Email marketing is a very effective way to reconnect with parents who visited your website or took a tour of your center. Like other digital marketing tools, it’s easy to track what’s working and what’s not with email marketing metrics. To make your email campaigns as effective as possible, you should be keeping track of (and optimizing) analytics, such as open, click through and bounce rates.
While you should never settle for your industry benchmarks, it can be helpful to see how your emails compare to those from other child care and education businesses. According to MailChimp, the provider we use for emails from ParentSeek, the education and training industry enjoys open rates of 21.8% and click-through rates of 2.5%.
Email Marketing Metrics You Need to Know
The success of your email marketing is dependent on how much time you spend looking at the analytical data your campaigns collect and using it to optimize the emails you sent to new parents.
Bounce Rate
For your emails to be successful, they need to end up in your subscribers’ inboxes. When they don’t it’s called a bounce. There are a lot of reasons your emails may bounce.
This includes hard bounces, which means the email address you tried to send to isn’t valid, perhaps because there’s a typo in it, it’s old and no longer in use or the formatting is incorrect. There are also soft bounces, meaning that the reason for your email being undelivered is temporary. This happens when the recipient’s email inbox is full or your email is too big to be delivered.
If an email provider sees your email address as spammy, it may prevent your emails from being delivered. Sending from a free email address, such as a Gmail or AOL account, or a domain previously used for spam can limit how many of your emails are delivered.
High bounce rates indicate spammy email practices and flag your domain as low-quality. MailChimp and other email tools suspend accounts with abnormally high bounce rates to ensure their reputation as a sender stays positive.
To determine a campaign’s bounce rate, divide the number of emails that bounced by the total number of emails sent and multiply by 100. A healthy email list should have bounce rates under 2%.
Conversely, email delivery rate is the percentage of emails that made it to subscribers’ inboxes, or didn’t bounce.
Open Rate
For your email to be successful, it needs to be opened. An email’s open rate depends largely on the subject line, as well as the relationship you’ve built with the recipient. You want them to be excited when your email appears in their inbox! Email open rate is calculated by dividing the number of opens by the total numbers of emails sent and multiplying by 100.
Click Through Rate
The click through rate, or CTR, measures the percentage of people who clicked a link in your newsletter or promotion after receiving the email in their inbox. Determine CTR by dividing the number of people who clicked on your email by the number of people who received your email and multiplying by 100.
You can also measure CTR based on the number of people who opened your email, rather than the number of people who received it. This helps you determine how effective your calls to action are without taking into account the efficacy of your subject line.
Before making any decisions based on your CTR, think about whether your email encouraged clicks. Open rate is probably more important for an informational newsletter. Alternatively, an email encouraging parents to sign up for an open house should get a lot of clicks.
Unsubscribe Rate
Your opt-out rate is the number of people who unsubscribe from your emails. These are parents who are no longer interested in receiving your emails. While you don’t want a high unsubscribe rate, it’s okay if a few people are opting out of your emails. It’s better for them to unsubscribe than mark your emails as spam or delete them without opening them.
