A Guide to Email Marketing KPI Metrics for MSPs

Running your managed service provider business, you may have a solid customer base. Sending emails to customers from time to time with the new promotions or specific offers is a good idea. To make your MSP email marketing more effective, you might use different tips, write thrilling texts and compose email subjects with all sorts of buzzwords that are impossible to ignore. However, these efforts are worthless unless you learn to track your email marketing KPIs.

But before setting up your KPIs you should define your email marketing funnel and specify your indices.

Email Marketing Funnel

This is a tool that helps MSPs visualize their customers’ journeys–from the first visit to the website to recurring payoffs and new referral leads to your business. You should specify the email marketing objectives for each step that is relevant to this specific campaign. Here are the typical steps:

• Awareness. At this stage, you should measure how many new prospects have been added to your email marketing list. These people have not ordered any services yet, and they haven’t been able to estimate the value that you offer.
• Consideration. Once your recipients start getting emails from you, they learn more about the value you can provide and will start to consider your company as a solution for their IT needs.
• Conversion. This is the point where a prospect turns into a hot lead by filling in the form or directly calling your office.
• Loyalty. Successful MSPs make most of their revenue with the help of recurring payoffs from customers whose loyalty grows with every passing month.
• Advocacy. The finest hour for your business is when your clients are so pleased with your services that they recommend you to their colleagues, generating a stream of referral leads for your business as a result.

There are many metrics and objectives that you can apply to your email marketing campaign. We are going to review only those that can give you real value and help you determine the strong and weak points of your email marketing strategy.

Email Marketing Objectives

1. Advertising budget

The amount of resources you have spent to acquire a new subscriber to your list during a specified period of time. Track the conversion rate for each advertising source, be it social media or contextual advertising via Google Adwords.

2. Open rate

Every time you send an email to the entire list of your recipients or only to a specified segment, track the open rate.

Open rate = (number of people who opened your email) / (total number of recipients)

This metrics shows how interesting and catchy the email subject was and whether it resonated with the recipients’ pains and desires. You may run A/B tests and try different subject lines to find the approach that will work best with your audience.

3. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

This index shows how many people clicked on a link or a button in your email.

CTR = (number of people who clicked on a link) / (number of people who opened the email)

CTR displays the effectiveness of your offer and how clear your email’s CTA (Call-to-Action) was. If this metric is low, consider trying a different offer or make the button or the link more visible.

4. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate = (number of people who ordered your services) / (number of people who clicked on a link in the email)

This metric shows how many people filled in the inquiry form or called you after your email marketing campaign. While it is relatively easy to track the conversions on the website using Google Analytics and other tools of that kind, it may be a challenge to identify those who call you on the phone.

You may ask them how they noticed your offer, but this is not a good idea as people don’t tend to keep such things in their memory. The most likely answer you will hear is, “I found it somewhere on the web”.

The most precise way to measure such leads, although not the cheapest one, is to set up a separate phone number on the landing page that you use for your email marketing campaign.

5. Overall ROI

The final step in your email marketing funnel shows how much money you have earned with the help of these leads.

ROI = (amount of earned) / (amount of spent on this specific campaign) * 100%

This is the most important KPI as it shows the overall effectiveness of the campaign. It may not be significant in the first months of your collaboration with new clients, but as you continue providing them with the best IT services in the region, their loyalty will grow and so will your revenue.

A Word of Caution

If you are at the very beginning of your journey as an MSP, don’t start with the email marketing. It’s a complex instrument that will take a lot of time to figure out and won’t bring you immediate success.

Start with more aggressive ways to sell your services. Email marketing is a good way to communicate to your client base, but not to acquire it from the very beginning.

If you want to learn more about how to start an MSP, tune in to our weekly show, The MSP Voice, where we interview real-life IT-consultants and managed services providers.

Conclusion

As long as you thoroughly collect and measure all these metrics, your business will remain in a healthy state. You will always be able to identify weak points of your email marketing strategy and make necessary changes.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.