Like any large undertaking in the digital age, modern SDR email campaigns generate tons of data. This sales data is a treasure trove of information about how your prospects are responding to your pitch – if you know how to analyze it. If you’re just getting started, here are the most important stats for you to consider.

#1 Emails Delivered to Inbox

With an imaginary little “whoosh,” your prospecting email leaves the sending account. Ideally, it’ll land right alongside emails from their colleagues and clients, where they’re most likely to read it: The inbox. Unfortunately, it might not always make it there. One of several different things can happen to it instead.

A – It could bounce because the email address you sent it to is inaccurate or out-of-date. Of course, this is bound to happen sometimes because people change jobs. If you have a high bounce rate (over 10-15%), contact the source of your prospect data to see what could be causing this problem.

B – It could land in your prospect’s spam folder – where they likely never will read it. Even worse, if this happens too much, your email provider may flag your domain and even shut your account off altogether. If your emails are being flagged as spam, you might be sending too many total emails, too many with the same subject line, or too many with the same body content. Try using variables (such as the prospect’s first name or company name). If that doesn’t help, check with the program that you use to send your emails for further suggestions.

C – Your email could end up in a “category.” This refers to one of the sub-folders in the prospect’s email account, such as “Updates” or “Promotions” – you know, the emails that they glance through every few days but don’t usually read. Fix this issue using the same strategies you would if you got flagged for spam.

#2 Open Rates

If your prospect never opens your emails, then it doesn’t matter how much their company would benefit from your services because they simply won’t hear about it. The most important factor influencing your open rate is the subject line of your email. The average open rate for cold emails is 15%-25%. Depending on your target audience, you may find different strategies that work to get the highest open rates, so you’ll need to do a bit of experimenting to find out what’s most effective.

One strategy that is useful in analyzing all sales data, but especially subject lines, is A/B testing. This means that half of your prospects (Group A) get one subject line, and the other half get a different one (Group B). Everything else about the email remains the same. After a few weeks, compare the results from the two subject lines. If one is dramatically outperforming the other, you might choose to stop A/B testing and send out only the one that’s doing better (or something similar, to avoid getting flagged as spam).

When you’ve done this enough times, compare the results across all your email campaigns. What type or style of subject line performs best on the whole? Are prospects responding better to a personal tone or a more professional tone? Is it better to use the company name or the person’s first name? From there, your copy department can continue to optimize their work.

#3 Replies

Ultimately, the statistic that matters most is meetings booked – that’s what actually brings money into your or your client’s pipeline. It’s often going to be by far the smallest number, which makes it more difficult to analyze accurately.

As a workaround for this issue, we’ve found that it can be helpful to analyze the number of replies that an email receives. We’ve found this to be the sales data that most closely correlates to the number of meetings that we’ll be able to book. While it’s usually still a small percentage of the whole, it’s often a much larger number than the actual number of meetings, so you have better data to work with.

Like with subject lines, you can A/B test individual emails to see what generates the best results, or you can analyze larger trends. What length of email are people responding the best to? What content does it need to have in it (statistics, links to case studies, photos, etc)? From the data you get from your reply rate, your copy department, again, can strategize best practices for writing your SDR copy.

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