To get the most out of your email marketing efforts, start looking at metrics from two different perspectives—optimizing for machines and then humans.

​​Everyone's been talking about the same email marketing metrics for years. But in order to truly understand the success of your program, you need to be thinking about metrics from two perspectives—machine and human. 

Before you analyze metrics from the perspective of how your human recipients responded to the message, you need to consider the impact that the machine had on the metrics. Analyzing them together will help fine-tune your strategy.

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The machine metrics of email marketing

The first and‌ most important machine metric is deliverability—the unsung hero of email marketing. 

Most conversations around email marketing metrics start with things like open rates and click-through rates. But they should start with email deliverability. After all, if our emails aren’t being delivered or are going to the spam folder, how do we expect to accurately measure things like opens?

Deliverability is the measure of your emails’ ability to land in your recipients’ inboxes, and it’s the foundation of your email marketing strategy. Without it, all other metrics are just numbers on a page.

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Many factors can impact email deliverability, including sender reputation, email content, and authentication protocols. Sender reputation, which is built over time based on your email sending practices, is a major factor in whether your emails are delivered to the inbox or marked as spam. Maintaining a positive sender reputation requires consistent and responsible email practices.

These variables are what mailbox providers look at when deciding if an email lands in the inbox or spam folder (don’t worry, we won’t let that happen). Let’s see what it takes to make sure your emails make it to the inbox. 

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1. Recency

Recency plays a significant role in determining whether an email lands successfully in the inbox. This time-based metric, which looks at how recently a subscriber engaged with your email, is a crucial factor for mailbox providers when evaluating sender reputation. 

If subscribers engaged with your emails recently, it signals that they’re not only receptive to your email campaigns, but actively engaging with them.  

2. Count of attempts

This volume-based metric looks at how many attempts did you make to reach the recipient and get them to engage with your message. Recency looks at time and count of attempts looks at the number of sends. 

Sending emails too infrequently can lead to your messages being treated as spam as the mailbox provider may not recognize your sending patterns. Conversely, bombarding subscribers with too many emails in a short span can result in fatigue and increased complaint rates, also negatively impacting deliverability. Consistency is the name of the game in email deliverability. 

Persistently trying to contact unresponsive or invalid addresses can ruin your sender reputation, as mailbox providers may interpret this behavior as spam-like. Being interpreted as a spam-like sender can land you in the spam folder or cause messages to not get accepted by the mailbox provider at all (often referred to as bounces or blocks). 

3. Engagement

When subscribers actively open, click, and interact with your emails, it signals to mailbox providers that your content is valuable and relevant and needs to be delivered. 

High engagement rates can boost your sender reputation, making it more likely that your emails will land in the inbox rather than the spam folder. On the other hand, low engagement—characterized by unopened emails or lack of clicks—can negatively impact deliverability, as mailbox providers may interpret this as a sign of irrelevance or poor content quality. 

Did you know? Mailbox providers will recalibrate how they view your emails if a recipient moves an email from spam into their inbox. 

4. Compliance

With recent changes to email regulations, it's proof that spam filters aren't going to become more relaxed. Since April 1, 2024, Google and Yahoo have enforced changes regarding both the unsubscribe process and authentication. 

Do not give the machines a reason to not trust the email you’re sending. Both marketers and the machines care about the subscriber. Understand that you’re up against spam filters, but by focusing on your shared customer and optimizing email for humans, you’ll optimize it for the machines at the same time. 

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How to improve your email programs for the machines

When your email messages are sent to recipients that the machines view as "wanting that message," they will deliver it to the inbox. They simply look at engagement, frequency, and compliance to determine if your email is valuable to the human it’s being sent to. Here are some tips for making sure your email marketing campaigns will get delivered. 

• Frequent list cleaning: You want to make sure you’re sending campaigns to engaged subscribers. Never buy an email list and put into play a sunset policy to remove unengaged subscribers.
• Review triggered journeys: Optimize your triggered sends first and laser focus on having the right number of emails in a drip campaign. Journeys have the biggest impact on your count of attempts and recency scores. 
• Less is more: When in doubt, cut it out. Sending too many campaigns that aren’t getting engagement can make the machines perceive your emails as spam. You’re up against very sophisticated spam filters, so err on the side of caution—especially when you're knowingly targeting the less engaged portion of your list. In fact, it’s recommended that you should never send an email if it’s been more than 6 months since a recipient has opened a message.
• Track days to conversion or days to unsubscribe: These numbers can guide you in determining which audience is best to target in order to see a conversion or stop an unsubscribe.

Essentially, if you’re not getting the most out of your email sends, it’s often down to three things: How you acquire addresses, how often you send, and when you choose to stop sending. Change one of these and you’ll get better results. 

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Human-based email marketing metrics

Outside of viewing your email metrics from the machine's perspective, there are a number of metrics that can help you understand how effective your email marketing campaigns are with the humans receiving them. This perspective on the following metrics can help you make decisions to improve your strategy and results.

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1. Open rate

Open rate is a key email marketing metric that shows you the percentage of recipients who opened your email. It’s a good measure of how effective your subject line was at getting people to open and read the email content. From the human perspective, a high open rate generally means that your subject lines are resonating with your audience and effectively communicating the value of your email.

2. Unique clicks

Unique clicks tell you how many individual recipients clicked on links within your email. This metric can give you a sense of how engaging and relevant your email’s content is. A higher unique click rate means that your content is resonating with your recipients and is effectively driving them to take action.

Focus on unique click rate by domain. If any domain has a 100% click rate, it’d be wise to ignore those metrics since it is most likely a bot click that won't lead to conversions.

3.Conversions

The ultimate goal of email marketing is, of course, conversion. They tell you how many recipients took the action you wanted them to take after engaging with your email. This could be making a purchase, signing up for a service, or downloading content. Your conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of clicks. It’s a great way to see if your email is driving the results you want.

4. RPR

And then there's ‌revenue per recipient (RPR), a key metric that showcases the financial impact of your email marketing. By dividing the total revenue from email campaigns by the number of emails delivered, you'll gain a clear picture of your return on investment (ROI) and the profitability of your email marketing strategy.

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How to improve your email marketing campaigns for your subscribers

Improve your open rate, unique clicks, conversions, and RPR by following these best practices.

• Segment your sends: Email performance starts with targeting the right audience. By segmenting your email list, you can increase the relevance of your emails and boost engagement metrics like open rates and click-through rates. You can create segments based on demographics, preferences, behavior, engagement, and more to deliver highly personalized email campaigns.
• Establish a consistent schedule: Consistency is key to nurturing a strong relationship with your subscribers and the mailbox filters. Find the optimal sending frequency that matches your audience's preferences and commit to it. This practice sets expectations, fosters familiarity, and enhances overall engagement. Steer clear of sending too often or too sporadically, as both can have adverse effects on your email marketing metrics. 
• Focus on engaging subscribers: Your subject line and email content needs to be relevant and clickable to improve engagement rates, something both the machines and subscribers care about. We’ve found that short email subject lines (less than 25 characters, which is about 3-7 words) had an open rate of 49.8% and a total CVR of 9.8%.
• Consider UX: Lastly, if you’re seeing strong open rates and click-through rates but conversions are low, you should evaluate the user experience from the email to your site. Be thoughtful of where CTAs will lead as you don’t want to promote one specific product in your CTA but then link to an entire collection. Match the look and feel of your email and meet the expectations subscribers will have when clicking your links to improve conversions.

Remember, understanding and optimizing these metrics is a continuous process. Stay vigilant, experiment, and refine your strategies based on data-driven insights.

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Campaigns vs. journeys: Impacts on email marketing performance

Another important consideration for your email program (that ties directly to the machines measuring your recency), is the type of email campaigns you’re sending. Email messages typically fall into two categories: campaigns or triggered messages (also known as journeys). 

• Campaigns: A one-time manual send
• Triggered emails: Always-on, automated journeys

Campaigns are one-time messages that you can send on-demand or schedule in advance based on your marketing calendar. Due to their one-off nature, email campaigns are ideal for promoting time-sensitive offers, brand awareness plays, and driving retention with non-promotional content, such as product tips, announcements, User-Generated Content (UGC) such as reviews, or newsletters. 

Triggered messages or journeys are sent when your subscribers do something, like leave their shopping cart, buy something, or not buy anything within a certain amount of time. Triggered email messages are designed to automatically nurture the brand-customer relationship at critical points in the customer lifecycle. 

Optimize your journeys first to get the right number of emails and the right timing of those emails. We recommend about two to three emails per journey as these are often finite windows of time to capitalize on the recipient’s action. As for campaign sending, we don’t recommend sending a recipient more than four emails per week unless they are super engaged with your campaigns and open and click every single time.

Both of these email message types impact your email marketing metrics—both on the machine side and the human side.  

Want to see how your metrics compare? We’ve compiled these email marketing benchmarks for our most popular journeys.

How often should you analyze your marketing metrics?

You should analyze your email marketing metrics regularly to ensure you’re making informed decisions that align with your strategic goals. After each campaign, a simple analysis should be done to look at the immediate performance indicators like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. 

For a more comprehensive understanding, a monthly review can provide insights into trends, campaign effectiveness over time, and audience behavior patterns. 

Conducting a quarterly or bi-annual deep dive can help you adjust your long-term strategies, identify seasonal variations, and optimize your email marketing efforts for better engagement and conversions. Regular analysis not only helps in fine-tuning the campaigns but also in adapting to the changing preferences and behaviors of your target audience.

Whichever approach you take, the key is to consistently track your email marketing metrics over time. This allows you to compare the performance of different campaigns and make data-driven decisions about your strategy. By monitoring your metrics in the long term, you can identify patterns, optimize your content and design, and continuously improve your email marketing results.

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Testing

Testing is a cornerstone of successful email marketing campaigns, providing valuable insights to improve performance and drive better results. By implementing A/B tests, you can compare different elements such as subject lines, content, send times, and calls-to-action to determine what resonates best with their your human audience. When your subscribers are engaging and clicking more, the machines will do their part to deliver your emails to those subscribers.

Regular testing not only ensures that campaigns remain relevant and engaging but also helps in making informed decisions that align with subscriber preferences and behaviors.

Being static will always make your program perform worse. You have to test your emails and make changes. If your email marketing campaigns stay the same, they’re actually getting worse.

No marketer lands in the inbox 100%, but by following the tips outlined here, you’ll have a strong email marketing strategy that both the machines and your human subscribers will like. 

Looking to strengthen both your email and SMS channels? Stay tuned as we’ll dig into email and SMS attribution in an upcoming post. 

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In the meantime, if you’re looking for a marketing platform to unite your email and SMS channels, schedule a demo to learn how you drive more sales and save time with Attentive.