Introduction
If you’re a marketing professional, you know that cold email is one of the most effective methods of reaching potential buyers and clients. But if you don’t have the right tools in place to measure the performance of your campaigns, then you won’t be able to optimize them and make sure they’re working as well as they should be. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the most important metrics for tracking cold email success and optimizing future campaigns:
Cold email metrics are essential for understanding the performance and ROI of your cold email campaigns.
Cold emails are a great way to get in touch with prospects and customers. They’re also arguably the most effective way to do so–after all, you’re reaching out to people who have actively opted in for your messages and are interested in what you have to say.
However, there are some drawbacks: cold emails can be time-consuming, difficult to track and optimize, and require a lot of follow-up over long periods of time (especially if they don’t lead anywhere).
The good news is that there are ways around these problems! By tracking key metrics like open rates, clickthrough rates (CTRs) and conversion rates on each individual email campaign or messaging strategy overall–and using those insights as a guide for optimizing future campaigns–you’ll be able to make better decisions about when/how often/who else should receive an invite from one of our warm introductions services.
How to track cold email metrics
The first step to tracking cold email metrics is to choose a tool. There are many options available, and it’s important to choose one that works well with your business goals and budget. You can use:
- A marketing automation tool like HubSpot or MailChimp
- A CRM like Salesforce
- A spreadsheet or database system of your own creation
- An email service provider (ESP) such as ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit
The 3 most important cold email metrics
The 3 most important cold email metrics are:
- Open rate. This is the percentage of emails that were opened by recipients. It’s a useful measure because it tells you how many people read your message, but it doesn’t say anything about whether they actually understood or valued what you had to say.
- Click-through rate (CTR). This measures how many times an email was clicked on by recipients who saw it in their inboxes or spam folders, as well as how many times recipients took other actions such as opening the message and forwarding it along to others via social media channels like Facebook Messenger or Twitter DMs
Open rate
Open rate is the percentage of emails that were opened by recipients. You can calculate your open rate by dividing the number of total opens by your total number of emails sent out, as well as subtracting one from both sides.
So if you sent 100 emails and 50 people opened them, then your open rate would be 50%.
Open rates are important because they tell you how many people actually saw your message and decided that it was worth their time to read (and hopefully act on). If someone doesn’t open an email or click through to another page within a certain amount of time after receiving it (usually 24 hours), then you may have lost that lead forever unless you send another follow-up message asking for further engagement.
Click-through rate (CTR)
As you know, click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks divided by the number of emails sent. A high click-through rate is ideal because it means that people are interested in your content and want to learn more. So, how do you measure this metric?
Well, if you use an email marketing service like MailChimp or Drip–or any other tool that tracks opens and clicks–you’ll have access to this data in real time as soon as someone opens an email or clicks a link within it. This kind of information can be extremely valuable when optimizing your cold emails for future campaigns: if one subject line performs better than another, then you may want to test out different variations of that subject line next time around; if certain links get clicked more often than others (e.g., “Link 1”), then perhaps there’s something interesting about those links’ placement onscreen or what they’re linked directly too (like another article).
Unsubscribe rate (UR)
Unsubscribes are the people who have decided that your emails are not for them. They’ve unsubscribed from your list, and you can’t reach them anymore.
Unsubscribe rate is a metric that measures how many people have decided to stop receiving emails from you on an annual basis. It’s calculated by dividing the number of people who have unsubscribed from your email list by all emails sent during that same time period:
- Unsubscribe rate = number of unsubscribes / total emails sent
To calculate total number of emails sent, use this formula:
- Total emails sent = opens x CTR
Tracking cold email metrics can help you improve your performance and optimize your next campaign.
Tracking cold email metrics is essential for understanding the performance and ROI of your cold email campaigns.
The three most important metrics are:
- Open rate – the percentage of emails that were opened by recipients. This tells you how many people saw your message, which is key to knowing if they’re interested in what you have to say or not!
- Click-through rate (CTR) – The number of times someone clicked on a link inside an email divided by total number of clicks within the same period. This can tell you how many people took action after reading your message, which helps determine whether or not there’s enough interest in what you’re offering that warrants further communication with them later down the line!
Conclusion
Tracking cold email metrics is one of the most important things you can do to improve your performance and optimize your next campaign. By measuring open rate, click-through rate (CTR) and unsubscribe rate (UR), you’ll be able to see which types of emails work best for your audience and adjust accordingly.