Engaging email is strategic email

Strategic email is engaging email and traditional email campaigns often fall short of being strategic. To add real value, email marketers must utilize more effective metrics. The right metrics not only refine what and when you send emails but also allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

Top executives prioritize:

• Driving customer engagement
• Demonstrating and measuring ROI
• Outperforming competitors
• Enhancing customer satisfaction and success
• Managing risks
• Navigating the complexity of evolving buyer behaviors, channels, and technologies
• Growing revenue and achieving targets

Executives typically aren’t concerned with metrics like Open Rate or Click-Through Rate from your latest campaign. If you can’t demonstrate the importance of email to your top executives, you won’t secure the budget or resources needed to make email a key element of your strategic marketing approach, missing out on its potential benefits.

In this section of our guide, we’ll outline best practices for using conventional email metrics. We’ll also introduce a new engagement metric and explain how to connect email strategies directly to revenue growth.

Before diving into advanced measurement strategies, let’s review the most common metrics used by Email Service Providers (ESPs). We’ll define each metric, provide benchmark values for average and top-performing companies, and share optimization tips for improving results.

Here are the seven most common email metrics:

1. Sent
2. Delivered
3. Bounced
4. Opens / Open Rate
5. Clicks / Click Rate / Click-to-Open Rate
6. Unsubscribe Rate
7. Marked as Spam

Sent

Definition: The number of emails that successfully passed through the sending mail server (your ESP). This may not match the number of addresses on your sending list, as it depends on how your ESP tracks sent emails. Some may count “bad” addresses in the total. Marketo defines this as the number of valid contacts who received an email.
How to optimize: To increase the number of emails sent, focus on growing and maintaining a healthy contact list. A well-maintained list ensures higher delivery success.

Delivered

Definition: This refers to the number of emails that were sent and not rejected by the recipient’s server. Note that “delivered” doesn’t guarantee that the email landed in the inbox. Marketo defines this as the number of contacts who received at least one message.
How to optimize: Maintain a healthy email list, ensuring that invalid addresses or spam traps are not included. Review Part 2 for more on building and maintaining a healthy list.

Bounced

Definition: Bounced emails are those that fail to be delivered. There are two types:

1. Hard bounces: Permanent rejections due to invalid email addresses or server blocks.
2. Soft bounces: Temporary rejections, like full mailboxes, server issues, or message size limits. Multiple soft bounces may lead to a hard bounce.

Marketo defines bounced as the number of contacts who received a bounced message.
The Value of Engagement: According to the Marketo Benchmark on Email Performance, top performers have lower bounce rates:

• Average companies: 2.1–5.0%
• Top performers: < 2.0%
  How to optimize:
• Ensure your email provider removes bounced addresses from future sends, but handle soft bounces like “out of office” messages differently.
• Use real-time email validation services to prevent invalid addresses.
• Regularly scan your lists for typos (e.g., missing periods or incorrect domains) and correct them.
• Offer subscribers the ability to update their email addresses through a subscription center or handle updates manually if they reply to your emails.
• Reach out to recipients with problematic addresses via phone or direct mail, especially if they have high potential value.
• Monitor delivery rates by domain, tracking Open and Bounce Rates. If a particular domain shows higher Bounce Rates, it may be affected by spam filtering.

• the new metrics for email marketing
• Engaging email is strategic email
• email measurement basics
• engagement
• True Financial Metrics

Number of Pages:

• 15 pages

Pricing: 

• Free