So, you’re a digital marketer or business owner striving hard to carve the path of your lead nurturing campaigns to perfection. You’re aware of the fierce competition existing in the digital world. And you’ve tried crafting compelling email automation campaigns.
Yet, something is missing.
- Your open rates are nowhere near the expected industry average (around 34%).
- Your leads engage with your emails but don’t convert.
- Your unsubscribe rates are higher than you expected.
Putting in all the hard work might be frustrating when your lead nurturing campaigns keep falling short, right?
You know something needs to be changed. But you can’t figure out what.
The good thing is – you won’t have to look beyond the processes and workflows you follow. All that you should do is monitor the appropriate KPIs.
So, if you’re ready to unlock the full potential of your email automation campaigns, here’s the Table of Contents we will follow.
If you want to learn more about the role of email automation in lead nurturing, here is a handy ebook that will help you excel.
By the end of this article, you’ll have a solid grasp of the 5 metrics that matter most and how to use them to nurture your leads more effectively.
Let’s dive right into the nitty-gritty of metrics that matter.
1. Open Rate
The open rate reflects how many people have opened your rich mail compared to the number of delivered e-mails.
It provides valuable insights into two key aspects of your email.
- Effectiveness of your subject line.
- Timing of your email.
According to a Mailchimp report, the average open rate of emails across all industries is around 21.33%. However, the email experts recommend an open rate of around 34.23%.
So, here are some proven strategies to improve the open rates of your email automation campaigns.
- Craft eye-catching and compelling subject lines. Personalize it while keeping it clear and concise.
- Segment your audience and optimize your email lists.
- Learn when your audience is most active, and send at the right time.
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate, or CTR, is another important parameter that indicates how often recipients click links in your email promotion campaigns. CTR shows how well your content and email design entice users to engage.
It provides valuable information about two important aspects.
- Content approval by the subscribers.
- Engagement on your emails.
According to a Mailchimp report, the average CTR for a successful email campaign is around 2.66%.
Here are a few tried and tested tips that you can use to improve your CTR rate for the automation email campaigns and your other lead nurturing initiatives.
- Create clear and actionable CTAs. Use contrasting colors to differentiate your CTAs from the body of your email.
- Use a mobile-first design approach while designing your emails. It will ensure your emails are visually appealing and responsive on all screens and sizes. Minimalism is the key.
3. Conversion Rate
Conversions are results or milestones of your campaign. It could be getting your leads to schedule a demo, downloading an ebook, making a purchase, or any other goal relevant to your marketing goals.
Conversion can be different for different kinds of email automation campaigns. For lead nurturing campaigns, they can be in the form of
- Signing up for a product demo or trial that they showed interest in.
- Downloading a whitepaper or ebook by giving their emails.
- Registering for a webinar.
- Completing a purchase.
- Filling out a contact form.
Here are a few strategies that will help you optimize your conversion rate.
- Personalize your emails based on audience segmentation. You must be relevant to every subscriber who expects something fruitful from your brand or business.
- Ensure that your landing pages are consistent with your email body.
- Optimize your emails to load faster, even if they contain images and animations. A seamless user experience is a priority for almost everyone.
4. Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who opt out of receiving further emails from your business, measured over a period of time such as a month, a quarter, etc. High unsubscribe rates can be a red flag, signaling that your email strategy needs to be improved.
According to a report by Campaign Monitor, the unsubscribe rates acceptable with the industry norms are about 2% or less. These people subscribed initially, but something changed their minds afterward. Maybe your content did not resonate with them. The reasons can be any and many.
Here are a few proven strategies that will help you reduce your unsubscribe rate.
- Learn about your subscriber’s expectations during the welcome emails you send across. Then, align your email content by segmenting your audience and offering value to each.
- Ensure that the frequency of emails sent doesn’t bombard your subscribers’ inboxes. They get hundreds of emails every day. So, respect their time.
5. Email Deliverability Rate
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The email deliverability rate is the percentage of emails that successfully reach the inbox on your sender’s list. Sometimes, emails bounce back due to incorrect or deleted messages. They may also get marked as spam due to the sender’s reputation score. Landing in the inbox is the first step for your subscribers or email lists to view your emails.
Here are the factors that influence email deliverability.
- Sender’s domain reputation.
- Using spam filters.
So, here are some proven techniques to help you improve your email deliverability.
- Use verified sender domains and email authentication protocols to add legitimacy to your emails.
- Clean and update your email lists regularly. Remove invalid or deleted emails. You must also allow users to unsubscribe if they are not interested in receiving emails.
How do we combine metrics for holistic campaign insights?
It’s crucial to learn how different email marketing metrics work together. This knowledge offers comprehensive insights into the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
When you look at each of these metrics individually, they look like characters of a thriller Netflix series (valuable, yet ineffective). But when they come together, that’s real cinema, my friend.
Wrapping up
That brings us to the business end of this article, and it’s fair to conclude that there are 5 crucial metrics in email automation lead nurturing campaigns. If you monitor these 5 comprehensively, you won’t need any other metric.
It’s time to create an action plan and take your email automation to the next level by capturing and converting leads.