How to Measure the Performance of Sales Outreach Emails in 6 Ways

Sales outreach emails are vital for any business trying to increase its revenue. They allow you to connect with potential customers, build relationships or personal connections, and ultimately close deals.

According to statistics, 80% of individuals prefer sales reps to contact them through email.

However, to ensure your sales outreach process is effective, you will need to measure the performance of those sales outreach emails. 

In this post, we’ll discuss six metrics to help you measure the performance of your sales outreach emails.

What is Sales Outreach?

At its core, sales outreach is a proactive approach where sales representatives initiate contact with potential customers or clients. It’s about reaching out to people who might be interested in your product or service but haven’t interacted with your brand yet. The goal? To spark a conversation, build relationships, and ultimately, close more deals.

What are Sales Outreach Emails?

Sales outreach emails are essentially emails sent by sales reps to potential clients or customers to introduce them to the company’s products or services. They’re the digital equivalent of a warm, friendly handshake that says, “Hello! We think you might find what we offer valuable.”

6 Ways To Measure The Performance Of Sales Outreach Emails

Ready to gauge the success of your sales outreach emails? This section delves into six effective methods to measure their performance and fine-tune your strategy.

1. Open Rate 

Your email open rate measures how often your recipients open the sales emails you send. A low rate could indicate that your subject line wasn’t effective or that your email ended up in the recipient’s spam folder. 

Low email open rates can also be due to other reasons. For example, your timing could be wrong. When you send emails at the wrong time, a recipient may pause opening them until it’s convenient for them. Unfortunately, most of them will completely forget about it.

Whatever the issue, you must calculate and track your average email open rate to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.

You can calculate your email open rate using this formula: (Number of emails read ÷ Number of emails sent) x 100%.

The typical email open rate varies depending on the industry of the targeted audience. However, 19% – 26% is a commonly accepted range for a successful email campaign.

Ideally, you should calculate your open rate and compare it to your industry’s average. It’s okay if you’re within the average. However, you’ll get better ROI for each campaign by pushing your open rates to be above the industry average.

How do you do that?

Start by paying attention to the sales email subject line to improve your open rate. Write something clear and concise, and ensure it is relevant to the rest of your cold email content. You also want to avoid using gimmicky words or phrases that will turn people off. 

Consider this email subject line from Alex Garcia. The subject line uses numbers to pique the recipient’s interest. This can boost open rates significantly.

In addition, ensure you send your emails at the right time of day. Your target audience may respond more to your outreach emails when you send them at the most suitable time. Here is a statistic created by HubSpot on the best time of day you should send an email.

Email segmentation is another effective tactic for boosting your email open rate. As a kind of personalization, segmentation helps you deliver more relevant sales emails to subscribers depending on their geographic area, interests, contact info, purchase history, and more. So, learn how to segment your subscribers and send them relevant material. Consider using an email extractor tool for this.

Finally, make sure to test your sales outreach emails extensively. You can experiment with different subject line formats and the time of day you’re sending emails, for example. This will help you optimize your campaign for optimal open rates.

2. List Growth Rate

The list growth rate indicates a company’s prospect list growth over time. It allows marketers to monitor the overall health of their email campaigns and the effectiveness of their list-building activities.

You can calculate your email list growth using this formula: [(New subscribers – Unsubscribers) ÷ Total subscribers] x 100.

By tracking your email list growth rate, you can see how well your sales and lead generation processes are doing and where you need to improve.

There are a few different ways to measure the email list growth rate:

• Look at the number of new subscribers added to the prospect list each month.
• Analyze the churn rate. That is the percentage of subscribers who unsubscribe from your list each month. 

To improve your email list growth rate, ensure you’re offering valuable content that your qualified prospects will want to read. That means upping your SaaS content writing strategy to ensure your B2B audience gets real value and sees you as an authority in your field. This will make it easier for them to sign up for your newsletter. 

If you’re just sending out hundreds of thousands of sales pitches, you’re not going to keep many people on your list. 

Unless you have a very niche product, chances are not everyone on your list wants the same thing. Therefore, you need to figure out what each prospect is interested in, put them in relevant customer segments, and target them with relevant email content.

Also, you need to find a good balance between information and promotional content. Don’t bombard your subscribers with promotions all the time. They’ll churn. Share more helpful content with occasional promotions.

Here is a cold email template example from Apple Podcast. In the following email, Apple doesn’t send out promotional material but informative content that may interest and assist podcasters.

It’s useless to try to sell to people who aren’t interested. As you can see in this report, the #1 reason why customers unsubscribe is because the emails aren’t relevant to them.

That’s how to prevent unsubscribes. But how do you attract new subscribers? 

One of the best ways to achieve that is through the use of lead magnets. Provide a valuable resource for free on your website. Just ask your site visitors to share their email addresses to access the resource. 

You may also want to create landing pages and popup forms where you share details about the benefits of having users join your email list. Make sure to optimize those landing pages and forms for maximum conversions. For example, don’t ask for too many details. 

Then drive traffic to that landing page. You can send traffic from your social media accounts. You can even include a link to the landing page on your digital business card.

Also, make it easy for your target audience to subscribe to your list. If you’re making them jump through hoops, they will likely give up and go elsewhere.

3. Bounce Rate 

Email bounce rate is the percentage of email messages sent that fail to be delivered. A high email bounce rate can indicate several problems, including an invalid email address, a full mailbox, or a problem with the recipient’s email server. 

A high email bounce rate might also hurt your “sender reputation,” sending your emails to the spam folder.

You can calculate your bounce rate using this formula: (Number of bounced emails÷ Number of emails sent) x 100.

If you’re seeing a high email bounce rate, it’s essential to take steps to fix the problem so that your cold sales email are delivered and read. Here are a few tips to reduce your email bounce rate:

• Maintain a clean and up-to-date email list: That will help to ensure that the email addresses you’re sending to are valid. This involves doing regular email verification to clean inactive email addresses.
• Use a double opt-in process: Send an initial email asking qualified prospects to confirm their email.
• Send test emails: Before sending a batch of sales outreach emails, send a few initial sales emails to yourself and some colleagues to ensure the newsletters are getting through.
• Use an email validation service: If you’re using an email finder to build your email list for cold sales outreach, make sure to validate those emails. An email validation service will help you avoid sending sales emails to email addresses that are likely to bounce.
• Monitor your email deliverability: Keep an eye on your email deliverability rate so you can identify any issues early on.

By taking these steps, you’ll reduce your email bounce rate and ensure that your sales outreach emails are delivered and read.

4. Conversion Rate

Email conversion rate tells you how many qualified prospects responded to your cold sales email and took the desired action, such as scheduling a meeting or requesting a quote. By measuring these metrics, you can ensure that your sales outreach emails are effective and are helping you reach your business goals.

Calculate your conversion rate using this formula: (Number of conversion÷ Number of emails delivered) x 100.

There are a few factors that can affect your email conversion rate. For example, if you are sending too many sales emails or if your emails are not personalized enough, you may see a lower conversion rate.

Your sales team should start segmenting your prospecting email list to personalize your emails better and improve your email conversion rate.

You can personalize your sales outreach emails by pitching relevant products or services that would resonate with the recipient. This shows you’re informed and eager to assist. You may even add a personal remark or social proof to convey your appreciation.

A/B testing your emails is also important here. You can test the value proposition, CTA, and even the email format to determine what elements produce the highest conversions.

5. Churn Rate

Email churn rate measures the performance of cold email campaigns by tracking the number of unsubscribers, bounces, and complaints. It’s a critical metric for sales professionals since it can help improve your email marketing strategy and avoid deliverability issues. 

You can calculate your churn rate using this formula: (Number of unsubscribes, complaints, and bounces over a given period ÷ Total subscribers at the start of that period) x 100.

A high churn rate indicates that your emails are not being well-received and that you need to change your strategy. Here are a few tips to reduce your email churn rate:

• Ensure your emails are relevant and exciting– Generic or mass emails are more likely to be ignored and may trigger unsubscriptions.
• Don’t send too many emails – If you bombard recipients with too many emails, they will likely tune out or unsubscribe. 
• Make it easy to unsubscribe – Making it difficult to unsubscribe will only frustrate recipients and increase complaints or spam reports. This will hurt your sender reputation.
• Keep your email list clean and up-to-date – Remove inactive or unengaged subscribers from your list. 

By keeping your churn rate low, you can ensure that your emails are well-received by recipients. This should also boost the efficiency of your sales outreach email campaigns.

6. Click-through rate

Email click-through rate measures the number of recipients interacting with the message by clicking on a link, call to action, or graphic. It can give you insights into the effectiveness of your cold email campaigns.

You can calculate your click-through rate using this formula: (Number of clicks÷ Number of delivered emails) x 100.

According to Ascend2’s poll, CTR is the most influential metric for assessing the health of an email marketing campaign.

There are a few different ways to improve your email CTR. First, write effective subject lines that entice people to open your emails in the first place. Next,  ensure your email content is relevant and exciting to your email recipients.

Finally, your sales team should include compelling calls to action (CTAs) and test different variations to identify your top-performing CTA. For example, if you’re doing email marketing for SaaS, you test different CTA versions like “Get Started For Free,” “Start Your Free Trial,” etc.

Here’s a sales email template example from SkillShare. SkillShare included a saving action that may pique potential customers’ attention and encourage them to take the desired action.

By tracking your email CTR and making improvements accordingly, you can ensure that your sales outreach emails and sales process are more effective and that you are reaching the right people with your message.

Conclusion

In conclusion, sales outreach is all about making the first move to engage potential customers, and sales outreach emails are an effective tool to do just that.

Sales outreach emails are a great way to build a mutual connection with potential customers and increase your sales. It is essential to any sales strategy, but it’s hard to know whether your efforts are paying off if you don’t track the right metrics.

Remember, the goal is to start a conversation, not to make a hard sell. So, be genuine, provide value, and watch as your sales outreach efforts bear fruit!

By measuring the open rate, list growth rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, churn rate, and click-through rate and verifying your email list, you can get a good idea of how well your sales outreach email campaign performs. Then, from the results, you can make necessary adjustments to your sales outreach emails. 

Use this guide to start tracking the performance of your sales outreach emails today!