Email Marketing Analytics For SaaS Businesses

Email marketing has always proven itself an effective way to grow a SaaS business. It’s an efficient SaaS marketing tactic, and it’s also a great way to promote new content, win new sales, and keep in touch with your existing customers.

But a successful email marketing campaign isn’t something you get overnight. It needs continuous assessment and improvement based on how your users react to your emails.

This is where email marketing analytics comes in.

In this blog post, we will talk about it and how you can use different metrics to improve your email marketing strategy.

But first, let’s define email marketing analytics and talk about why you need it.

What Is Email Marketing Analytics for SaaS Businesses?

Email marketing analytics is the process of measuring, analyzing, and interpreting the data from your email marketing campaigns.

You can use this data to improve your email marketing strategy in a number of ways.

It can help you segment your audience more effectively, understand what kind of content they respond to, and track the overall performance of your marketing efforts via email.

The easiest way for a SaaS company to track their email marketing analytics is through Google Analytics, especially if you’re already using that platform to track your website traffic. However, there are plenty of marketing analytics tools out there that can provide you with more specific data to know what you can improve and automations to make repetitive tasks more bearable. You may want to explore or research different email marketing tools to get the best one for your needs.

Why Is Email Marketing Analytics Important?

There are a number of reasons why email analytics is important. Let’s talk about a few specific benefits:

It Helps You Improve Your Overall Email Marketing Performance

The most obvious reason why email marketing analytics is important is that it helps you improve the overall performance of your email marketing efforts, and identify that best practices that work for your SaaS company.

The data that you get from these analysis helps you understand which parts of your email marketing campaign are performing well and which parts need improvement. And when you do, you can make changes that will lead to more successful campaigns in the future.

It Helps You Segment Your Audience More Effectively

Another benefit of email analytics is that it can help you improve your email list segmentation. This is important because not all users are the same and they will not all respond to the same type of content in the same way. Remember that your audience is going through a customer journey and email marketing enhances that experience.

By understanding the different segments of your audience, you can create more targeted content that is more likely to resonate with each individual user.

It Helps You Understand What Your Subscribers Want

Email marketing analytics can also help you find out what type of message your email subscribers are looking for.

This is important because it allows you to create content or email templates that is more likely to be of interest to them.

And when your subscribers are interested in the content you’re sending them, they’re more likely to engage with it. This can lead to better overall performance for your email marketing campaign.

It Helps You Improve Email Deliverability

Email marketing analytics can also help you improve your email deliverability. This is the process of making sure that your emails actually reach your subscribers.

There are a number of factors that can affect email deliverability, including things like the quality of your email list and the frequency with which you send emails.

Email marketing analytics can help you identify any issues that may be affecting your deliverability and take steps to improve it.

If you’re a small business or a SaaS startup, you don’t want your emails to end up in the spam folder. You’ll want them to land in your subscriber’s inbox so you won’t lose any potential customers. Email marketing metrics can help you do just that.

It Helps You Measure Email ROI

At the end of the day, the ultimate measure of effectiveness for any marketing campaign is its return on investment (ROI).

Email marketing is no different.

Email marketing analytics can help you measure your email ROI in a number of ways.

It can help you track the number of leads or sales that you generate as a result of your email marketing campaign. It can also help you track the amount of revenue that you earn from those leads or sales.

And finally, it can help you track the costs associated with your email marketing campaign so that you can calculate your overall ROI.

Email Marketing Metrics You Should Analyze

Now that we’ve talked about some of the benefits of email marketing analytics, let’s talk about the specific metrics you should be tracking.

Below are some essential email marketing metrics you should be analyzing on a regular basis:

1. List Growth Rate
2. Delivery Rate
3. Email Open Rate
4. Clickthrough Rate (CTR) or Click-To-Open Rate (CTOR)
5. Conversion Rate
6. Bounce Rate
7. Unsubscribe Rate
8. Spam Complaints
9. Email Forwarding or Sharing Rate
10. Device Statistics

Let’s talk about them one by one.

1) List Growth Rate

The earliest steps in email marketing include growing your mailing list. This is the process of adding new subscribers to your list.

The metric you should track here is your list growth rate, which is simply how much your email list has grown in a certain period of time. It’s usually computed in terms of months.

Factors That Affect Your List Growth Rate: The main factors that affect this metric include your efforts to build your email list. There are a number of ways you can do this, including things like using lead magnets and running opt-in campaigns.

So, if you want to improve your list growth rate, you should focus on those activities.

How To Compute List Growth Rate: First, take the number of new email subscribers you have for the month minus the number of unsubscribers. Then divide the difference by the total number of email subscribers on your list.

That should give you your email list growth rate.

For example, let’s say you started the month with 1,000 email subscribers and added 200 new subscribers during the month. But you also had 50 people unsubscribe

That means your list growth rate would be ((200-50)/1000)*100, which would give you 15%.

2) Delivery Rate

Your delivery rate is the percentage of your emails that are actually delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.

This email marketing metric is important because it gives you an idea of how good your email deliverability is. If your delivery rate is low, it means that a lot of your emails are not reaching their intended recipients.

Factors That Affect Your Delivery Rate: There are a number of factors that can affect your delivery rate, including things like the quality of your email list, the frequency with which you send emails, and your email sender reputation.

How To Compute Delivery Rate: To calculate your delivery rate, simply take the number of delivered emails and divide it by the number of emails sent.

For example, let’s say you sent 1,000 emails and 900 of them were delivered. That would give you a delivery rate of 90%.

3) Email Open Rate

This is an important SaaS email marketing metric to track because it gives you an idea of how well your emails are making a good first impression on your recipients.

It also gives you an idea of how much interest there is in the content of your emails.

Factors That Affect Email Open Rate: The main factors that affect your email open rate include your subject lines, preview text, and sender name. These are all things that your recipients will see when they receive your email in their inbox.

So, if you want to improve your email open rate, you should focus on improving those factors.

How To Compute Email Open Rate: Your email open rate is simply the number of people who open your emails divided by the number of delivered emails.

For example, let’s say you sent out 1,000 emails and 200 people opened them. That means your email open rate would be (200/1,000)*100, or 20%

As of this writing, the benchmark for the email open rate in the tech and software industry is around 22.7%.

4) Clickthrough Rate (CTR) or Click-To-Open Rate (CTOR)

CTR can refer to clicks on links on any digital marketing asset that you have, such as online ads and social media posts. CTOR specifically refers to the clicks you get from your email campaign.

This is an important metric to track because it gives you an idea of how well your email content is resonating with your recipients.

It also gives you an idea of how effective your calls-to-action (CTAs) are in getting recipients to take your desired action.

Factors That Affect Email CTOR: There are a lot of factors that can affect your CTOR. But the primary ones include the quality of your email content and the effectiveness of your CTAs.

How To Compute Email CTOR: Your CTOR is simply the number of people who click on a link in your email divided by the number of people who receive it.

For example, let’s say you sent out 1,000 emails and 20 people clicked on a link in them. That means your email CTOR would be (20/1,000)*100, or 2%

According to Campaign Monitor, the benchmark for CTRs in the tech industry is 2%.

5) Conversion Rates

Conversions can refer to any desired action that you want your recipients to take, such as signing up for a free trial or making a purchase.

This is an important metric to track because it gives you an idea of how successful your email campaign is in achieving its goals. Every subscriber is a potential customer, so make sure that you have a CTA in your emails and that you track this metric.

Factors That Affect Email Conversion Rates: The main factor that affects your email conversion rates is the quality of your email content and CTAs. If your email content is good and your CTAs are effective, you should see a high conversion rate.

How To Compute Email Conversion Rates: Your email conversion rate is simply the number of people who take the desired action divided by the number of people who receive your email.

For example, let’s say you sent out 1,000 emails and 100 people signed up for a free trial. That means your email conversion rate would be (100/1,000)*100, or 10%.

6) Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is the percentage of your emails that are not delivered because they’re bounced back by the email recipient’s server. From our experience, this is an annoying issue to deal with, but it can easily be solved. Any email marketing tool has a feature that lets you identify email addresses that bounce your newsletters.

There are two types of email bounces: soft bounce and hard bounce.

A soft bounce is when an email is temporarily undeliverable. This can happen, for example, when a recipient’s mailbox is full.

On the other hand, a hard bounce is when an email is permanently undeliverable. An example of this is when a recipient’s email address is invalid.

Factors That Affect Email Bounce Rate: The main factor that affects your email bounce rate is the quality of your email list. If you have a lot of invalid or inactive email addresses on your list, then your bounce rate will be high.

Now, your bounce rate is something you need to watch out for. Remember a while ago, we mentioned something about your email sender reputation?

It’s determined, in part, by your bounce rate.

If you have a high bounce rate, it will get flagged by your internet service provider (ISP) and perhaps even spam monitoring networks.

The higher your bounce rate, the lower your email sender reputation will be. And a low sender reputation can lead to your emails being blocked or even sent to the spam folder.

So, you need to make sure that you keep your bounce rate as low as possible. If you’re getting a lot of hard bounces, it would be better if you remove the invalid emails from your list altogether.

How To Compute Email Bounce Rate: Your email bounce rate is simply the number of bounced emails divided by the total number of emails sent.

For example, let’s say you sent 1,000 emails and 10 of them were bounced. That would give you a bounce rate of 1%, which is pretty high.

According to Mailchimp, the acceptable bounce rates should be no more than 0.97% for soft bounces and 0.65% for hard bounces.

7) Unsubscribe Rate

Your unsubscribe rate is the number of people who unsubscribe from your email list after receiving one of your emails.

Factors That Affect Email Unsubscribe Rate: The main factor that affects your unsubscribe rate is the quality of your mailing list and the relevance of the emails you are sending to them.

If you’re sending emails to people who are not interested in what you have to say, then it’s only natural that they will unsubscribe.

Another factor that can affect your unsubscribe rate is the frequency of your emails. If you’re bombarding people with too many emails, they may get sick of it thinking it’s a spam and then unsubscribe.

How To Compute Email Unsubscribe Rate: Your unsubscribe rate is simply the number of people who unsubscribe from your email list divided by the total number of emails sent.

For example, let’s say you sent 1,000 emails and 2 people unsubscribed. That would give you an unsubscribe rate of 0.2%.

As of this writing, the benchmark for unsubscribe rates in the tech industry is around 0.2%.

If you’re constantly having an issue with people unsubscribing from your email list, then you may want to get help from your content marketing team to produce engaging newsletters for you, and then set up an email automation to remove unsubscribed emails from your list.

8) Spam Complaint Rate

To state the obvious, your spam complaint rate is the percentage of people who mark your email as spam after receiving it.

Factors That Affect Spam Complaints: Considering that people report emails as spam because they find them annoying or irrelevant, there can be a lot of possible triggers.

One may be that the email is unwanted or unsolicited. This is more common with businesses that do cold emailing.

Another factor may be sending your emails too frequently. As we mentioned before, people will get sick of too many emails and may mark them as spam just to stop the flow.

Other potential triggers include using a misleading subject line, having a lot of typos or grammatical errors in your email, or hiding your unsubscribe link.

How To Find Spam Complaints: You can find your spam complaint rate in your email marketing software’s reports.

For example, in Campaign Monitor, you can go to Email Reports to see different data about the emails you send, including how many people mark them as spam.

The acceptable spam complaint rate varies depending on who you ask. But according to GetResponse, it should be less than 0.01%.

9) Email Forwarding or Sharing Rate

Your email forwarding or sharing rate is the percentage of people who forward your email to someone else after receiving it.

This can be through the default forwarding feature in their respective email platforms. Or it can be through social media sharing buttons you’ve added to your emails.

Factors That Affect Email Forwarding or Sharing Rate: The most important factor here is, of course, the quality of your email.

If you’re sending something that’s truly valuable or interesting, then people will be more likely to share it with others.

Other factors that can affect your email forwarding or sharing rate include the following:

• Length of your email: Email subscribers are more likely to share shorter emails.
• The use of images: Emails with images are more visually appealing and thus people are more likely to share them.
• Inclusion of social media share buttons: These buttons make it easier for people to share your email.

How To Find Email Forwarding/Sharing Rate: You can generally find your email forwarding or sharing rate in your email marketing software’s reports.

10) Device Statistics

Device statistics refer to the different devices that people use to open and click your emails.

This information is important because it helps you understand which devices your subscribers are using and how they interact with your emails on those devices.

For example, let’s say you see that a lot of people are opening your emails on their iPhones but not clicking the links.

You might want to take a look at how your email looks on an iPhone and see if there are any improvements you can make.

On the other hand, if you see that people are clicking the links in your emails when they’re opened on a desktop computer, then you know that your email design is working well for that device.

How To Find Device Statistics: The availability of device statistics reports depends on what email marketing software you are using.

For example, if you’re using SendGrid, you can retrieve email statistics by device type. It would take some coding to do, but it would enable you to see if your email is opened using a computer, phone, or tablet.

Final Thoughts: Turning Email Marketing Analytics Into Actionable Insights

Compared to social media marketing or setting up Google ads or Facebook ads, email marketing is a more efficient SaaS marketing strategy. It’s a great way to directly communicate with your audience, especially if you have any important announcements, updates, SaaS product launch, or promos that you want to make known. You can also set up email automations to make your life easier. If you’re a SaaS founder, you can do these things by yourself, but then you’ll need to be consistent in order to be successful.

Email marketing analytics can help you understand what’s working and what’s not with your email campaigns.

But simply looking at the numbers is not enough. You also need to know how to interpret them and turn them into actionable insights.

As you may have seen through this blog post, there can be a lot of factors that may affect a wide variety of email marketing metrics.

That’s why it’s so important to not only track your email marketing analytics but also to understand what they mean.

That is the key to using email marketing analytics to improve your overall campaign.

Looking for more tips and strategies that can help you grow your SaaS business? Visit our blog here.