It seems that every day we are bombarded with hundreds of KPIs that ought to help us understand if our campaigns are actually performing or not. For us marketers, optimizing email marketing campaigns is more fundamental than ever. To do this, we have to measure results and evaluate the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs for short). But how can we recognize which KPIs are the ones that could help us identify whether the campaign is a success or not?
With this article, I want to help you understand which KPIs to analyze, but above all I want to help you to unravel the meanings behind the hundreds of KPIs made available by Dynamics Marketing Automation platforms.
As already mentioned, Dynamics Marketing Automation products offer a large quantity of KPIs to the most advanced marketers. The PowerAddon Marketing Cloud application offers you excellent monitoring tools that analyze pre-established values and generate statistics automatically after each submission.
The most relevant KPIs for email marketing are:
1. Delivery Rate
This percentage indicates how many of the selected recipients received the email. This identifies the actual number of recipients that have been engaged by our email marketing campaign.
2. Soft Bounce and Hard Bounce
This value is very important: it identifies the amount of emails from our campaign that were rejected. The reasons may be quite disparate. For example, the inbox could be full (soft bounce), the inbox does not exist, etc. Understanding how many recipients in our campaign are active is essential to understanding if the acquisition work we are performing is fruitful or not
3. Open Rate
This value indicates how many recipients opened the email. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between total openings and unique openings. Unique openings are calculated by ignoring repeated openings of a message by the same recipient. Furthermore, the open rate can refer to either all recipients or just the emails that were delivered. Our research shows that the average open rate percentage is around 15-24%, and that greater than 24% is considered good
4. Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate is the number of recipients who have unsubscribed from a specific email. When measuring the performance of email campaigns, the Dynamics 365 Marketing software automatically generates this value if the unsubscribe action is taken through the appropriate link in an email. This link also allows the recipient to describe why he/she decided to unsubscribe. By monitoring our emails, it becomes easier to understand what reasons lead to unsubscribes, which can help you optimize future campaigns.
5. Click Rate
This value indicates how many recipients have clicked on a link in an email. As with the open rate, we distinguish between total clicks and unique clicks. With unique clicks, only one click on a particular link per user is considered. The average click rate ranges from 1.2% to 5%, above which is considered strong. The evaluation of this index varies according to the business sector. A rate of 3% is low if the objective of an email is product or service sales, while it may be a standard rate for those who use an email for merely informational purposes.
6. Click Percentage or Click-Through Rate (CTR)
This rate indicates the number of recipients who opened an email and clicked on a link. In this sense, it does not differ much from the rate of clicks, but it does reveal additional information. A low rate of openings with a high click-through rate and a high rate of openings with a low click-through rate could result in the same number of clicks; however, when interpreting these values to optimize an email marketing campaign, it can help differentiate the subsequent actions taken.
What are the KPIs that PowerAddon Marketing Cloud Can Monitor?
Opens
Opens are classified into unique opens and total opens. Both values refer to all recipients. Furthermore, you can view how many times each individual recipient has opened an email. Opens are subdivided on the basis of device from where they are engaged. Through this, it is possible to understand whether or not it is necessary to deliver mobile-responsive designs to make our email compatible with the most commonly-used devices. The type of browser and operating system used to open an email is also captured.
Click Analysis
The visualization of clicks on a map allows you to understand at a glance which links and how often the recipients have clicked. Links that are clicked are highlighted, as well as classified with different colors based on the frequency of clicks. This makes it easy to understand which links are more or less interesting to readers. Clicks are classified into unique and total clicks and are based on the total number of recipients. It also displays the click-through rate (CTR), which is the average of clicks on the various links, and highlights the links that have been clicked more frequently.
Activity
On the activity dashboard, you can see when users interacted with our email or if they did not receive it. You can view the contacts that opened emails, clicked on links, purchased products, unsubscribed, and reported our email as spam. In addition, the listed contacts can be saved from time to time in a group or exported to a CSV file.
Geotargeting
The geographical locator allows you to view the locations where emails were opened and received clicks. This can help you become familiar with the regions where our email has impact and which cities most of our clicks are coming from.
Content Popularity
Content popularity indicates which content links in an email that receive the most engagement. This data is fundamental to understanding which areas of an email the customer is the most interested in.
Reaction Over Time
This data is important because it identifies how our customers behave over time. Usually a good marketer will know how each segment of customers reacts to an email and can predict how long it will take to reach a CTR goal. A practical example is an email with discount codes. A good marketer must always know how long it will take for customers to react to marketing emails so that he/she can anticipate the needs for the e-commerce platform to perform under high demand.
Recipients Stats
This chart shows us quickly and clearly how our customers are segmented. The areas are:
- Opened Only
These are the customers who have only opened emails but have not taken action - Opened and Clicked
These are the customers who have not only opened an email, but have also clicked on at least one link in the email - Not Opened
These are all the customers who have never opened an email - Bounced
These are the recipients who have delivered a bounce message to our system
Bounce Details
This chart, although very complex to read, discreetly identifies the number of Soft Bounces and Hard Bounces. It also manages to subdivide these two macro groupings into sub-categories: Soft Bounce or Hard Bounce along with the relevant percentages.
Devices
The PowerAddon Marketing Cloud platform has a robust and detailed section dedicated to the devices used by customers. This area is important because it is essential for marketers to know the type of devices used by their users. This way, they can better design emails and landing pages for each link.
Trends
Last but not least is the Trends dashboard available from PowerAddon Marketing Cloud. Whenever you create an Email Marketing/Survey campaign, PowerAddon Marketing Cloud requires you to associate it with a well-defined segment. This is so that you can analyze the progress of the campaigns within each segment. The available KPIs are:
- Trends from the last ten campaigns
Here we analyze the trends from the last 10 campaigns in the segment. The analysis will include Open Rates and Click Rates. We will use this chart to understand whether the tactics we are employing for our campaigns are effective or not. - Campaign Rannking
Here we will have a sorted list of the best campaigns in the segment, ordered from best to worst, based on Open Rates and Click Rates - Segment Weight
Here we will see the weight of each segment according to the “Click to Open Rate” and number of campaigns - Segment Rankings
Here we will show the ordered list of the best segments sorted by Open Rates and Click Rates - New vs. Returning Users on the Selected Campaign
Here we will feature an analysis about new and recurring customers who have interacted with the selected campaign It is important to understand if the campaigns we are creating resonate with new prospects or regular customers. An ideal outcome is the one with a higher percentage of “Returning” customers than “New” customers. - Campaigns with the overall most engaged users
This graph displays the segment ambassadors. The customers in this segment with the greatest number interactions across all campaigns are listed from most engaged to least. This list is sorted by “Unique Opens,” “Total Opens,” “Unique Clicks,” and “Total Clicks”
Conclusions
The KPIs for tracking emails with our platform let you monitor the progress of your email marketing campaigns. These stats can be exported to .xls, .cvs or .pdf files and used for presentations or for team analysis. If this article has piqued your curiosity about the potential of monitoring emails to optimize your campaigns, don’t miss the next one!
Stay Tuned
