7-minute email metric review

For most education nonprofit and technology professionals, there’s little time to get an email marketing campaign out, not to mention reviewing how the campaign performed. These are the most important email metrics to review when you have a million other things on your plate.

Most email software has metrics ready for review, for example, I often use MailChimp or Constant Contact and they provide good reports.

Open rate

What it tells us: the subject line was interesting enough that recipients wanted to open the email to learn more.

This is good information, but I don’t waste much time with it. I pay more attention to trends when comparing different email campaigns instead of one email campaign at a time. Here’s why: open rate isn’t always accurate. Depending on the recipient’s email software and settings, and a bunch of other variables, opens can be over- or under-counted. That’s why I’m suggesting spending time on the metrics that matter, and in a time crunch, the next two are most important.

For primary/secondary education, the industry standard for open-rate is 21-24%. For “other nonprofit” it’s 18-20% (Sources include Constant Contact & Mailchimp).

Click rate

What it tells us: the percentage of recipients who clicked one or more links. The content is good enough for people to take action. This is more of an overall success story of an email.

Note: if you see an unusually large percentage of clickthroughs, it’s not always time to celebrate. It could be security bots, but that’s a whole other story.

After we know how many clicks the email received, we want to know what people clicked, and I love Mailchimp’s clickmap which tells you where they clicked the link. Often, I’ll send emails that have the donate link in more than one spot, so I can see where people clicked the link most often. Did they click it at the top of the message, so I had them at “donate”? Or did they read the whole email before they clicked “donate” at the bottom?

For primary/secondary education, the industry standard for click rate is 6-9%. For “other nonprofit” it’s 5-8%.

Conversion rate

What it tells us: the percentage of people who completed a call to action, such as donating. This takes a little more setup connecting the email provider, like Mailchimp, to the web site’s Google Analytics. It’s worth the effort though, to see which emails are more effective.

It’s harder to find a reliable industry standard email conversion rate—which I think is fair, since it really depends on how many emails the recipient sees before they act, plus a bunch of other variables.

So, there’s 7-minutes to review an email campaign’s success. For a deeper dive into email marketing trends and to tweak strategy, I’ll spend more time monthly on these metrics and others. For now, that 7-minutes is a little less daunting and well worth it.