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Email Marketing Metrics: 5 KPIs for Data-Driven Marketers

Wednesday, May 17th, 2023

Open rates only offer a small glimpse into the success of your email marketing campaigns. To determine whether your campaigns successfully drive engagement and behavior, diving deeper is necessary. In this article, we go beyond the basics to look at other email marketing metrics that can help you determine the success of your campaigns.

data-driven email marketing

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

One way to tell if your email content engages your audience is by looking at the click-through rate or CTR. Instead, looking at your messages’ click-through rate can tell you more about how successful the campaign is. The click-through rate can be calculated by dividing the number of total clicks (or unique clicks) by the number of emails delivered.

 This metric tells you how successful the message content is and whether the recipients find the content engaging. Many split tests are designed to find new ways to get more clicks in your emails, and the click-through rate is an essential metric to determine success. Clicks are significant because they often lead to conversions.

Conversion Rate

For most marketers, the conversion rate is the most vital metric to track. The conversion goal you are tracking may change from email to email. For example, the goal of one campaign may be to increase app downloads. In another, the goal may be to increase appointment sign-ups. Whatever your goal, to track the conversion rate, you compare the number of people who completed the desired action to the number of emails delivered. 

To measure the conversion rate of your emails, you may need to integrate your email platform with web analytics. You can do this by creating unique tracking URLs for your email links that identify the source of the click as coming from a specific email campaign. Tracking the source is incredibly important for understanding the ROI of your email campaigns.

Bounce Rate

It’s imperative to keep an eye on your bounce rate. The bounce rate measures how many emails were delivered to the recipients’ inboxes. Bounces can either be soft or hard. Understanding why an email failed to be delivered can help you improve your lists for future sends.

Soft bounces result from a temporary problem with a valid email address, such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. The recipient’s server may hold these emails for delivery once the problem clears up, or you can try to resend the message manually. 

Hard bounces result from invalid, closed, or non-existent email addresses. These emails will never be successfully delivered. You should immediately remove addresses that hard bounce from your email list because internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates to determine an email sender’s reputation. Keeping your email lists clean is essential to maintaining email deliverability.

Unsubscribes

Similarly, you should be tracking who is unsubscribing from email messages. Seeing a small number of unsubscribes from your email campaign is expected. The average email campaign unsubscribe rate is about 0.2%. Nevertheless, tracking unsubscribes on a per-campaign basis is helpful to ensure your content is hitting the mark. If your unsubscribe rate jumps above the average, it may be time to re-evaluate your content or clean up your lists. Unsubscribing indicates that the recipient did not find your messages engaging, and you should remove any contacts who unsubscribe from future marketing messages. There are also legal ramifications for failing to comply. The CAN-SPAM Act requires companies to honor all opt-out requests and enforces penalties for noncompliance. 

Spam Complaints

Spam complaints can also affect the future deliverability of your emails, so it’s crucial to track who is marking your emails as spam and remove them from your list. Spam complaints are delivered to ISPs, and receiving a lot of them could impact your deliverability and sending reputation. If you aren’t tracking these requests, you could be emailing people who do not want to be contacted by your company.  

Conclusion: Implement Data-Driven Email Marketing Today

Move beyond top-line email marketing metrics to take your email marketing expertise to the next level. You can better engage patients, drive behavior, and improve outcomes by using data-driven email marketing techniques. Contact LuxSci today to learn more about how our HIPAA-compliant email marketing software can help you achieve results.

Tags: click tracking, conversion rate, data driven email marketing, email analytics, email deliverability, email engagement, email list clean up, email list hygiene, email marketing, email marketing metrics, metrics, patient engagement, precision nudging
Posted in Email Marketing
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5 Email Open Rate And Click Tracking Caveats That Every Marketer Should Know

Tuesday, August 10th, 2021

Understanding your email open rates is critical for the long-term success of your marketing strategy. If you aren’t monitoring key metrics, you won’t know if your campaigns are effective. Reviewing KPIs regularly helps you understand how to tweak your strategy to meet your business goals.

While you are likely already tracking key metrics, you may not know that there are some caveats to the accuracy of email open rates and click tracking data. Understanding these caveats will help you properly interpret your results.

email open rates

1. Email Software Configuration May Lower Email Open Rates

You have no control over the email software that your recipients use or how they set it up. Some users will have their email client configured so that it will block images or HTML in their email content.

Users do this for security reasons or because they don’t want to be tracked. Either way, it’s bad news for the accuracy of your email open rate figures and click tracking data. Under normal circumstances, this type of data is collected via a beacon that is embedded in every email you send out. These beacons are tiny images that recipients don’t notice. They work by triggering a request for the image data from a server, which results in the server obtaining data about the recipient.

If a recipient blocks images or HTML, these beacons won’t load. This means that the tracking data isn’t collected by the server. Marketers will not have any insight into their activity. Even if the recipient does read the message, it won’t be included in email open rate figures. This results in email open rates that may in reality be slightly higher than your data shows.

2. Automatic Opens May Affect Your Email Open Rate

Some email programs may automatically open messages without user intervention. This can result in false positives. As a result, a user may be counted as having opened your email, when in reality it was just their software. These false positives will affect the accuracy of your email open rate, suggesting that the individual opened the message when they actually didn’t.

These false positives can be caused by some email filtering services which pre-load images to scan them for security purposes. Gmail has also been known to automatically pre-load images, affecting the accuracy of your email open rate.

3. Spam Filters May Affect Your Email Open Rate & Click Tracking

Some recipients may use spam filters that are configured to click email links to verify whether an email is safe. While this is great for protecting the recipient, it does pose a problem for email marketers. These automatic clicks from the spam filters may artificially inflate your email open and click rates.

If you look through your metrics, you may be able to determine which are automatic clicks caused by spam filters. If you see that multiple links are clicked in rapid succession, it is a solid indicator that the filter is scanning the email, rather than the recipient clicking a link themselves.

4. Certain Recipient Software May Prevent Collection of Email Open Rates & Click Tracking

Email client providers may offer protective measures that stop beacons from being able to collect metrics for the sender. The most prominent offering to do so is Apple’s Mail app, which began providing Mail Privacy Protection as part of iOS 15. This gives users the option to protect their email activity and prevent marketers from knowing when they open an email. It also masks their IP address, which stops their IP from being linked to their other online activity.

While many users may like this privacy feature, it does cause problems for email marketers. If more users opt-in to these privacy features, marketers may have to rely on metrics other than open rates.

5. VPNs May Cause Location Data To Be Inaccurate

As Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) become more popular, the accuracy of your location data may be affected. This is because VPNs allow users to spoof their locations. The data may indicate that a user is in Texas, but in reality, he or she could be in Vietnam using a Texas-based VPN server.

You need to be aware of this limitation when planning your email marketing strategy, and allow for the fact that your location-based targeting may not be 100 percent accurate.

How Can You Obtain Useful Metrics While Remaining HIPAA-Compliant?

While the above caveats complicate email open rate accuracy and click tracking for all marketers, those in the health sector face an even more complicated challenge. They need to be able to obtain useful data without violating HIPAA regulations.

Thankfully, LuxSci’s Secure Marketing tool is designed specifically for email marketing in the health industry. It offers features that allow you to measure your email open rates and click tracking, all while helping your organization meet its HIPAA compliance needs. Talk to us today to find out how Secure Marketing can help solve your business challenges.

Tags: click tracking, email marketing, kpi, open tracking, open tracking email marketing
Posted in Email Marketing
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Email Open and Click Tracking for Everyone

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019

Have you ever sent an email message and then wondered:

  • Did they open your email message?  
  • Did they click on any of the links that you included?  
  • Which links?  
  • Was the message forwarded on and opened by other people?  
  • When did they read it?

Typical email marketing platforms, like LuxSci’s Spotlight Mailer, include features that expose this information for the email marketing campaigns sent through them.   However, not all email marketing systems include email open and click analysis.  And, what about sending email via other means, e.g., through WebMail, Outlook, iPhone, API, basic SMTP relaying, etc.   Most outbound email systems that are not explicitly geared towards email marketing do not provide any means to learn the answers to these important questions.

With LuxSci’s new email open and click tracking options, LuxSci will add codes to your messages so that you can gather then answers to such business critical questions for any messages sent through LuxSci:

  • WebMail
  • API
  • SMTP Relaying — i.e., Outlook, Mac Mail, iOS, Android, and other all programs that connect via SMTP

Open and click tracking is included as a standard feature with LuxSci email hosting, LuxSci high volume secure sending, and LuxSci smart hosting.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

When LuxSci email open tracking is enabled, LuxSci adds a small image to the end of the HTML part of every message sent to every recipient.  When the recipient opens this message, that image is requested from LuxSci’s servers and we record the “email open” event.   This includes the date/time it was opened, the recipient of that message, and the IP address / physical location where the message was opened.

When LuxSci email click tracking is enabled, LuxSci modifies the links in all HTML parts of every message sent to every recipient.  When the recipient clicks on any of these links, they are taken first to LuxSci.  We record the click event. This includes the URL clicked, date/time it was clicked, the recipient of that message, and the IP address / physical location where the link was clicked.  Then, LuxSci redirects your recipient to the actually intended web address.  This happens so fast that most people never notice the tracking.

HOW TO I ENABLE OPEN AND CLICK TRACKING?

Open and/or click tracking can be enabled in LuxSci on an account-wide, domain-wide, or per-user basis; you can customize its usage to match your business needs.

To enable account-wide, for all messages sent by all users in your account, go to:

  • Account Settings > Email
  • Scroll down to “Open Tracking” and “URL Click Tracking”
  • Toggle the settings to “On” and press “Save Changes”

To enable domain-wide, for all messages sent by all users whose email addresses belong to a specific domain, go to:

  • Account Settings > Domains
  • Click on the domain in question (if you have multiple in your account).
  • Click on “Outbound Email Settings” on the left
  • Scroll down to “Open Tracking” and “URL Click Tracking”
  • Toggle the settings to “On” and press “Save Changes”

To enable for all messages sent by a specific user, go to

  • Your user outbound email settings:
  • Scroll down to “Open Tracking” and “URL Click Tracking”
  • Toggle the settings to “On” and press “Save Changes”

HOW DO I SEE MY OPEN AND CLICK TRACKING REPORTS?

Once you have enabled open or click tracking and have sent some messages, you can look and see what has happened. Did anyone open the messages? Who clicked on what links? When?

There are several ways to dig into this juicy data.

User-Level Reports

Login to you LuxSci Account and go to your Reports area. From there, open up the menu area on the left for “Sent Email – From WebMail” or “Sent Email – From SMTP Server,” depending on which messages you are interested in. Next, you can look at the “Message Opens” and “URL Clicks” reports to see what has been opened and clicked. Note that you can export data using the “Download CVS File” button on the upper right of the page. Also, Open and Click details are also available in the “Delivery Status” reports via the “Advanced” reporting tab.

Account-Level Reports

As an account administrator, you can view reports covering sending across all users in your account. Go to your Account Reports area. Then, open the “Sent Email” menu on the left and you can find reports analogous to the user-level ones, described above, but inclusive of the sending from all users.

API Reports

If you would like to integrate email open, click, and other deliverability information into our own database or application, your can use LuxSci’s REST API. The API provides all of the functionality of the user and account user interface reports, but through programmable queries and filters.

WHAT ABOUT WHITE LABEL BRANDING

When open or click tracking are enabled, images and/or links are added to your email email messages that reference luxsci.com.  If you would like to customize this so that your own domain name is used for these images and links, LuxSci offers “Private Labeling.”  Customers with Private Labeling can customize many aspects of LuxSci, including the look of the WebMail interface and the domain name used for these links and images.  If you already have Private Labeling enabled, then your configured secure domain name will be automatically used with open and click tracking.

Want to learn more about HIPAA-compliant email marketing and reporting? Contact us.

Tags: click tracking, click tracking email marketing, email marketing HIPAA, HIPAA-compliant email marketing, open tracking email marketing
Posted in Email Marketing, New Feature Announcements
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LuxSci Announces: Secure Email Marketing

Friday, May 31st, 2013

WESTWOOD, MA, May 31, 2013 — LuxSci® announces the recent launch of Secure Email Marketing, a unique solution to combined need for email marketing, patient engagement, and patient communication while remaining fully HIPAA compliant.

LuxSci’s existing Secure High Volume mailing service enables sending vast quantities of email for marketing and transactional purposes. This service is quick and easy to use and includes lots of reporting features. However, you still have to use some email program or service for composing your messages, managing your mailing lists, and managing their sending through the Secure High Volume API/SMTP sending service.  We have found that many customers do not have any tools for managing their bulk mailing campaigns and want a simple, powerful web-based system for this purpose.

The LuxSci Secure Email Marketing is just that, an extremely feature rich, web-based, email marketing service that can is plugged directly into LuxSci Secure High Volume, so that all of these messages are sent securely.

“Email marketing is a commodity — there are literally hundreds of companies that will happily help you send your marketing messages and track the success of your campaigns.   LuxSci’s Secure Marketing service is the only one to do all of that, but in the context of HIPAA compliance and ease of use.  This is a game changer for health care.” says Erik Kangas, CEO of LuxSci.

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Tags: api, bounces, bulk email, click tracking, email marketing, hipaa, mailer, smtp, spotlight, unsubscribe
Posted in Business Solutions, Email Marketing, New Feature Announcements
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