Key performance indicator (KPI) data is essential for building your constituent base. Whether you’re a for-profit business looking to grow your customer base or a non-profit focused on building and engaging your audience, you need data to inform your email marketing campaigns. And once you have a plan in place, KPI growth tracking is vital to help you measure what’s working and what’s not.
Email outreach provides a great indication of how your business or organization is growing (or not). Below are some of the most-watched email KPIs you can use to determine how your outreach is fairing.
Common Email KPIs to Watch
- Bounce Rate: This metric tells you what percentage of your audience didn’t receive your email. Bounces can be hard (permanent non-delivery) or soft (temporary issues that result in a delayed delivery). Bounces happen due to old email addresses, bad email servers, or because someone has blocked your messages.
- Hard Bounce: A permanent non-delivery usually resulting from an invalid or expired email address.
- Soft Bounce: This could be a one-time bounce where the remote server did not receive the message. This is most commonly related to spam policies, full inboxes, or an improper connection.
- Delivery rate: On the other side of bounce rates, delivery rates show the percentage of people who received your message. Aim to get your delivery rate over 90% for newly acquired email addresses and grow it to the high 90s for warm leads and commonly targeted email addresses.
- Open rate: Open rate tells you what percentage of recipients opened your message. Engaging subject lines and a good brand reputation can help you improve your open rate. As with any metric, standard open rates vary by audience. Healthy open rates for new prospect data are around 10-15%, while current customers or members might open at 25-30% or more, depending on the subject matter.
- Click-through rate: This is one of the most difficult KPIs to grow. Click-through rates show the percentage of recipients that clicked on links in your message, and the typical threshold is a 2% click rate or higher. It’s also important to evaluate your click-to-open ratio: the percentage of contacts who opened the message that also clicked.
- Conversion rate: Once a user has clicked on a link in your message, you want them to take action on the next page they see. The percentage of people who take action is reflected in your conversion rate. Ultimately, this is the KPI you want to grow the most as it correlates directly with revenue.
Averages for each of these data points vary by industry, so you need to do your research before setting your organization’s specific email KPI goals. Once you have goals in mind, you can start to track your performance and pinpoint which data points you need to grow.
Our Email Marketing Best Practices
At NuGrowth, we use marketing automation to monitor varying subject lines, send dates and times, and other critical elements that can have a high impact on campaign KPIs.
We work with organizations of all sizes to identify audience segments with accurate and up-to-date data, limiting bounce rates. We also craft compelling content and enact proven customer journeys to increase engagement and reach individual KPI goals.
Additionally, we work with organizations to streamline processes to create, manage and report on email communications. Our unique automated journeys increase efficiency and efficacy, and we provide clients with performance insights such as delivery rates, open rates, and interaction with desired calls to actions.
Whether you need to promote events, increase membership renewals, share a newsletter, or grow as a thought leader, NuGrowth can be your go-to email marketing partner.
Get in touch to find out more about our marketing campaigns – visit us at nugrowth.com/contact/ or call us at 800.966.3051 to get in touch.
