6 Email Marketing Acquisition Data Points You Need to Measure

For those Realtors® just starting out, email marketing can be challenging and even a bit overwhelming. Knowing the basic data points to capture and how to determine the effectiveness of individual campaigns is the best place to start.

Effective and Affordable

Kevin George, writing for the website emailmonks.com, aggregated a great list of email marketing statistics from 2017. Here’s just five:

• Email list segmentation and personalized emailing were the most effective email strategies of 2017. (DMA)
• Email has a median ROI of 122%—over 4x higher than other marketing formats including social media, direct mail, and paid search. (DMA and Demand Metric)
• In 2017, global e-mail users amounted to 3.7 billion users. This figure is set to grow to 4.1 billion users in 2021. (Statista)
• 89% marketers said that email was their primary channel for lead generation. (Mailigen)
• In 2017, the average results for email campaigns across industries were:

      – Open rate: 24.79%

      – Average click-through rate: 4.19%

      – Click-to-open rate: 11.88%

While these outcomes represent the 10,000-foot view, they are a clear reminder that email marketing can be effective and affordable. Done well and measured often, email marketing campaigns can capture new customers and nurture post-close clients for future business and referrals. Email is an affordable way to market and test multiple messages and content. The versatility of the platform allows for detailed market list segmentation by demographics, geographic, position in the sales funnel, and so on.

These are the acquisition data points you want to pay close attention to:

1. Delivery rates speak directly to the accuracy of your customer database. To determine your delivery rate take the number of emails sent minus the number of undelivered emails.

2. Open rates tell you just how effective your subject lines are in persuading customers to open your email. Take the number of emails opened minus the number of emails delivered.

3. Click through rate tells you how many users clicked the link provided in the email to get to your website. Take the total clicks on the link and divide by the number of delivered emails.

4. Lead to customer conversion rate is where the rubber meets the road. How many of the leads who went to your website ultimately became customers? Take the number of users who completed the desired action and divide by the total number of emails delivered.

5. Sharing and forwarding rate tells you just that—how many people shared or forwarded your email. Every email you send should include share links that can be used to forward your email message and help grow your database of potential customers. Take the number of clicks on a share and/or forward button and divide by the number of total emails delivered.

6. List growth rate is another way to measure success and keep your database up-to-date by tracing the number of new leads. Take the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes and divide by the total number of email addresses on your list.

Once you mastered the basics you’re ready to move on to more nuanced measurements of behavior and outcomes, as well as testing and refining messaging and content.