The hard work is done – you’ve finally sent your slick-looking email, populated with rich, relevant content, out to your list of receptive contacts. But before you rest on your laurels and prepare to send the next email (in line with your carefully curated content plan, of course), it’s crucial to understand how well your email was received and whether it hit the mark. Here, we take a look at the importance of reflecting on your firm’s goals and the metrics you need to be measuring.
Identify what ‘hitting the mark’ means to your firm
Before you take a deep dive into email analytics, it’s essential to revisit the goals of your email marketing strategy. These should have shaped your content planning and will inform how you measure the success of each campaign – and your email marketing as a whole. For example, have you created a marketing email to specifically drive new enquiries as the end of the tax year approaches? Or are you working on a series of informative tips to build your firm’s reputation, nurture your contacts and stay top of mind? These goals will affect whether the return from your email marketing is a slow burn or produces instantly measurable results.
Review email analytics with your goal in mind
Analytics give you instant, valuable insight into how your marketing email has performed. Over time, this allows you to review, adjust, improve and benchmark what email marketing success looks like for your firm. The most common metrics to track include:
Open rate – as the name suggests, this is the percentage of recipients that opened your email. A compelling subject line (as we covered here) can make all the difference to open rates, and they are a valuable metric for comparing performance between campaigns. A word of warning, however: don’t place too much emphasis on open rates, as an email is only recorded as ‘open’ once embedded images or graphics are downloaded. Many email servers have image-blocking enabled, which means that even if the email is opened, it won’t be recorded unless the recipient chooses explicitly to download the images. This can lead to a significant under-reporting of open rates.
According to 2024 email marketing benchmarks, the average open rate for the financial services industry is 20.20% while a good open rate is 25-28%. However, BOMA users average email open rates sit at 32% which is a whopping 58% better than industry average.
Click rate – this is the percentage of people on your email list that clicked on at least one link within your email. This metric gives you insight into how recipients are engaging with your email content and is particularly important in measuring success if you have a call to action. If the call to action is linked to your website or a specific page within it, you should also view the corresponding analytics on your website – things like engagement time or page views.
According to the same 2024 email marketing benchmarks, the average click through rate for the financial services industry is 2.5% however, BOMA users average email open rates sit at 4%, an impressive 60% better than industry average.
Unsubscribes or spam reports – these figures show how many recipients opted out of receiving future emails and how many emails either got marked as spam by an email provider or manually marked as junk by recipients. If you’re repeatedly seeing high numbers of unsubscribes or marks as spam, it’s essential to look at the possible reasons for this that are within your control:
- Unsubscribes can be driven by many things, but provided you are delivering well-designed, relevant content with subject lines that align with the body of your email, you’ve removed the most common triggers. Unsubscribes can help track patterns over time – for example, is there a particular type of content that tends to drive increased unsubscribe numbers?
- Spam reports can be triggered by including things like excessive punctuation, special characters, capitals or phrases like ‘free’, ‘act now’, and ‘credit’ within the email or subject line. By avoiding these, you reduce the risk of your email landing in junk folders.
When measuring the effectiveness of email campaigns in BOMA users can clearly see the key metrics including open numbers, open rates, click numbers, click through rates, bounces and any unsubscribes. For a full list of digital marketing terms and their definitions click here.
Continual analysis is crucial for email marketing success
Email marketing is about building a valuable relationship and strong connection with potential and current clients over time. It’s not set-and-forget – it takes constant analysis, review and adjustment to make sure your campaigns hit the mark more often than not.
BOMA makes this easy, with plenty of the most common email marketing mistakes removed by default. And with easy-to-use campaign insights, you’ll quickly gain an understanding of what resonates with your clients. Find out how BOMA will help your firm.