How to Tell If Your Emails Are Working Effectively

If you’re here, you probably already know that email is a precious marketing channel. It allows you to easily keep your subscribers in the loop about new products, exclusive promotions, and everything you want them to know.

Issues with your open rate, click-through rate, and deliverability can lead to decreased sales. Here are some of the most important things to look for that can help you tell if your emails are working effectively!

Key Metrics

The definition of a good email performance changes across industries, as metrics will vary based on the business, audience, and strategies in place.

Klaviyo‘s analytics and reporting allow you to keep an eye on the data that really matters. We always recommend checking these three main metrics as they provide an overview of your emails’ effectiveness: open, click, and conversion rate.

Open Rate (Open)

Your open rate is one of the most critical stats because it tells you what percentage of your emailed people actually opened it. This metric is an excellent indicator of your deliverability, performance, and customers’ engagement.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

That being said, it isn’t enough for your recipients to simply open your email once and forget about it. Your clickthrough rate tells you how many people follow through with your call to action and click through to your website.

Conversion Rate (Conversion)

Although creating emails that get read and direct subscribers to your site are essential steps toward making online sales, knowing if a specific email results in a sufficient number of sales also tells you a lot about the email’s effectiveness. Your conversion rate indicates the percentage of recipients that open your message and then take another action (such as placing an order) within the conversion period, which is five days by default.

Performance Benchmarks for Your Emails to Determine Your Current Reach

Determining the percentage of recipients who are currently reading your marketing emails and using them to access your website is the first step in understanding whether they are helping you achieve the goals you designed them for. It doesn’t matter how many emails you send if they aren’t being read.

But what is “good”, anyway? This number will vary depending on the flow or campaign you are analyzing. For instance, a Welcome Series should have a better open rate than a Winback campaign.

If you take a closer look at your account analytics, you will notice that your automated flows’ metrics are generally higher compared to your campaigns. No worries! That is entirely normal, as it is more difficult to get subscribers to convert on a campaign than to get them to convert on a flow email.

Here are the average performance benchmarks published by Klaviyo for key foundation flows:

Find here more email performance benchmarks for emails across 13 different industries.

As a rule, you should consider your email campaign to be successful if at least 20 percent of the emails sent are opened. On the other hand, seeing an open rate of less than 10 percent is usually a sign of deliverability issues. It indicates that you should take some time to identify ways to improve your strategy before sending out your next round of marketing emails.

A low open rate indicates that your next step should be figuring out why and making adjustments to how they appear in the customers’ inboxes on your email list to do a better job of capturing their attention. You should ideally see approximately 1.5-5 percent of recipients click your email and a conversion rate above 1 percent.

Evaluating the Deliverability of Your Emails

If you are not already familiar with the concept, email deliverability is when an email is successfully delivered to your recipient’s inbox (including tabbed inboxes, such as Google’s Promotions tab). An email is unsuccessfully delivered when it ends up in the spam folder or is blocked from reaching the inbox entirely.

As you regularly review your campaign performance, we highly recommend you look at the following ranges for crucial email metrics:

If you find that your open rates are lower than 10 percent, chances are you may be experiencing some deliverability issue. You will want to look into whether your emails are ending up in spam folders, leading to high bounce rates, or being unsubscribed from at a higher than average level if your open rate falls below approximately 10 percent.

Why Is Deliverability Important?

Suppose you repeatedly reach out to unengaged people. In that case, your sender reputation will diminish, and inbox providers (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) will send more of your messages to your recipients’ spam folder. Consequently, fewer people will see your emails, and open rates (and revenue) will decrease.

Monitor Your Key Metrics

Last month, in December 2020, Klaviyo released a new tool that will help you monitor your email deliverability performance. Benchmarks allow you to assess and compare your data concerning companies similar to yours, highlighting the areas you can improve.

Get better with every email

The best way to avoid deliverability issues is by segmenting and keeping your list clean. At Future Holidays, we help our clients ensure that every email they send has a positive impact on their eCommerce business. Our email marketing experts can help you understand how to analyze and optimize your open rate, click through rate, and other performance benchmarks to get the most out of each campaign.

We can also assist with web designing, migrating to a new platform, and other tasks to keep your eCommerce business running as smoothly as possible. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you make your emails work to your advantage!