Running an email marketing campaign requires a managed service provider to track specific email marketing metrics in order to estimate and calculate efficiency. There are many metrics that can be applied to your email marketing campaign. However, in this article, we are going to focus only on the most important ones: an average open rate, CTR (Click-Through-Rate) and ROI (Return-on-Investment).
Before we dive deeper into these metrics, let's find out why MSPs need email marketing at all and how it can be useful in terms of attracting new clients and promoting involvement with existing clients.
Is Email Marketing Still Legit?
Email marketing is an efficient and cheap way to deliver information to your customer base. This is a flexible and inexpensive tool that helps you communicate with your prospects and inform them about your special offers, new services, and promo-campaigns.
All the email addresses in your list are for clients who are already familiar with your services and have willingly signed up for your news and updates. The level of their loyalty is more valuable to you than those who occasionally come across your offer in an open market. It is also far easier to sell your services to them.Starting an email marketing campaign can be useful when:
- You need to get new clients
- You need to inform your existing clients about anything important like new solutions available or handy know-hows
Once your campaign is complete, it’s time to measure how successful it was.
Average Open Rate
The first and the easiest metrics to calculate is an average open rate. It equals the number of people who opened an email divided by the total number of received emails.
OR = number of opened emails / total sent emails
This index shows the percentage of people who are really interested in your email and have most likely read it. In other words, it displays how catchy the email subject was, how much it resonated with your recipients’ pains or desires.
In order to improve the open rate make sure to include one of the email marketing buzzwords for MSPs.
Email Marketing CTR (Click-Through-Rate)
The open rate is not everything. Click-through Rate can show you exactly how many clicks your email received. It’s a good index to estimate the level of engagement in the content you send and is directly related with the number of new leads and eventually the level of your profits.
CTR is essential to measure the efficiency of your campaign. It can also give you a clue as to what to change in your email in order to attract more clients for the managed services that you provide.
In the most cases, low CTR shows that your call-to-action button or link is not visible and clear enough.
ROI (Return-on-Investment) in Email Marketing
This is one of the most important metrics for any MSP business as it shows the level of profit you get with respect to the amount of money you spend on achieving every new customer. In other words, how many dollars you earn per 1 dollar invested in advertising.
To calculate this metric, you need to use the following:
- How much money you spend on each advertising source
- How much money these clients have paid over an estimated period of time
ROI = Money spent / money earned x 100%
Conclusion
These are three most important email marketing metrics that a managed service provider should calculate in order to estimate the level of email marketing efficiency.
Here is one more useful tip for you. Apart from measuring the metrics of each campaign, calculate the average for every week/month/year. This will help you determine the trends and give you some food for thought regarding the level of your business growth. One number in isolation will give you nothing, but comparing several numbers can help you recognize tendencies so you can quickly take action in times of recession.
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Alexander Negrash is director of marketing at CloudBerry Lab. Read more CloudBerryLab blogs here.
