I recently had a discussion with a college friend, Karla that is running a six-figure online business. I asked what the most important part of her funnel was. She speaks a lot about Pinterest marketing on her social media platforms, so I was surprised when she attributed her success to email marketing.
Karla isn’t alone. Polls have shown that 59% of B2B marketers cite email as their most effective channel.
Unfortunately, developing successful email marketing campaigns is challenging. You need to know which metrics and KPIs to focus on to optimize your email funnels. Here are some of the top metrics you need to track.
1. Open Rate
Your open rate is arguably the most important KPI in your entire email funnel. A poor open rate indicates one or more of the following:
- Your email headlines don’t draw enough attention.
- Your lists aren’t segmented properly.
- You are attracting leads that aren’t interested in your offer.
The average email open rate is 24.79%. However, you should be careful about using it as a benchmark, because it varies by industry, geography and customer demographics.
2. Click-Through Rate
Your click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of users that clicked at least one of the links in your emails. While email marketers tend to focus on it a little too much, the CTR is still a very important metric. A low CTR may be a symptom that:
- You aren’t able to keep customers engaged with your emails.
- Your call-to-actions don’t stand out enough.
- Your offer wasn’t enticing enough.
This is one of the reasons that email marketers need to run split-tests to boost their CTR. Of course, a high CTR isn’t always an indicator of a healthy email marketing funnel. You can get a high CTR by using misleading call-to-actions or using large clickable images that are unlikely to drive conversions. Therefore, you need to balance CTR with conversions.
If you are having a hard time making your content more engaging, you should consider adding higher quality images.
3. Conversion Rates
As with any other KPI, high conversion rates alone don’t indicate that you have a profitable email funnel. However, they play an incredibly important role in the ROI of your overall funnel. If your visitors are clicking through to your offer but aren’t converting on your money page, then the earlier stages of your funnel have been wasted. This problem could be due to the following:
- Your landing page isn’t appropriate for your segmented lists. You may need to look at your segments more carefully and build better landing pages for each of them.
- Your sales copy in your email content wasn’t effective. You may need to refine your message and make sure they hit the right pain points.
- The call-to-action on your landing page wasn’t strong enough.
- You didn’t emphasize the benefits of your product on the landing page or your messages seemed contradictory.
While all of these factors can have an adverse effect on your conversion rate, you probably don’t need to worry about changing your lead demographics or engagement strategy. If you are getting leads to click through to your landing page, then you probably got those aspects right with your campaign. Tools like GetResponse’s landing page creator give users the ability to create multiple versions of each landing page for A/B testing. In each test you will want to only change one aspect of the landing page to make sure the change you have made is what affected the results.
Optimizing your conversion rate is important, but it is also tricky if there are problems with other stages of your funnel. Take a hard look at your copy and CTAs on your final landing page and emails. Try split-testing variables that seem to be poorly optimized. You should be able to boost your overall ROI considerably for all segmented lists that are engaging with your content.
4. Subscriber Growth Rate
In order to build a sustainable email marketing funnel, you need to make sure that you are constantly attracting new subscribers. Your subscriber growth rate needs to be high enough to keep your list from burning out, because eventually all of your leads will either have converted or demonstrated that they aren’t interested in your offer.