the first thing you need to do is to check the deliverability rate. Are your emails getting delivered or just routed to spam? Check the bounces, and Mailer Daemon reports to improve your deliverability. Develop a strategy to ensure a good domain reputation.
Next, check your open Rate. If it is low, start working on your subject lines.
If your open rate is substantial, check your CTRs. Test your CTR button, attached link, and relevancy.
2. Leads generated
Lead generation is proportionate and supplementary to -
- CTRs of the total volume of cold email outreach
- CTRs of the total volume of promotional emails
- CTRs of total transactional emails
- Total email deliverability
Marketers can measure the number of leads that their business generates in proportion to the website traffic received. In essence, every visitor is a potential marketing lead or prospect. This simply means that if an email campaign makes consumers initiate business inquiries or piques their interest enough to make them browse your website, then that email campaign has done the job of generating leads.
While Mailmodo helps other businesses to create email campaigns,
It also uses engaging email marketing (remember, email quality goes a long way in ensuring CTRs) to dispense information about its brand and business.
Through the email campaign, it can educate consumers about its products, their use cases, offers and promos available on purchase, and updates relevant to its users.
Here, the number of leads generated by Mailmodo depends on factors such as the email conversions achieved by campaigns and the volume of users engaging with emails to visit the Mailmodo website. From amongst these users, we get sign-ups and leads.
Takeaway: As stated above, email content quality and interface, even a simple subject line, may seem irrelevant but are factors that can make or break your email campaign. The smallest inconvenience caused to prospects leads or customers, i.e., too many redirects on the email campaign, irrelevant content, lack of clickable buttons, can break down your growth metric. It takes customers less than a second to get annoyed and unsubscribe - that’s why it’s essential to invest in creating a brilliant and easily navigable email marketing campaign that is both user friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and manages to get conversions.
3. Leads converted, and customers acquired
Customers acquired are directly proportional to -
Total leads generated
Total volume of website traffic
Total number of email campaigns nurtured
Total number of email campaigns shared on product information and updates
Potentially generated leads are typically of two kinds - MQL & SQL. Marketing qualified leads need to be nurtured to become sales qualified. Of the potential leads generated, the overall lead conversion rate refers to the number of converts, aka SQLs that became customers.
Takeaway: To ensure that leads to convert into customers, marketers adopt digital strategies to nurture them. Think of the nurturing process as trying to convince someone why they should become your customer.
One of the tactics deployed by businesses to nurture leads is disclosing product information and luring the prospect with offers.
In most cases, if your communication is strong and effective, you will convert the lead into a customer.
One of the smoothest ways to do this is by using email campaigns. These campaigns help to deliver information sharply and are pretty effective in nudging leads towards conversion.
3. Customer churn and retention
Acquiring customers is one part of the game and retaining them is another. The rate at which customers quit or discontinue doing business is the churn rate. The churn rate is divisibly proportional to -
The total volume of onboarding emails
The total volume of support relations undertaken through email campaigns
The total volume of email campaigns and communication on features and updates shared with customers
The total volume of email campaigns sent to nurture customers
Takeaway: Think of email campaigns as filling the gap created by businesses in getting customers to comprehend communication. If a customer can understand the brand’s message and considers it useful or valuable, they will stay. If not, they will shy away from contributing to the business’ revenue, leading to a churn rate.
Just because a business has certain customers on board doesn’t mean they’re going to stick around. The business needs to constantly engage them, interact with them, and provide valuable inputs by understanding their pain points. One of the easiest ways to do this, i.e., keep the churn rate from going up, is by having a solid email marketing campaign.
4. Net promoter score:
A company’s net promoter score is an indicator of its business performance in terms of its customer rating - the likelihood of customers to recommend products or services to referrals, to be specific. If you want to understand where you stand with your customers, get them to rate you and give feedback. How? By conducting NPS surveys through email campaigns! Businesses use NPS for various reasons like conducting product or concept surveys, improving their value propositions, and tapping into inactive leads.
Takeaway: Many businesses tend to get creative with NPS surveys. Some use NPS surveys the traditional way - to understand how likely customers are to recommend them. Others use NPS surveys as a means to gauge customer choices and preferences.
Related guide: 4 Effective Ways to Improve Your NPS Survey Response Rate
5. ARR & MRR
A business’s annual recurring revenue or monthly recurring revenue depends entirely on the net number of customers it acquires. It is calculated as the total net volume of customers acquired, derived as follows -
- Subtracting the churn rate from the total volume of customers.
Takeaway: As explained in the factors above, whether it’s a monthly or an annual recurring revenue metric, the ‘recurring’ aspect will happen only when leads are generated, customers are happy and stick with the business through its journey, and engage and interact with the business. To make sure you have a sustained and growing ARR & MRR, one of the common strategies across the board, is using email marketing.
The right levers to pull for better growth
As enumerated, looking to upscale your business, email marketing can help you tremendously. By creating personalized and user-friendly emails with easy-to-click CTAs, you are bound to witness an increase in visitors like moths to a flame. The more visually appealing and aesthetically designed your email campaign, the better the customer response will be - and the better the response, the higher your sales growth.
How can you improve your email marketing game?
Do you recall the Greek tragedy of Sisyphus, where he is punished and forced to push a boulder uphill aimlessly? Each time Sisyphus reaches the top, the cursed boulder rolls back down, forcing him to start climbing again, looping him in for eternity. Let’s place this analogy in email marketing terms - are you trying to scale business growth but find your strategies getting caught in a similar loop, with the fruits of your labor (growth metrics) rolling down each time you try to reach a certain height of success?
Try taking a closer look at the growth metrics we’ve talked about in this article, and use these numbers to your advantage. To improve your email engagement metrics, you’ll need to leverage email marketing best practices to your advantage.
Using AMP emails for your email campaigns will give your users one less step to climb on the sales funnel journey, thereby bringing them one step closer to conversions and revenue increase.
The future of email marketing, AMP emails provide dynamic content that cuts out the middleman - in other words, they ensure embedding forms, user inputs, and increased personalization, leading to an increase in user engagement, open rates, and conversions.
Find out more about how you can use Mailmodo’s AMP emails as part of your email marketing campaigns to accelerate business growth and increase sales and revenue.
AMP your way ahead
Gauging actual growth numbers helps businesses specifically understand roadblocks by evaluating the metrics explained in this article - Businesses can use email marketing as powerful ammunition in their arsenal to boost sales and growth. Using AMP emails in their email campaigns is an excellent strategy to ensure email marketing delivers results.
