Cold emails have proven to be one of the most effective outreach channels, widely used by a variety of B2B companies regardless of size or industry. In fact, cold emailing is the single most popular outbound tactic in 2021, with 34% of marketers asserting its efficiency over other channels. Besides that, 80% of prospects prefer to be contacted by sales representatives via email rather than any other outreach channel.
However, cold email performance isn’t a simple metric to measure: It consists of multiple KPIs (key performance indicators) to keep track of and analyze constantly to secure growth and stable ROI for the company. To evaluate how successful your cold email strategy is and define what elements of your email outreach process need improvement, you should keep track of the seven main cold email statistics discussed below.
The most basic cold email stat to monitor constantly is the total number of all cold emails sent by your sales team during a certain period of time. In outbound outreach, the more high-quality leads you manage to contact, the higher is the chance of closing more deals.
To scale your cold email outreach effort, you should either increase your in-house team or outsource this channel to a third party that specializes in this type of outreach. Another option is to use email automation to optimize your team’s effort and reduce the time wasted on manual repetitive work.
The cold email bounce rate is a metric that shows the percentage of emails that failed to be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. The bounce rate is an extremely important metric to keep a close watch on because if it is too high (more than 2%), email service providers (ESPs) like Google, Bing, or Yahoo might mark emails from your domain as spam more frequently, making it even harder to reach out to the prospect.
To calculate your company’s email bounce rate, use the formula:
To minimize the chances of your cold email bouncing back, follow these rules:
The cold email open rate metric is used to define the percentage of emails opened by the recipients out of all emails delivered. It is crucial for any B2B company to achieve a good email open rate and only after that to focus on improving other metrics. After all, it doesn’t matter what you are going to write in the body of the email if it remains untouched or sent to spam by the prospect right away.
To check out what your email open rate is, use this formula:
Open Rate = Emails Opened/(Emails Sent - Emails Bounced) * 100%
If you struggle with getting your email noticed among emails sent by your competitors, try out the next tips:
The cold email response rate shows how many emails received a reply out of all the emails that made it to the prospect’s inbox. This metric evaluates how successful you are at interacting with your prospects and trigger them to send a reply.
To find out how successful your B2B cold email response rate is, use the formula:
The main purpose of any cold email in B2B is to start a conversation with a potential customer. A well-researched cold email with a proper personalization and relevant message is more likely to end up with an answer, which will later result in a high cold email response rate. If this is not the case for your company, here are a few hints to improve the situation:
The key difference between cold email adjusted response rate and the cold email response rate metric is that this one is based not on all the emails delivered but just on those which were actually opened by the prospects. This metric gives you a better understanding of how good your emails are in terms of the value they generate for the prospects.
To calculate the adjusted response rate, use this formula:
To increase this stat, you should first work on the content of the cold emails you send in these ways:
Cold email click-through rate (CTR) is a stat that shows how many people have clicked on at least one link incorporated in the body of your email. This metric includes tracking the effectiveness of all types of CTAs, regardless of where this link leads: to schedule an appointment, to read a blog, to subscribe to news, or to purchase a product.
To measure cold email click-through rate in B2B, you’ll need to apply the next formula:
Cold emails are primarily a channel for communication with the prospects, but not a platform where the final sale is happening. To attract the prospect into the sales funnel, they will have to go out of their email boxes. But remember, to keep your CTR metric high, follow these tips:
The cold email conversion rate measures how many recipients completed the most desired action for your business and made it to the bottom of the sales funnel. This metric can be based on the number of closed deals, appointments set up, subscribers, unique visitors to your blog, etc.
To calculate, simply use the formula:
In B2B, conversion rate (CR) shows how well your cold email is selling your product or services. If this metric isn’t good enough, try different options to boost it:
All the seven statistics mentioned above are there to help you improve your cold email outreach process. However, to boost the efficiency of this channel, you have to pay attention and analyze all the data altogether. If you limit yourself to monitoring only cold email open rate, response rate, or click-through rate, for example, you’ll have just a small part of the picture, which might lead you to wrong conclusions. To avoid any mistakes in the future and build a strong cold email campaign, contact our specialists today.