How Can You Measure the Performance of Your Sales Outreach Emails?

Email marketing is a powerful tool throughout the sales process and customer lifecycle. Sales outreach emails include cold sales emails or email follow-ups sent to warm prospects. But without tracking the sales email metrics, you'll never identify whether your techniques are working or not. Measuring the sales outreach email performance helps determine how well different parts of the email campaign are doing. And to measure that performance, you’ll need to look at multiple metrics. 

In this article, we’ll discuss seven of the most critical email metrics that’ll show the performance of your sales outreach emails. Let’s get right into it.

Conversion and Bounce Rate

The conversion rate of prospecting emails is the rate at which the sales pitch convinces the target audience to perform a particular action. It could be that you want the recipients to purchase a product, sign up for a trial, etc. The percentage of recipients that complete that action (out of the total interaction) represents your conversion rate. Conversion rate is a critical metric because it shows how effective your sales outreach emails are. Naturally, you’d want to have a conversion rate as high as possible. But the truth is not all email recipients will convert. Still, you can boost your outreach emails’ conversion rate in various ways:

• Email list segmentation to facilitate personalized campaigns
• Use engaging email subject lines and visuals
• Write strong call-to-actions
• Create mobile-friendly emails
• Send your emails at the perfect time

Meanwhile, an email bounce rate is the number of emails that haven’t reached the inbox of potential customers. It is calculated by dividing the number of bounced emails by the total number of emails sent multiplied by 100.  Emails can bounce for various reasons. It could be because your target recipient has an invalid email address or their mailbox is full. It could also happen if they’ve blocked your email address. Generally, your bounce rate should be lower than 3% since most email service providers penalize senders with a bounce rate exceeding 5%. The best way to reduce your bounce rate is by cleaning your email list regularly. You can do this manually by checking the emails that bounce in each mass email campaign. Then, exclude those email addresses in future campaigns. Alternatively, you can use some advanced email marketing software solutions to automatically detect bounced emails and exclude those addresses.

1.Open Rate

This refers to the percentage of email recipients who opened your sales emails from a particular sales email outreach campaign. It is calculated by dividing the number of emails opened by the number of emails sent minus the bounced emails multiplied by 100. Your email marketing software should automatically generate the open rate for you. It’s advisable to aim for an open rate of above 25%. In fact, most email marketing campaigns have a more than 30% open rate. And you can get higher email open rates by:

• Writing engaging subject lines
• Segmenting contact info to help personalize email content
• Creating relevant content 

Sleeknote prioritizes relevant content in this cold sales email to boost open rates. Source The email points out the importance of email marketing, statistics to support the point, and then introduces their email marketing ROI calculator.

Email open rate is a crucial metric, but it doesn't paint the whole picture. For example, leads may open the emails but fail to click on the CTA that would take them to our Venture Smarter sales pages. That would mean the email campaign didn’t achieve its intended goal. So don’t obsess too much over this metric.

2. List Growth Rate

An email list growth rate is the rate at which your email list grows. Take your total number of new subscribers and minus the number of unsubscribers. Next, divide that by the total number of email addresses on your email list. Finally, multiply it by 100 to get the rate as a percentage.  This metric gives your marketing team valuable feedback, like whether their lead generation efforts are paying off or not. For example, it can tell you whether the lead magnets you use are helping you get more subscribers.  If you’re still struggling to grow your email list, consider the following tips.

• Use referral and loyalty programs that will require email signups
• Make use of pop-ups
• Create relevant and valuable lead magnets
• Offer exclusive content through emails alone

Videofruit leveraged personal relationships and an effective referral sales email to grow its email list.  Source By making the email personal, leveraging warm prospects, hosting a giveaway, and maximizing each mutual connection, they gained 205 subscribers and $247 in two days. 

3.Rate of Sharing and Delivery

Email sharing rate refers to the number of times your target accounts share your email content on social media or to other emails. The email sharing rate is calculated by dividing the number of shared emails (number of clicks on your email’s sharing CTA button) by the total number of delivered emails. Then multiply by 100. When email recipients find product news or content useful, they'll most likely share it among connections. This is very important because it helps you generate new leads. Moreover, it builds brand awareness.  The email sharing rate also helps identify the content that's gaining customer attention and engagement. This is content you can tap into and include in your prospecting sales email template in upcoming email marketing campaigns.  To increase the sharing rate in your sales email outreach, send personal 'snackable' content. For instance, this sales email outreach has great relevant content offering great perks for being an email subscriber. It also provides a link to simplify the process of sharing the email. Source The delivery rate shows the percentage of emails your email recipient’s servers accept. Divide the number of emails delivered by the number of emails sent and multiply by 100 to get your delivery rate. Ideally, you’ll want to keep your email delivery rate above 97%. The delivery rate is a helpful metric, but it doesn’t really speak much to the overall health of your campaigns. That’s because emails could get delivered but end up in the spam folder. Recipients may also not open those emails. In both cases, your recipients are not interacting with your content. Keep that in mind if you’re pitching a campaign for a client while using proposal creation software to write your proposal.  Nevertheless, here’s how to increase email deliverability of your sales outreach email:

• “Warm up” your IP address first by emailing a few clients with whom you have a business relationship.
• Use the right cold email outreach software tools to maintain a high sender reputation score. 
• Provide a double opt-in confirmation to ensure that your list of contacts is genuinely interesting and have provided relevant customer email addresses 
• Make the unsubscribe process easy. Also, Learn more about How to Mass Unsubscribe From Gmail Emails by using TrimBox.

Make sure you’re using reputable email marketing software. That’s because the solution used also influences email deliverability.

4.Track Period of Engagement

Tracking the period of email engagement helps narrow down the best time of day to send out your emails. This will help your cold outreach emails, reminder sales emails, etc., fetch higher open and click-through rates. You can use email service providers (ESPs) to automate the period of engagement tracking. You can track this manually to see at what time your emails get the highest engagements. From there, you can tweak your email campaigns to ensure your mass emails are sent at the perfect time. You may also want to use advanced email marketing solutions if your recipients are spread across different timezones. These tools will ensure every recipient receives the emails at their most optimal time.

5.Complaints and Churn Rate

The complaints rate shows the percentage of your email recipients reporting your emails as spam. This is a crucial metric to track because high spam complaints rate can have your account penalized or blocked.

One of the most effective ways to maintain a low spam complaints rate is to ensure you get the recipient's permission to send emails. That means you need to avoid buying email lists. Also, give your recipients the option to opt-out of your email list. That way, they won’t have to report your emails as spam. On the other hand, the email churn rate is the percentage of customers who cancel an email subscription. This email metric demonstrates the health of your sales outreach email campaigns. A high churn rate means there’s something wrong with your campaign. Luckily, a few techniques can help you lower your email churn rate. These include

6.Use redirect links 

Redirect unsubscribers to complain forms to help identify common mistakes. Here’s a great example of how companies follow up to understand why their email recipients are leaving. Source

7.Email Segmentation and Personalization

Email list segmentation helps you to categorize and personalize email content. This helps you build on customer relationships and reduce the churning rate. Here’s an example to show this: Source Other techniques involve the use of a double opt-in process and giving recipients the option to update their email preferences.

8.Click-through Rate

The Click-through rate (CTR) refers to the percentage of people clicking on the link on your email as a response to your sales offer. The CTR measures the email campaign's success and helps sales teams understand the interests of each client. Here are some ways to help encourage CTRs in your sales outreach emails:

• Write engaging and relevant emails
• Optimize sales emails for use on all devices, including mobile phones
• Use clear CTAs
• A/B test different elements of your sales outreach emails

With these tips, you are bound to have more recipients click through your sales emails to your landing or sales pages.

In Closing

To improve the success of your email outreach campaigns requires you to measure the performance of your emails regularly. And while there are tons of metrics to look at, it usually comes down to several key KPIs. From this article, you’ve learned about those metrics and what they mean for your sales outreach campaign.

Once again, the metrics are conversion & bounce rate, list growth rate, sharing and delivery rate, open rate, complaints & churn rate, and click-through rate. You also want to track the time when your emails get the most engagements.  Carefully integrating and following this advice sets you for customer success and growth. Good luck.