a healthcare marketers guide to email reporting metrics

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Why are Email Reporting Metrics Important?

Leading consumer-facing businesses invest in robust email marketing strategies to effectively engage with their audiences and ultimately attract and retain their customers. Email marketing should build brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, and convert your prospects into loyal customers. 

In building this strategy, it’s important to keep the overall goal of your email communications top of mind. The email marketing metrics explained in this article act as guidelines to keep your team focused on their desired business outcomes. There are numerous metrics to evaluate, such as open rates, clicks, conversions, and more. 

Our platform allows you to easily access, analyze and derive insights into performance across all your interactions. Before diving into these numbers, however, you must understand the common metrics that will allow you to take your email marketing strategy from great to game-changing.

Common Email Reporting Metrics

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Opens and Unique Opens‍

Opens are recorded when an email recipient opens an email. A similar metric, unique opens, tracks the first and only time a recipient opens an email. If a recipient opens an email, then opens it again later - that would register two opens, but register only one unique open. Unique opens only track the first time a recipient opens an email. 

Both opens and unique opens are directly influenced by an email recipient’s reaction to the ‘from name’, subject Line and preview text provided in your email send. Continuously test these elements to improve your open rates.

Open Rate =Total Opens / Total Emails Delivered

Unique Open Rate = Total Unique Opens / Total Emails Delivered

Average Healthcare Open Rate: 23.40%

Clicks, Unique Clicks and Click-Through Rate (CTR)

A click is recorded each time a recipient clicks on a link shared in your email. Clicks can be registered through interaction with a Call to Action (CTA), images with links, or even unsubscribes. One recipient can record multiple clicks on the same link.‍

Unique clicks measure the first and only time a recipient clicks on a specific link in the email. 

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For example, a recipient receives the above email and clicks both CTAs - one unique click would register. Later on, that same individual reopens and clicks both CTAs - the unique clicks recorded remains at one and the total clicks recorded increases to four.

Total clicks and unique clicks measure the relevance and effectiveness of the content provided in your emails. The best way you can improve click rates is to A/B test content areas, send frequency, CTA verbiage and location, image placement, and content layout.

A comparable metric, Click-Through Rate (CTR), is the percentage of your send audience who received your email and registered a click. CTR allows you to compare the effectiveness of your content across all your email sends.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) = Total Clicks / Total Emails Delivered

Average Healthcare Click-Through Rate: 3.70%

Click to Open Rate

Click to Open Rate (CTOR) is a ratio that uses Unique Clicks and Unique Opens to paint a more detailed picture on how recipients interact with your message using this basic formula:

Click to Open Rate = Unique Clicks  Unique Opens

Average Healthcare Click to Open Rate: 15.6%

This metric tells you the number of recipients who opened the email and registered a click. In this sense, CTOR tests an email’s ability to have a positive impression on a recipient at the moment they open the email for the first time.

Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate tells you the percentage of emails out of the total sent that did not reach your recipient's inbox. When tracking bounces, it’s important to distinguish between soft and hard bounces. A soft bounce indicates a temporary issue like a full inbox or inactive email address. Hard bounces indicate a more permanent problem, like if an inbox has been disabled or does not exist. If there are three or more soft bounces within 60 days, the recipient will be marked undeliverable. Undeliverable means we will no longer send to them.

A high bounce rate signals that it's time to audit your customer lists so you are only sending to engaged customers with active email addresses. Luckily, Cured’s platform automatically audits your customer lists and will not send to email addresses that have either previously hard bounced or soft bounced three or more times within the last 60 days.

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Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate tracks the percentage of recipients who choose to unsubscribe from your mailing list. Recipients can unsubscribe for a variety of reasons: they don’t find the content relevant, they no longer have use for your offering, or they don’t appreciate the volume of emails sent from your account. Here are some ways to lower your unsubscribe rate:

• Experiment with new content. Alter the preview text, include a different layout, or move the CTA to a new area on the email. Something as simple as subject line wording can drastically alter the unsubscribe rate of your emails.
• Alter or reduce your send volume. If you find you are bombarding consumers with emails, try lowering your send volume and see if unsubscribes decrease. Additionally, we advise that you establish your send frequency with recipients upfront so they know exactly when to expect your messages in their inbox. 
• Segment your send audience to deliver hyper-relevant content. Consumers respond to material that is tailored to their interests - for example, a typical college student will not show immense interest in an email showcasing the newest nursing home in their area. 

Lastly, you should honor unsubscribe requests when they are made. According to CAN-SPAM, companies have 10 days to remove the consumer from their mailing list after an unsubscribe is requested. Mailing to unsubscribed consumers increases the risk of ending up in the SPAM folder - that’s why Cured’s product removes unsubscribed individuals from their related publication list. 

Average Healthcare Unsubscribe Rate: 0.30%

Conversions

Conversions track how many recipients open your email, click on an offering, navigate to your website and take the desired action. This desired action can take the form of an appointment request, webinar download, account activation, or any other action you want your recipients to take as a result of interacting with your email message. Overall, tracking conversions can be valuable in calculating your return on investment (ROI) for each email campaign.

On email reporting metric overload? Learn more from a Cured expert. 

Source: Healthcare Email Metrics