Demystifying Email Marketing Results

ROI, AOV, CLV, CTR... ABCDEFG. 

There are a bunch of terms thrown around in the marketing world than can feel super confusing, bloody overwhelming, or completely empty.

If you're sending marketing emails, you're going to want to understand your analytics so that you can continue to improve your results. I'll break it down for you as simply as I can...

Open Rates

This one is a little nuanced. With the introduction of Apples MPP (Mail Privacy Protection) and other ISP's (Inbox Service Providers) following suit, open rates aren't quite as reliable as they used to be.
Basically what happens is little robots read your emails before you do, resulting in them showing as opened - sometimes multiple times - before the reader actually opens the email themselves.
The average open rate across the board is around 21%, so if you're near or above that you're doing okay. An initial first welcome email often has open rates of up to 80%.
ESP's (Email Service Providers) are catching up to the MPP issue pretty quickly, and there are ways to filter opens if you want to dive really deep, but this inflation in 'opens' causes us marketers huge headaches, and is not a metric to rely on any longer.

If your open rate is super low, try this:

➡️ Test different subject lines - use these to grab attention in the inbox.

➡️ Check your deliverability/sender reputation - if you're landing in spam, you might have a bit of an issue. Setting up your dedicated sending domain can help with this.

Click Rates (also referred to as CTR's)

The click rate shows us the percentage of openers that have clicked on some link in your email.
Between 2-5% is healthy, higher than this is great.
Using simple but strong calls to action on your buttons, ensuring imagery is hyperlinked to product or landing pages, and not having loads of calls to action in a single email are great ways to keep a healthy CTR. 

If your click-through rate is dire, try this:

➡️ Reduce the number of calls to action in your email

➡️ Don't send your email as one single image

➡️ Ensure your CTA's are convincing

➡️ Review your email copy: are you talking about the features of your product, or the values and benefits your reader (aka customer) will experience when they purchase it?

Conversion Rates

There are lots of different metrics we can look at when it comes to a conversion rate, but most commonly, you'll be eyeing up "Placed Order". You want to know how many sales each email has brought in.
The tricky things to consider here are are attribution - by default, Klaviyo sets this to 5 days. But we can't tell whether this customer has seen your organic social media posts, ads, and emails and in which order, to know for sure that your email is what finally convinced them to place that order.
A 5 day attribution window from Klaviyo means that if your customer has opened and clicked on your email, and then placed an order any time up to 5 days after doing so, Klaviyo will count that as a conversion. The attribution period can be changed in your settings, but running regular reports through Google Analytics or a third party software like Triple Whale will help you gain a clearer idea of where your sales are coming from.
2-9% again are considered healthy conversion rates - but this is majorly industry dependent, and you need to know your own numbers rather than worry about global averages in this instance.

If your conversion rate is a tragedy, try this:

➡️ Check your website out, in incognito mode, as if you were a customer. Is your checkout functional? Is your website easy to navigate? Is your web copy customer focused and convincing?

➡️ Consider your shipping costs. These tend to be the biggest reason a customer will not complete a purchase.

➡️ Ensure the links in your email were driving customers to a specific product, collection or landing page relevant to the content of that email. Try to send them to the checkout in as few clicks as possible.

In a nutshell -

Low open rates? Check your subject lines, and deliverability.
Low click-through rates? Check your links, copy, and calls to action.
Low conversion rate? Check your website functionality.