The ability to drive new email signups is one of the most important aspects every email campaign needs to have. People lose interest, change email addresses, and generally just become inactive as time goes by. Once they do, users will either unsubscribe or just ignore your emails.
Experienced email marketers know the importance of replacing lost subscribers. They know that, sooner or later, they’ll start seeing diminishing returns that will cause more harm than good in time.
There may be quite a few techniques to promote new signups, but how can you determine which ones will work best for you? This is where signup tracking comes in.
Why Is It Important to Track Your Email Signups?
The email list is a major asset for any business that incorporates email marketing as part of its digital marketing strategy. This is because each time a visitor decides to sign up to your mailing list, they’re essentially taking a step forward and letting them know they’re interested.
Email marketing campaigns that are optimized to convert leads are often successful and generate higher ROI than those that aren’t. To achieve this, you need to know where your new subscribers are coming from.
Here are some of the main reasons why you should consider tracking your newsletter signup forms:
You Can See Where Your Subscribers Come From
Email marketers aren’t always aware of where all of their new subscriptions are coming from. It can become even more confusing with the number of ways users can sign up for your email campaign.
The problem with this is that you won’t know which channel is driving these people to sign up. Could it be your social media page, a personalized landing page, or an email signup form you made before?
When signup tracking is available, you can monitor which sources are bringing in new users and lay all of that information in a spreadsheet. Such data can be quite useful as it provides you with a bigger picture of your overall digital marketing strategy’s effectiveness.
You Can Determine Which Channel Works Best for You
With the ability to track the channels that are raking in the most subscriptions, you will have a better idea regarding the performance of each of your channels. If you notice some channels outperform others, you can shift your focus. In doing so, you’ll get the attention of more potential subscribers and be more likely to turn followers into loyal fans of your brand.
Meanwhile, if you find that most of your newsletter subscribers aren’t coming from your blog posts, for example, you’ll know that you need to change your strategy. Tracking this crucial data gives you all the information you need to know regarding your next steps — all for free.
You Can Segment Your Lists by Source
The more relevant your communication, the higher the chances that your current email subscribers will continue engaging with your email content. Given that subscribers aren’t all the same, it only makes sense to split them up based on certain preferences and characteristics so you can approach each one the right way.
When you know where your email signups are coming from, you can start segmenting your subscribers based on their source and create signup forms appropriate for each group. You might prepare different messages for those coming from a specific landing page, guest blog, or social channel.
Moving users into an email list segment of their own can let you target them more effectively and provide them with content that is highly relevant to their needs.
It Helps You Understand Your Clients Better
Finally, knowing your sources for email signups can help you understand your audience better. This means that each contact in your email database will be at different stages of interaction with your brand.
Similar to the segmentation advice above, learning about your subscribers lets you provide content that is more relevant to where they are in the sales cycle. For instance, you don’t want to promote an advanced course to a person who just recently signed up, nor would you want to talk about the basics of how your products work to someone who has been buying them for years. No — each of your email newsletter subscribers subscribe for a different reason. Email tracking is just one way of finding out that reason.
Knowing your email signup sources lets you comprehend your recipients and craft content that matches their level of familiarity with your brand.
Which Metrics Are Important for Email Signup Tracking?
Email marketing metrics are the KPIs that will help marketers understand how their email campaigns are performing thus far.
Most email marketing platforms let you keep track of data such as email opens, clickthrough rates, bounces, and more. Such data is often summarized into reports that let you know the performance of your emails over time. You can then use this information and compare it against industry standards.
To make the most out of your reports and improve your existing email strategy, understanding each KPI is crucial. Here are the most common email metrics to consider:
Email Open Rate
The open rate for your emails is a measurement that shows people the rate at which their messages are opened by recipients upon receiving them. Open rate is one of the most important metrics to consider in email marketing.
After all, getting users to open your messages is the only way they can access your content. You might send them an email with exclusive tips, but no matter how enticing they are, subscribers won’t see them if they never open it.
The industry you operate in plays a role in the average open rate in email marketing. However, the average should be around 15% to 29%, which is what you should aim for.
To increase your open rates, consider improving your subject lines by making them more compelling. Attracting the attention of subscribers is one of the best ways to tempt them in opening your messages.
Another technique is to try sending emails at different times of the day. Some days simply generate better open rates than others so see if you can do an A/B test to know which would work best for you.
Click-Through Rate
Your email click-through rate, or simply called CTR, is a metric that measures the number of times subscribers have clicked on a link in your messages. It’s usually shown as the total number of clicks over the total emails that you’ve delivered so far.
The click-through rate of your email campaign is another essential metric to consider besides the open rate because it shows how engaged your recipients are. It is an indication that people want to learn more about something you offer or complete the desired action.
One way to improve your CTR is to vary the methods you use for clicking. You can use hyperlinked words or phrases, buttons, and images to promote clicks in your messages.
Always try performing A/B tests with your emails to see which ones will generate better click-through rates than others. This is one of the smartest ways you can learn about the performance of your buttons.
Sharing and Forwarding Rate
Many email marketing platforms track the sharing and forwarding rates in which recipients disseminate your messages to others. Google Analytics — formerly known as Universal Analytics — also shows you these details.
When people share your emails, they are performing a step beyond the standard way of engaging with them. It usually means that people have found your content to be beneficial to them and want others to know about it as well.
In case the email tracking tool you’re using doesn’t take this metric into account, there’s another way you can monitor it. Tracking the click-through rate of your “Share” and “Forward” links is one way to identify this statistic.
To improve your sharing and forwarding rate, you need to ensure your messages are direct to the point. Focusing on a single topic per email signature makes them easier to share with others and doesn’t need to have extra context for people to understand them.
Bounce Rate
A bounce is when a message can’t be delivered to a contact and returns back to the sending user. The two types of bounces are soft bounces and hard bounces.
Soft bounces are normally temporary issues that will usually resolve themselves after several attempts to deliver have been made. It often occurs when the recipient’s inbox is full or their email provider has problems.
Meanwhile, hard bounces are considered to be permanent as they can’t be delivered at all. Messages labeled as a hard bounce will return to the sender and most email service providers won’t allow you to send anything to them again.
Ensuring that your bounce rates stay below 3% is crucial if you want to maintain a positive sender reputation as an email marketer. This is because having high bounce rates can lead to your IP address getting blacklisted or your domain being blocked by internet service providers (ISPs).
A great way to minimize your bounce rates is to get your emails authenticated. There are standards you can use today that will make you look more trustworthy and reliable by improving your sender reputation.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) are the three most common email authentication protocols today. Choose one authentication method or use all of them to get the best results.
Spam Complaint Rate
Receiving spam complaints due to many of your emails being marked as spam is a serious offense in the world of email marketing. A high score in this metric means that you haven’t been paying attention to how you craft your messages or you may have indulged in illegitimate practices — whether you meant to or not.
Keeping this score low is crucial because you lose your ability to send emails otherwise. Having a spam complaint rate of less than 0.02% is ideal while anything more than that increases the risk of your IP address being blocked.
One way you can reduce your spam complaints is by including unsubscribe links in your emails. Making it easy for subscribers to make changes to their preferences is important as it gives them some control over what they can receive from you.
Another tip would be to improve the quality of your email content. Some ways to do this include:
- Sending targeted and relevant messages to your audience
- Making sure the HTML code is clean and works on multiple devices
- Removing attachments and sending a link instead
- Replacing spam-like words such as “free” and “cheap”
- Not sending content too frequently (your audience doesn’t need an email every time you make a Facebook post, for example)
Unsubscribe Rate
Since we’re already on the topic of unsubscribing, the unsubscribe rate of your email campaign is also another metric you should consider. This is the rate at which your subscribers decide to opt out of your mailing list after you have sent them messages.
Each time a contact decides to unsubscribe, you’re losing them as a potential lead that you can send to your website, and convert into a customer later on. Retargeting might get them back on your email list, but it’s not an easy path to take. Keeping your unsubscribe rate low, therefore, is important.
To improve upon this, you want to include the option to let users change their mailing preferences as they please. It could be that some would still want to hear from you but simply want to change the frequency in which they receive your emails. If they receive emails more often than they’d like, they might unsubscribe altogether if they’re not given any other option.
You can also let users change their mailing preferences in terms of the types of content they receive. For example, a user might not want your promotional emails, but they’d love to read a blog post from your website each week.
Email List Growth Rate
The email list growth rates of your campaigns are the analysis of how many new email signups have happened or how many people opted out of your lists over a period of time. Tracking your list growth rate is important since it lets you assess the success of your email capture form campaigns.
Subscriber lists typically decay over time, which is why it’s important to keep driving new subscribers to your campaign. Smart marketers prioritize growing their lists by leveraging accurate email data.
To improve your email list growth rate, you need to monitor how your list decay. Lists that are decaying faster than expected might require marketers to be more proactive in understanding and resolving issues as they happen.
Another way is to send out lead capture campaigns designed to drive new prospects to your email lists. You can provide an incentive to people who sign up such as downloadable content and discounts to entice them to take part.
Email Conversion Rate
Email conversion rate is measured by how often recipients accomplish one of the desired actions of your brand.
Tracking the conversion rate is important as it can help you analyze how effective your email campaign is in completing its goal. It also lets you know if the content you’re using right now is relevant and interesting to your audience.
An ideal way of improving your email conversion rates is to provide clear calls-to-action (CTAs). Your messages should provide distinct and straightforward instructions on what you want your audience to do next. Otherwise, they will likely just read them and move on.
Now, What to Do With This Information?
Now that you have all of the information you need about tracking your signup process and the essential metrics to consider, what should you do next?
The next step to take is to improve your email campaigns by applying all of the data you’ve gathered thus far. You can start to:
Segment Your Lists
As mentioned earlier, segmentation plays a vital role in letting you send targeted content to your subscribers. Segmenting your audience into different groups allows you to provide emails that are relevant to each one.
Furthermore, it also lets you identify which group needs to be prioritized over others to keep them engaged.
Send Personalized Emails
Everyone prefers personalized emails nowadays because they feel more valued by the brand that sends them these messages. Failing to take a personal approach in email marketing will reduce your positive metrics and increase the negative ones you’d want to avoid.
When you have your newsletter signup page tracking where your signups are coming from, you can create tailor-made emails that readers can easily relate to.
Provide More Specific Content
Finally, you can send more specific email content to subscribers upon learning their signup sources. Being clear with your messages can let you stand out from your competition and increase the chances that readers will engage with your content.
Conclusion
Tracking your email signups through your newsletter signup form is one of the most crucial but least known techniques applied by marketers today. Applying it in your campaigns can prove to be beneficial as it opens up a lot of important information you’d otherwise bypass.
Subscribers will eventually lose interest in your email campaigns as time goes by. That’s why it’s important to know where they are coming from through signup tracking.
When you are able to monitor where your signups are signing up from, you can:
- See which channels they are coming from
- Identify channels that are performing better than others
- Start segmenting your audience based on their sources
- Understand your contacts better
Following the tips provided in this guide should help you make the most of tracking new email signups so you can deliver the best email marketing experience to them.
