In last week’s article, we talked about How to Get Your Emails Opened and Read. It’s useful to measure your open rate on your emails, because if no one is opening them (and thus reading them), you need to make some significant changes. If no one is opening your email, it’s a waste of time.
Unfortunately, open rate is a pretty soft number, and hard to accurately measure. Usually, open rate is tracked as a percentage based upon how many people downloaded the graphics in your email (thus “opening” them) divided by how many were sent.
Since not everyone will download the graphics, it’s nearly impossible to accurately measure. Industry average open rate is about 20% give or take, but it’s probably a bit higher since some people will block or prevent the graphics from loading.
How to Track and Measure Email Engagement
What’s far more important, and much easier to measure is how many people clicked your links in your emails. All your email platforms like Constant Contact, MailChimp, Aweber, etc., will easily track the clicks as a number called “click-through-rate” or CTR.
Constant Contact Email Click Through Rate
In this case, 23 clicks from 254 opens is 9.1% (23/254 times 100%). My CRM system unfortunately, calculates click-through-rate based upon the emails that were sent, not on those opened. So in the example above, it would only be a click-through-rate of 1.2% (23/1832 times 100%) which is incorrect.
If people don’t open your email, they can’t click the links. So make sure your platform is calculating it based upon the opened emails, not sent emails.
Why This Matters
If we’re putting effort into sending out a regular email newsletter (which we’ve already suggested is your most effective and least expensive marketing tool that you have), we want people to DO something, which is get to the goods on our website. This may be to sign up for something, read something or buy something.
We need people to get to the destination where they will do whatever it is we want them to do to “convert” or engage with us.
This is why it’s so important to measure.
If people are reading my emails, but not going any further, it’s not doing any good. If they’re opening my emails but signing up for webinars or other things, then I know I’m doing it right.
Constant Contact says that the industry average CTR (click-through-rate) is roughly 8%, or 1 out of 12 people who opens your emails will click. Looking at my own stats, I’m running right about double that, or 16%, which is awesome.
Measuring Engagement in Google Analytics
I’m a data guy. I like numbers, and I like to see what’s working or not working. Unfortunately, with so many systems and tools, our data can get spread out into different places, making it hard to track. So I like to track my email engagement (clicks) in Google Analytics, which is where I track how many people visit my website.
Google Analytics (GA) does a pretty good job of putting clicks into buckets, but with email, it gets a bit muddled. If someone clicks a link in Microsoft Outlook, GA will see that visit to the website. However, it will come in as a direct visit to your website, because it doesn’t see a referral click from another website. To GA, it looks as if someone just typed the web address directly into their browser.
Hm. That’s not very useful.
So instead, I tag the links that I put into my emails so it forces GA to recognize that it’s an email link, rather than a direct link.
If you clicked this blog post from my email newsletter, look at the web address in your browser. You’ll see stuff like &utm_medium=email… in the URL. This is the tagging I put on the URL so it translates into GA-eze.
You can use Google’s URL Builder Form to tag the web addresses in your email (and in your social media). You want to make sure the “Campaign Medium” is set to email, and then it will show up properly in your GA account under “Campaigns”
But this is really tedious, and I have a much quicker and simpler way to do it automatically, which I’ll talk about in our next article.
Look in your own email tool. What CTR are you seeing in your newsletter? Tell me in the comments below.