How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Bulk Email Campaigns and Keep Customers Engaged

Bulk email continues to be a dominant and growing medium for communication. This is why in our five-part blog post series, we present a bulk email crash course that’s packed with useful tips to bolster your campaigns, whether you’re an email marketing newbie or old hand. You can read the blog posts as a series or individually, and we encourage you to refer to them time and again for top bulk email results.

We kicked off by explaining what bulk emails are used for, how they can make an impact, and what it takes to make them engaging. Next, we shared tactics to help you build subscriber lists, maintain compliant contact databases, and practice list hygiene – and why it’s essential to do so.

We also detailed three powerful ways to boost bulk email campaigns by using A/B split tests, autoresponders and workflows, and landing pages. Then, we gave you top design tips anyone can implement in their bulk email campaigns to ensure they’re eye-catching and impactful.

To close out the series, we tackle the somewhat tricky subject of how to measure your bulk email campaign success. We’ll share tools that will help you understand what makes your emails effective and explain why deliverability is an essential consideration for your campaigns.

With millions of emails sent around the world every minute, inboxes are crowded. So, how do you ensure your bulk emails stand out? Well, it’s definitely not by sending the same standardised and vanilla email to all your recipients.

This approach is often referred to as spray and pray, whereby you send one bulk email to many and hope it will resonate with all your recipients.

Bulk emails can – and should – be utilised in much more sophisticated ways to help you target your messaging for recipients and drive your desired results.

Bulk email providers, like Everlytic, give you so many options to create custom messaging that can be automated and sent at scale. This ensures you send hyper-personalised bulk emails to your recipients and focus on each of their specific interests without having to send each email individually. To do this successfully requires collecting valuable contact data, such as your recipients’ names, contact details, and interests.

Once you are in a position to send targeted and strategic bulk emails, it’s important to constantly monitor how they are received and refine what works best.

We’ve already shared how you can use A/B split tests to determine which version of your mailer a few of your recipients respond to best before sending the top choice to the rest of your database. This is one way to understand what your recipients want to receive in your mailers. But, there’s a deeper way to analyse and assess what works. It’s by using email marketing analytics.

It’s official: the spray and pray approach to email marketing is just not going to cut it. This was determined in Everlytic’s You Mailed It Email Marketing Awards 2024.

In a bid to use marketing analytics to measure your campaigns, you’ll need to have access to a bulk email marketing service provider that can give you statistics on how each email performed. On our Everlytic platform, you can view detailed reports to learn insights about how your recipients received your email.

You may wonder what the point in learning how an email performed is, when your next mailer may be completely different. The crux is, your content may differ, but your audience is the same, and analysing how your recipients respond to each email will give you insight into what they respond to well and reproduce that in your next emails.

By considering when your recipients are more responsive to opening emails, where they click in your emails, and how they respond to different calls to action, you can ensure you consistently serve them with the content they enjoy and in the ways they respond best.

Basic Engagement Stats
In email marketing, you’ll often hear industry professionals talking about basic engagement stats. These are standard metrics and are therefore a way in which you can compare your emails to averages in your industry. They include:

• Opens, which show the number of times an email was opened, so if a contact opens an email more than once, it will be counted.
• Unique Opens, which are counted once per contact who opens the email.
• Clicks, which indicate the number of times your recipients clicked the links within your email – including multiple clicks of the same link by one contact.
• Unique Clicks, which are counted once per contact and per link.
• Total Clicks, which record the total number of times recipients clicked the links in the email, including when a single contact clicks multiple times.

You can then take these basic engagement stats a step further to calculate the open and click-through rates, which help you compare your emails against one another as well as industry standards.

• Open Rate: The percentage of recipients who open an email out of the total number of recipients to whom the email was sent.
• Click-Through Rate: The percentage of recipients who clicked at least one link in the email out of the total number of recipients to whom the email was delivered.

Rich Engagement Stats
Then, there are rich engagement stats, which use the basic engagement stats to determine what the click-to-open rate is, which is the percentage of your contacts who opened and clicked at least one link in your email.

You can also work out the average percentage of your contact list that interacted with your emails over a three-month period to give you a long-term view.

Delivery Stats
It’s important to check your delivery stats, which are the percentage of your emails that were sent, delivered, bounced, and forwarded.

In a bid to be viewed as a credible sender, you need to include an option for recipients to unsubscribe from your contact list. Make a habit of viewing which contacts unsubscribed and if they left a reason for unsubscribing, as this can guide you as to the relevance of your emails.

Don’t be too concerned when recipients unsubscribe, as it’s better to have a small and engaged contact list than a large list of recipients who never interact with your emails.

Social Sharing
Social stats show you the percentage of your contacts that used the social icons to share your email on a social media platform. It’s not common for these stats to be high, so don’t worry if your percentages are low.

Heatmaps
Some bulk email providers, like Everlytic, give you access to a heatmap of the links clicked in your email. Analysing the heatmap for each of the emails you send will help you understand which links were popular and what was effective in your email layout.

If you find there are more clicks at the top of your email and less as you read further down, perhaps you need to re-look at the length of your emails and consider writing and designing in an inverted-pyramid structure and F-shaped pattern.

Attachment Downloads
You should be able to track how many of your attachments were downloaded (and if there were repeated downloads). You can also learn the download-to-open rate, which is the percentage of recipients who downloaded the attachment out of the total number of contacts who opened your email.

Devices Used
It’s also interesting to understand which devices and browsers your recipients are using to access your emails. This will also give you motivation to use responsive templates, so your email design stays intact as you intended no matter which device recipients used.

Geo Report
Finally, a geo report can show you the locations of where your recipients are accessing your emails. This may help you to tailor your content in your next mailers too.

Email marketers spend a lot of time considering what to say and how best to present their messages to boost their engagement rates. Another important consideration is when to send your emails. Get a blueprint for the best day to send your email newsletter across four industries.

Since the purpose of your emails is to ensure they land in your recipients’ inboxes, achieving a high delivery rate is likely the most important marketing analytic. However, this is not always as straightforward as it seems.

This is because after you hit send to your contact list, your bulk email goes through a complex process of checks to ensure it is legitimate and not spam.

In the beginning of 2024, Google and Yahoo implemented changes to their email authentication protocols by requiring additional verification measures for those who send more than 5 000 bulk emails a day. This aimed to enhance inbox security by ensuring incoming emails are authenticated. This would reduce the risk of spam, phishing attempts, and any other malicious activities.

Therefore, to be viewed as a legitimate bulk email sender, you need to adopt the following three authentication protocols: Sender Policy Framework, DomainKeys Identified Mail, and Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance.

You also need to implement a one-click unsubscribe and retain a spam rate of 0.3%, which is another reason why constantly reviewing your email marketing analytics is essential.

Get all the info you need to ensure you are recognised as a legitimate bulk email sender in our Bulk Email Delivery Survival Guide.

Getting email marketing right takes strategy and tact. A spray and pray approach is not effective when sending your bulk emails, as your recipients want to receive messaging that’s specific to their needs and interests. It’s also unhelpful to simply send your emails without understanding how your audience is receiving them. This is where email marketing analytics come in. Examining how your recipients interact with your emails will give you data-driven insights to tailor your bulk emails in ways your recipients will respond to them best.