Email marketing is one of the many ways to grow your business, drive sales, and build stronger relationships with current and potential clients.

Before diving into the details of important Email Marketing metrics to track, your business should first clarify what you are trying to accomplish with email marketing.Whether you want to attract new clients, sell your products, or simply let your clients know your updated business hours, determine your goals and read on!

This useful blog from Millennium Systems International, the developers of Meevo2, pulls together the go-to email metrics that salons and spas should always be tracking, explains why they are important, and offers strategies to improve these metrics to maximize your email marketing campaigns.

Open Rate

One of the most important email metrics is Open Rate, the percentage of people who opened your email. A high Open Rate is an indication that your audience was engaged by your awesome subject lines.

Emma, an email marketing tool, recommends setting a goal for an average open rate between 15-20%. Additionally, industry-specific data shows that the average open rate for salons, spas, and barbers is around 13% to 14%. Don’t be afraid to set your own KPIs as you get more comfortable sending email campaigns and gain additional analytics.

But what if your open rates aren’t as high as you hoped? While it could mean your subject line wasn’t compelling enough, it might also signal that your audience either isn’t familiar with your brand or simply isn’t interested in the content you’re providing – especially if you notice a steady decrease in your Open Rate over a long period.

To avoid this scenario, avoid over-emailing and make sure your emails provide value to your clients by learning about their interests and behaviors to determine what content to send in your emails, including special events, business news, or limited time offers on products or services.

Another way you can improve your Open Rate is to try A/B testing to compare which emails are most effective or which aren’t catching the eyes of your recipients. With A/B testing, you can test many parts of your email, including subject lines, email body copy, email images, and calls to action – helping to improve your Open Rates!

Clickthrough Rate

Do you often include links in your emails to important content like your website or a video? If so, keep an eye out for your Clickthrough Rate. This tracks the percentage of email recipients who decided to click on the links you provided in your email. Tracking your Clickthrough Rate is a great way to measure overall email effectiveness. An average Clickthrough Rate for the salon and spa industry can range from 4% to 6%.

Much like Open Rates, one way to boost your Clickthrough Rate is to try out different call-to-actions (CTAs) in your email through A/B testing. This way, your audience will receive an email with a CTA that is most likely to result in a click.

Also, be sure to provide different content types for your recipients to click on during email campaigns. For example, your first email can contain a link to a video on your business’ YouTube channel, while email number two takes your contacts to your website’s retail product section.

Bounce Rate

Another email metric that can easily be overlooked is Bounce Rate, or the percentage of your total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered to your recipient’s inbox.

Bounce Rate allows you to determine which email addresses are either invalid, closed, or non-existent. Diving into your Bounce Rate data can help you clean up your email lists to ensure accuracy and is valuable when determining your database’s overall health. An average Bounce Rate can range from 13-15%.

Forwarding Rate

Do you want to know if your email recipients share your content with their friends, family, or even on social media? Take a look at your Forwarding Rate, which tracks the number of email recipients who either clicked on a “Share” or “Forward” button.

The reason this metric is so valuable to monitor is that a high Forwarding Rate can lead to new contacts in your email list who you can send future communications to and prompt them to book an appointment or purchase retail products – driving revenue growth for your business!

Tip: If you are getting new people to join your email list, you may want to send out a custom email welcoming them to your list. You can even send them a special offer on their first service just for joining!

Unsubscribe Rate

By tracking your Unsubscribe Rate, you can provide the right value to the right people and minimize email fatigue because we all understand the frustration of receiving too many emails.

As discouraging as it may be to have a high Unsubscribe Rate, this metric can inform you on which content has worked well and should be used again and the content that led to more unsubscribes, which you may want to avoid resending in the future.

Keep in mind, the average Unsubscribe Rate for the beauty industry is about 0.30%.

If your Unsubscribe Rate starts to increase, it may be time to adjust your email marketing strategy. For example, sending emails less frequently or avoiding email sending on certain days.

About the Meevo Marketing Suite: Have you thought about using an Email Marketing platform to boost your business growth? The Meevo Marketing suite has salons covered with the ability to not only design emails and create campaigns, but it also includes all the tools needed to track all of the metrics above!