Everyone in the health club space seems to agree that email marketing is a tool that can directly grow your health club memberships. However, like any strategy, email marketing is only effective if you know what’s working.
Email marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) help you identify the progress you’ve made as it relates to your email marketing goals. In other words, they allow you to determine if your health club’s analytics are where they should be. If you’re wondering where to start, don’t worry we have you covered!
Here are the six email metrics your marketing team should be tracking:
#1 List Growth
List growth is important because it examines the rate at which your email list is growing. You want to keep track of how quickly your list is growing, and whether or not it continues to do so. And, just as it’s important to track growth, you also need to pay attention to list loss. Email marketing databases naturally decay by about 22.5% every year, which means it’s critical to stay on top of your email list and consistently add to your list over time.
#2 Open Rate
The open rate is the percentage of people who open your email based on the number sent. You will want to benchmark where you currently are, and try to improve this number by testing. The open rate also suggests that your subject line was effective because the email wasn’t deleted or marked as spam by your recipient.
#3 Click Through Rate
The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of contacts that click one or more links in your email. CTR is a very popular metric to track because it provides good insight into how many people are engaging with your content or taking advantage of special offers. Looking to improve your click through rates? A/B testing can help you improve your CTR percentage, and here are three simple tests to get you started.
#4 The Conversion Rate
The conversion rate looks at the number of the people who click through your email, and then take action on the landing page or offer. As an example, if you provide a free ebook, anyone who downloads your ebook would be considered a conversion.
#5 Spam and Unsubscribe Reports
This KPI looks at how many people you are losing because they consider your email spam or are choosing to opt out altogether. The goal is to keep this number as low as possible, and a good way to ensure that is with a compelling headline, personalized content, and not to bombard your subscribers. Every major email marketing program will show you how many people are unsubscribing over time. Keep in mind that it's normal for a list to have a 25% churn rate of subscribers over a year. Anything higher than that and you may have a problem that needs to be addressed right away. Anything lower means you're doing something right!
#6 Bounce Rate
Bounce back emails are emails that could not be delivered. There are soft bounces, which means the address isn’t bad, but the email could not be delivered for some reason. Hard bounces are the opposite, meaning the email address is, in fact, bad. It’s important to revisit your email list to ensure it’s clean and full of good email addresses.
Email marketing can be an excellent tool if it’s functioning properly. With the use of KPIs, you are able to accurately measure your efforts to ensure your email marketing campaigns are doing what they are intended to do.
Want to better organize your email campaigns? We love this email marketing planning template from HubSpot.
Now it’s your turn! Please share your best tips about how KPIs have helped your email marketing efforts. How often are you looking at your KPIs, and where have they helped you most improve?
