How do you ensure your outreach marketing campaign is worth the effort and money?

The simple answer is to measure it.

However, no matter how simple that is, many companies still don’t have the means to determine the effectiveness of their outreach campaigns. If you’re one of those companies, then you’re running a headless campaign, resulting in wasted time and money.

But you don’t have to launch a campaign blind anymore. You can stop wondering whether your email marketing is performing well and generating positive ROI.

In this article, we’ll help you understand the importance of tracking, analyzing, and measuring your outreach marketing campaign to help you to reevaluate your efforts and determine what’s working.

The Importance of Measuring Your Campaign

Sure, we could talk about optimizing your campaign by learning how to write a compelling email message, avoiding common cold email mistakes, and debunking cold email myths.

But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how optimized your emails are if you don’t have any idea if your campaign is helping you reach your business goals.

Measuring your campaign is essential because it gives you insight into what works and what doesn’t so you’re in a position to make informed decisions on where to direct your resources in the future to allow you to increase ROI and maximize your efforts.

Having a clear idea of how your campaign is doing also helps you understand your target audience better. For instance, by tracking your clickthrough rates on a particular email campaign, you’ll understand how people respond to specific messages and materials. In return, you can plan your campaigns that are more relevant and attractive to the right group of people.

5 Key Performance Indicators to Measure

The best criteria for measuring the success of your outreach marketing campaign are those that help you verify your performance based on data. Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your campaign, regardless of your niche or offer.

1. Bounce Rate

A 100% email deliverability rate is near impossible. Actually, it really is impossible. So, don’t expect all recipients on your email list to read every email you send them. What’s important is that most of your emails get delivered. You’ll know this through your email bounce rate.

Your bounce rate percentage is the total number of emails you sent that weren’t successfully delivered to your recipient’s inbox. Bounced emails are a sign the recipient’s email account is not active for one of two reasons and you should consider removing them from your email list.

There are two kinds of bounce rates:

 

  • Soft bounce: This happens when the recipient’s email address is active but experiencing a temporary problem, like the recipient’s inbox is full
  • Hard bounce: This occurs when an email address or domain no longer exists

 

In hard bounces, you should immediately remove email addresses because email service providers (ESPs) use bounce rates to determine an email sender’s reputation. If you send too many hard bounces, ESPs may flag your email address as a spammer.

How to calculate bounce rate: (total number of bounced emails ÷ number of emails sent) x 100

Example: 65 bounced emails ÷ 12000 total emails sent x 100 = 0.5%

2. Open Rate

This metric is pretty explanatory, right?

Your open rate is the metric to know how many recipients opened your email. If you have a high open rate, you can safely assume that many of your email recipients were interested in your company.

But a high open rate doesn’t necessarily mean you’re running an effective outreach marketing campaign.

Open rates mainly indicate the effectiveness of your email subject lines. You can also use open rate as a comparative metric to see how your emails perform since the variables are somewhat controlled.

As a general benchmark, you should aim higher than the average open rate of 37.65%. 

How to calculate open rates: (number of unique opens) ÷ (number of emails sent – those that bounced) x 100

Example: 110 unique opens ÷ 300 emails successfully sent x 100 = 36%

3. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

 

Optimizing your open rate is important, but what’s even more crucial than that is your clickthrough rate.

CTR helps you track your email marketing campaigns by knowing the performance of each of your emails. You can use CTR to determine the results of your A/B tests, especially as most tests determine which emails get more clicks.

CTR is important because it provides direct insight into how many people engage with your content. The more engaged they are, the higher the chances you get a response.

If your open rate is impressively high but your CTR is poor, it means people were enticed to open your email but not interested enough to follow through. You might have to rewrite the contents of your email.

How to calculate CTR: (total clicks ÷ number of delivered emails) x 100

Example: 500 total clicks ÷ 12,000 delivered emails x 100 = 4.2% clickthrough rate

4. Response Rate

Your response rate indicates how many people opened and responded to your email. It’s the most definitive metric in measuring your campaign’s success as it counts how many people interacted with you.

This shows that apart from just opening and reading your email, your recipients took a step further by replying directly or clicking a link. Still, how people respond to your email highly depends on your ask and call to action—how much you’ve convinced them to take the specific action.

How to calculate response rate: (total responses ÷ number of delivered emails) x 100

Example: 1,000 total responses ÷ 12,000 delivered emails x 100 = 8.3% response rate 

5. Conversion Rate

Perhaps the most crucial KPI is the conversion rate.

In every email marketing campaign you launch, the ultimate goal is to convert your prospects into customers. However, don’t confuse your conversion rate with money or your overall ROI. Your conversion rate depends on the objective of your campaign. It can either be the following:

  • Sale
  • Event registration 
  • Product subscription
  • Appointment booking
  • Whitepaper, e-book, article download

 

In short, the conversion rate refers to the percentage of people who completed your desired action from the email sent. They don’t just respond (which is the response rate), they convert into the individual you want them to be—like a customer or client. 

How to calculate conversion rate: (number of people who completed the desired action ÷ number of delivered emails) x 100

Example: 2.000 total responses ÷ 10,000 delivered emails x 100 = 20% response rate

Email Benchmarks

So knowing how to calculate your KPIs is one thing. But how do you know if your campaign is performing well or underperforming?

The short answer is it depends on your industry.

Here’s a summarized email benchmark you can use for comparison:

 

Industry 

Bounce Rate

Open Rate

CTR

Advertising & marketing

9.99%

20.5%

1.8%

Education

9.55%

28.5%

4.4%

Financial services

9.15%

27.1%

2.4%

Healthcare services

9.86%

23.7%

3%

IT/technology

11.10%

22.7%

2%

Retail

7.65%

17.1%

0.7%

Travel, hospitality, leisure

7.62%

20.2%

1.4%

 

Source: Mailerlite & Campaign Monitor.

 

Note: All figures represent average percentages.

 

 

Launch Better Outreach Marketing Campaigns with Data

Email marketing is an important marketing strategy for many businesses. But, to measure your campaign’s effectiveness, it’s crucial to understand email metrics and how to calculate them. By understanding your KPIs, tracking your progress becomes much more accessible and even more critical.

With accurate data, you can position yourself to make data-driven decisions to maximize strategies that are working.

The bottom line is that analyzing the metrics of your email campaigns will help you improve your campaign’s effectiveness and reach your desired objectives.

Ready to launch email campaigns that boost your profits? Partner with cold outreach experts like ScaleUpSales. Contact us today!