Sending out an email newsletter is a great way to stay in regular contact with your guests, alert them to new offers, increase engagement and drive booking rates, but if you’re not staying on top of the hard data, how can you be sure all your hard work is paying off?
To make sure you’re spending your time and resources wisely, these are the five key metrics you should be keeping an eye on to assess the performance of your email newsletter.
1) Click-throughs
Most of the time your primary reason for sending an email newsletter is to encourage your guests to click on something – whether it’s a link to your latest blog post, your resort’s social media profile or a landing page offer. One of the best ways to gauge if your email campaign is useful then, is to monitor the number of click-throughs your newsletters generate over time. If you notice the number is gradually dropping, you know it’s time to have a rethink. Often, your email content will include several different clickable elements, so you should also keep an eye on which links garner the most clicks within the email – based on this data, you might be able to adjust the way you format your content depending on your goal.
2) Conversions
A high click-through rate is great, but to see if your email newsletter is truly performing you need to track what your guests are doing after they click. Are they clicking on a CTA in a blog post? Converting on a landing page? Whatever you want your audience to do after they click a link in your email, you need to monitor their actions, and use this data to assess the success of your newsletter campaign over time.
3) Guest Database Growth
Moving forward, you want to get as many people as possible reading your newsletters and clicking the links they contain. True, list growth isn’t everything, but generally speaking, the more people on your email contact list, the more click-throughs and the greater number of conversions.
4) Forward Rate
One of the best and perhaps most surprising ways to grow your contact database is simply to continue emailing great content to the people that have already subscribed to your list. Why? Because of the possibility of your guests passing on the email content to friends and family by hitting ‘Forward.’
Email marketing programs can’t give you a direct answer when it comes to how many of your guests are clicking this button, but there are several ways you can begin to gauge your ‘forward rate’:
- If your email newsletter links to a form, you can track the volume of conversions on that form.
- You might choose to include a short CTA urging your guests to forward the email content to a friend, along with a trackable link. You can then track clicks via that link.
Neither method will give you the complete picture, but they should help provide a general idea of how forward-friendly your newsletter is.
5) Delivery Rate
The majority of the time, the simplest method for calculating your delivery rate is to divide the total number of emails delivered by the number sent. Ideally your delivery rate should be over 95%. If at any time you notice your rate dropping below this ideal, it might be time to spring clean your contact list and remove non-active subscribers. Certain content choices such as inclusion of Flash, video, overuse of exclamation marks and a subject line written entirely in capital letters are also spam red flags to Internet Service Providers and could stop your email from getting to your guests’ inboxes.
The key to an effective email campaign is to experiment, test and continually monitor performance. By staying on top of your email metrics you can constantly adapt and optimise your campaigns to ensure they are reaching and resonating with your guests.
Do you monitor your email newsletter metrics? Let us know in the comments below!
RELATED PAGES AND BLOG POSTS:
- 10 Simple Email Marketing Ideas
- Email Marketing - When Less is More
- 6 Things To Check Before You Send That Email
