Whether you’re an expert email marketer, or just starting up with your first email marketing campaign, these 10 key metrics will guide you on the right path.

Everyone is aware of how effective email marketing is when it comes to the return on investment and other success rates as compared to other marketing channels.

• According to Databox, in 2022, 33% of marketers send emails weekly and 26% send emails often throughout the month.
• As per Litmus, in 2022, 41.5% of brands, down from 78% in prior years, believe email marketing will be extremely important to their company’s success.
• Email marketing delivers a whopping ROI: 36$ for every 1$ spent.

The list is endless when it comes to writing down how effective email marketing can be.

Creating and executing email marketing campaigns can be a tough task. Nonetheless, with the right email marketing tool and following the best practices one can easily ace this task. Although, at the end, all that matters is whether the email campaigns are able to do their job in fulfilling your end goal. Importantly, whether or not you are able to measure if the emails are hitting the set benchmarks.

Importance of Measuring the Performance of Email Marketing Campaigns

To determine what works and where you fell short in your email marketing efforts, setting clearly-defined and relevant goals is vital. This is particularly true for email marketing as giving utmost value and importance to privacy becomes increasingly important. All the more, it’s crucial for businesses to keep the clients who have expressed interest in their brand engaged and subscribed.

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” – Peter Drucker

Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be tracked to evaluate the success of your email marketing initiatives in order to fully comprehend how each campaign is doing separately and collectively.

Consistently prioritizing KPIs helps maintain a high-level picture of the data points because the target audience never has a uniform or straight customer journey or purchase pattern. This not only offers but also gives you the opportunity to strategically modify and improve.

Depending on the business niche and email marketing objective, the email marketing metrics or KPIs you need to measure will vary. However, generally speaking, you should start at the top before going down. Every campaign you run should be guided by an understanding of the type of data you are looking for from your audience, the response or actions you want them to complete, and how these impact the overall email and customer experience.

Here is a list of the email marketing metrics that you cannot afford to overlook if you wish to effectively measure the success of an email marketing campaign. Remember: For the ideal baseline for an omnichannel strategy, make sure to take a comprehensive look at your email marketing efforts, including the email data.

What are email marketing metrics and KPIs?

KPIs are metrics that show how your email marketing is doing in relation to the objectives you set for each campaign.

There are important email performance measures that will decide your overall email marketing strategy even though each campaign is unique. You can use these to establish your own email KPI standards.

Simply review each metric for the current campaigns and contrast it with those of the prior email marketing campaigns. Different KPIs help to analyze different aspects of the email marketing campaigns like email performance, email list health, ROI, and email engagement.

10 Essential Email Marketing Metrics to Keep an Eye On

1. Email Open Rate

The email open rate, which is the percentage of your delivered emails that were “opened,” is an excellent way to assess the efficacy of subject lines, keep track of email deliverability, and gauge highly engaged subscribers. You can learn more about your previous brand awareness via open rate. The open rate might be a sign that subscribers have evolved to value your brand and believe your emails have worth or it can indicate how well your previous emails resonated with your audience.

Remember that now Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection has also come into play. This has a major impact on the email open rates. Thus, the email open rates can longer be completely reliable and may be inaccurate in some cases.

2. Click-through Rate

Your list’s engagement with your email and interest in finding out more about your company, its products, or your offer can be directly inferred from your email’s clickthrough rate (CTR). It essentially functions as a “day-to-day” email marketing statistic because it makes it simple to determine the effectiveness of each and every email you send. From there, you may monitor the evolution of your CTR. Additionally, CTR reveals a lot about the quality of an email marketing campaign.

Since A/B testing is typically created with the goal of discovering fresh approaches to increase email clickthrough rates, CTR is frequently used to ascertain the outcomes of these experiments.

3. Unsubscribe Rate

How many people unsubscribe from your emails is indicated by the unsubscribe rate. Generally speaking, you should aim for less than 1-2 percent to maintain deliverability. Depending on the email marketing tool you select, whether a person truly opts out or just clicks your unsubscribe link will affect whether an unsubscribe is recorded.

You can determine the health of your email list and the effectiveness of your content by monitoring your unsubscribe rate. Additionally, unsubscribes are not always a sign of unsuccessful campaigns; rather, they can be utilized to confirm that the people receiving your emails are both the correct audience and interested in hearing from you.

Having said that, allowing subscribers to opt-out and making the process simple promotes trust that you appreciate their feedback and the customer experience.

You can use the data pertaining to unsubscribe rates to decide whether to alter your sending frequency, content or sign-up processes.

Additionally, it aids your email service provider in evaluating your campaigns and making sure they adhere to recommended practices for email marketing, such as when obtaining consent.

What causes high unsubscribe rates? – Plenty of reasons may spark high unsubscribe rates. Poor email list quality and ‘aggressive’ campaigns can be some of the causes of unsubscribing. If so, examine your email analytics tool more closely and determine whether the conversions and return on investment outweigh the expense of acquiring new connections.

4. Spam Complaint Rate

Irrelevant emails, absurd email sending frequency, and sending emails to disengaged contacts may lead to high spam rates. Moreover, if the recipients do not find an unsubscribe link, they are more likely to mark the email as spam.

A high complaint rate over time might negatively impact deliverability and put you in hot water with your email marketing service provider.

To minimize your spam rate:

• Send emails only to subscribers who have given you their explicit consent.
• Use the double opt-in method.
• Make unsubscribing simple by providing an easy-to-find unsubscribe link in every email.
• Refrain from using third-party paid email lists.
• Send welcome emails to newly registered contacts.

Email service providers will automatically transport emails to the spam folder if they are frequently flagged as spam. This could harm your email sender’s reputation and take months to fix.

5. Conversion Rate

The email conversion rate counts how many recipients of your email took an action after opening it. Any action that results in a conversion, such as filling out a form or signing up for an event or purchase. There could be multiple conversion points in an email, and each one needs to be recorded independently.

The best indicator of how campaigns are doing, what is connecting with customers, and what is generating revenue is the number of conversions. It’s crucial to keep the client’s journey in perspective, though. Although conversions don’t often happen right away, your efforts haven’t been in vain. Emails and advertisements are constantly bombarding consumers. They occasionally require more messaging to move them through the conversion funnel, especially if it is tailored to them personally.

6. Email Deliverability Rate

100% email deliverability is a myth. Even if you use an effective email marketing tool, it does not mean that all your emails will reach the targeted recipient’s inbox (although, it may land into the spam box).

There are a few things you need to take into account when calculating the email deliverability rate.

• For instance, if 80% of your emails are opened by recipients, then 20% of them may not even exist.
• Second, you must determine whether your deliverability rates have suddenly dropped.
• Your email could be marked as “delivered,” but it could also end up in the spam folder.

When using a shared IP address rather than a dedicated IP, an ISP may occasionally add the sender’s email address to a blacklist. In this case, you need to identify and solve the issue immediately. The deliverability of your emails is influenced by a number of factors, but the best approach to keep it high is to follow anti-spam laws and follow the best email marketing practices.

7. Bounce Rate

The number of your sent emails that bounced, or were not delivered, irrespective of whether it was a soft bounce, a brief issue with email addresses or servers, or a hard bounce, is known as the email bounce rate.

 

A high bounce rate is a warning that the email addresses on your list are unreliable, usually as a result of improper list hygiene practices or problematic sources of acquisition. If you don’t take action straight away, it can eventually hinder your email’s ability to reach the inbox and will portray you as a spammer.

A fantastic technique to determine the caliber of your email list and whether you need to look more into what’s generating issues is to compare bounce rates against opens.

Requiring double opt-in is one technique to increase safety and reduce bounce rates. In this subscription method, a new email address is only added to your mailing list once the owner of the address clicks a confirmation link in an email sent to them following their opt-in via a form or checkbox.

8. List Growth Rate

Your email subscriber list’s growth rate reveals whether it is expanding or dwindling. A growing list shows that your readers are interested in what you provide them and like it. An unresponsive email list indicates that your strategy needs to be improved. In the worst-case situation, your email list can be contracting rather than expanding, necessitating a big adjustment to your email marketing approach.

Making email content that is click-worthy, read-worthy, and share-worthy are some effective ways to guarantee a consistent organic list growth pace. Your email list will automatically grow as more and more people find the email content more interesting.

An SEO-focused email marketing campaign aimed at generating leads is a terrific concept as a way to boost list growth rate.

9. Click-to-Open Rate

The ratio of unique clicks to unique opens is known as the click-to-open rate (CTOR). This figure represents how well the email’s message, layout, and content functioned and whether the recipient was sufficiently stimulated to take the intended action or respond in a particular way.

In contrast to the click-through rate, the click-to-open rate measures the proportion of clicks to opens (rather than the number of delivered emails). Because these clicks are exclusively from people who read your email, you may get a better idea of how your audience responded to the email campaigns.

CTOR data will help you better understand what excites your email client base when you combine this with the analytics you’re presumably already using. Capitalizing on their excitement is the key to getting your potential consumer to participate more fully in your email marketing activities.

10. Return on Investment

This email marketing metric calculates your email marketing campaigns’ profitability. To know whether sending emails is a profitable approach for you, you must monitor their return on investment.

Of all the digital marketing channels, email marketing provides the best return on investment. Whether email marketing is profitable should still be answered for you.

Bottomline

To derive the most out of email marketing metrics:

• Track relevant and right email marketing metrics and KPIs.
• Break down the KPIs’ data per your marketing objective to better understand the email marketing performance.
• Shift the metrics as the email marketing campaigns scale on a wider spectrum.

Key performance indicators are essential for conducting an email marketing campaign successfully. Finding the most efficient email marketing tactics quickly becomes a guessing game without assessing the progress.