Email engagement metrics are how you can tell the effectiveness and appeal of your email marketing. Each individual email has a few tags attached that help you track the email, including where it lands, if it's been opened, and if it's been forwarded. These data points can be used to track email metrics that indicate engagement with your content. Open-rates and click-through rates are the most essential, but not the only two metrics you can and should be tracking.
The trouble lies in email addresses in your marketing list that do not belong. Bad email addresses may belong to fake or abandoned accounts, hackers, or even lead to dead domain names. Unlike your real email list members, these emails will always come back dead, unopened, or un-delivered. They not only reduce the effectiveness of your campaign, they also skew your metrics so that it looks like your email marketing efforts are less effective than they really are.
Here are some of the many ways a bad email address set can be damaging your email engagement metrics.
Never-opened emails
No one likes this metric: the never-opened emails count. This is the number of marketing emails sent that are never touched. However, a pattern of never-opened emails can indicate an abandoned email address or even a broken domain name. Remove the 100% never-opened names from your marketing list, as they're not looking at what you have to send.
Click-through and click-to-open rate
Click-through rate and click-to-open rate are both essential metrics when it comes to email engagement. These indicate how many email recipients take action based on the content of your emails. This is an important indicator for your success, but dead or 'bad' emails will artificially lower your click-through rate for every campaign.
Undeliverable emails
Undeliverable emails are those where the email bounces back to the carrier before it reaches the domain and name indicated. These might be disconnected email accounts or the domain name itself may have been lost. Go ahead and remove accounts that can't be delivered to from your email list. Undeliverable emails can lower your stats compared to the overall number of emails sent out.
Inactive accounts
Inactive accounts are those past clients who bought something a long time ago but haven't been heard of since. Even if they did join your email list and newsletter, they haven't opened an email in months, maybe years, and haven't interacted with your brand for almost as long. This is an inactive account, reducing your email marketing response rate without any intention of buying or even helping others to buy.
Verifying your email address list can help you spot inactive accounts. Learn more about why email verification is essential for your business.
Hacker targeted accounts
Sometimes, a hacker will make a spoof account and wait for it to receive emails or promotions. It can then use the promotions you send to inspire or even open a loophole for further hacking attempts. Be cautious of any account with suspicious activity that also does not contribute to your engagement methods.
Spam folder redirect
No one wants their marketing emails to go into the spam folder, but sometimes a recipient may have mis-labeled a previous email or an auto-sorter placed your email there. For email addresses where you just can't stop being listed as spam, consider removing the email address from your email marketing campaign or using a tool that helps to detect spam traps.
Revenue per email
Revenue per email is how you calculate ROI for an email marketing campaign. Return on investment determines whether the email was worth the time and assets put into it. However, bad email entries can artificially decrease the revenue per email by stacking on sent-emails that you know will come back with poor to no results.
How Email Hippo can help
Cleaning your email lists is one of the best ways to combat issues with email marketing metrics. Our email verification service can show you the email addresses will threaten your metrics, so you can exclude them from your email campaign lists.
Try out our quick, easy and accurate verification service now with a free trial!
