Email benchmarks part II: How you should measure the success of your email marketing

As promised in Part 1 on the perils of relying on industry benchmarks to measure the success of your email marketing, I have returned to the discussion to talk through some practical steps you can take to both improve your email marketing strategy and gauge its success.

First, let’s refresh real quick on the context of this conversation from Part 1. I promise to be quick about it.

Okay, speed run; here we go.

The problem with industry email benchmarks

Email benchmark reports can seem like an ideal way to compare the success of your email strategy against others in your industry. The problem is, that they are too unreliable for almost too many reasons to keep track of.

Some of the most significant factors are:

• The data pool being referenced

• The presence of inorganic activities that pose as organic subscriber data

• The many factors that can cause a difference of experience even with comparable companies in the same industry

With all of that said, we still need to be able to understand what our email engagement metrics mean, as they are the main source of information here.

While you can’t treat engagement metrics as gospel, you can use them as a window of understanding into the health and relationship state of your brand with your audience.

Focusing on the characteristics of a healthy relationship with your subscribers and maintaining that relationship with each subscriber becomes the route to achieving success (aka conversion).

How do you do that though? How do you gauge and manage the much more fluid and obfuscated idea of success in email marketing?

And is there a way to make it more tangible and practical for identifying success and failure?

There is.

What marketers should do to measure success instead

A strong approach to managing and gauging your email strategy’s success can be achieved with the following:

Use your own metrics as identifiers of success and failure

Simply put:

What are you currently doing, what have you done before, and what would you like to see in the future?

Put it into action:

Review your current 30-day stats and then compare them to the previous 30-90 days. Use this to evaluate what is a likely trend rate and a realistic opportunity for growth.

Questions to ask:

• Are positive engagements (opens, clicks, conversions) going up (good) or down (bad)?

• Are negative engagements (bounces, complaints, non-opens) going up (bad) or down (good)?

• What are some of the largest influences on engagement rates (aka is it seasonality, a sudden large marketing push, etc.)?

By doing this (and doing it regularly), you can easily establish an understanding of what success looks like for you and your brand, as well as better understand what it will take to reach your desired level of success.

Use your biggest campaign outliers to determine how you can push the limits

Simply put:

Evaluating your biggest wins or losses in email engagement can help you identify the pathway to improvement.

Put it into action:

• Identify your best and worst-performing email campaigns.

• Compare them both with your average email performance and each other to see if you can identify the likely causes.

• Look at everything—content funnel, presentation, rhetoric, tone, popularity of offer, etc.

• Use this information to adjust your strategies as you focus on improvements.

Questions to ask (starters):

To improve open rates:

• How did the subject line create interest?

• How valuable/interesting is the topic on its own to this audience?

• How engaged is this audience regularly?

To improve click rates

• What type of click points does the audience tend to engage with over others?

• Does placement (top, bottom, etc.) affect engagement?

• What content funnel works best?

For negative-engagement improvement (bounces, complaints, unsubscribes):

• What best practices are being missed?

• Is this audience regularly engaged?

• Is the opt-in experience being honored by the content being sent?

These questions and approaches are a starting point, but you can easily see the direction they will lead you.

The most important thing to understand is why you win and why you lose, and use those factors to your advantage in future strategies.

Look for gaps in your subscriber relationship

Simply put:

Some of the biggest opportunities for a stronger email strategy are not in the bulk email marketing campaigns but where you are either sending too little or too many one-off emails throughout the subscriber’s lifecycle, rather than establishing a regular cadence.

Put it into action:

• Identify the stages in the subscriber’s lifecycle where they are receiving too many emails.

• Identify the stages where they are going a long time without receiving personally relevant content.

• Strategize how to clean up or fill those gaps.

• Use automation to maintain a clean and consistent experience.

Questions to ask:

• Are my automation onboarding-heavy or 3-month nurture-heavy with nothing to follow? (Most marketers will find this is the case)

• Are there gaps in the subscriber’s experience post-onboarding?

• What informational content can we provide parallel to the lines of interest with our product?

• Can we automate a personalized experience for all of this?

Personalized nurturing is becoming increasingly important in marketing strategies, especially in the seasons where growth is restricted due to external factors like the economy.

Building a relationship with your subscriber base requires intentionality and smart tools. Together, they can create a personalized experience where your brand is associated with value, rather than simply being another promotion in their inbox.

Why all of this matters

Sure, I can admit that referencing an email benchmark report isn’t the end of the world, and it probably could have a positive effect in some way as well.

But, even if it does, it is not educating you on the real problem, only on some symptom-focused solutions that will help you limp along a little better than before.

The true success and failure of your email marketing simply comes down to your relationship with your subscriber base.

That means that one business's relationship with their subscribers can never be accurately compared to another's, especially in attempting to understand what is needed for improvement.

Your audience is different than everyone else’s, and that's awesome.

So, if you want to measure the performance of your email marketing, there's no point in comparing your engagements to industry benchmarks.

Instead, you should be focused on establishing your own benchmarks for success and watching things grow from there.