Did you know that 95% of marketers said that their email marketing strategy helped them meet their business goals successfully in 2021?
And the right email marketing metrics can help you gauge your email campaign’s success.
Email marketing is not just the marketing team’s favorite technique. Both sales and service teams use emails extensively to stay in touch with customers.
No wonder the global email marketing revenue is projected to be $17.9 billion in the next 5 years.
Image via Statista
There is an obvious reason for marketers to choose email marketing over other techniques.
Email marketing drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent.
That’s higher than any other digital marketing channel.
This stat also highlights the fact that customers too respond positively to well-targeted branded emails.
Email marketing is highly rewarding but it is not easy. Only well-thought-out, data-driven campaigns will yield quality results. And to measure your campaign’s success comprehensively, you need to set the right email marketing metrics.
If you are new to email marketing, choosing the right email marketing metrics can be a bit overwhelming.
Below are the 12 best email marketing metrics every business must track and how they can contribute to your business growth.
Let's get rolling.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, after social media, email marketing is the most preferred content distribution channel for marketers.
Image via Content Marketing Institute
Needless to say, marketers can achieve phenomenal success by monitoring the relevant email metrics. Here are some of the top benefits of tracking email marketing metrics and how they help you accomplish great results.
Ideally, email marketing campaigns aim to send a series of emails to inform, capture and nurture leads.
But if your audience has not even opened the first email you sent, the chances of them opening and reading the follow-up emails are very rare.
With the help of email tracking, you can monitor the open rate of your first set of emails to assess the response of your readers. By understanding how the readers are engaging with your emails, you can decide on the kind of follow-up emails you need to send.
This prevents you from flooding the audience with unnecessary emails and wasting their time and yours.
Email marketing is a powerful medium to interact with your connections, followers, and prospects. And to make every interaction interesting and fruitful, you should create powerful email marketing campaigns.
Measuring email marketing metrics will provide you with the right context and frame of reference for your marketing team. It creates a detailed data-driven backdrop that can precisely tell you what works with your audience and what doesn't.
You can find keywords, graphics, and videos that best resonated with your audience and reuse them in future campaigns too.
When setting certain goals for your email marketing campaign, the content has to be prepared accordingly.
The subject lines should be catchy enough to pique the curiosity of the readers and the body of the email should have the right balance of text, graphics, and promo videos to encourage them to take action.
Email marketing metrics like open rate, click-through rate, website visits, and so on indicate how effective your content has been in compelling the email recipients to take action.
As an email marketer, your aim is to ensure quality customer engagement to grow your business, and the only way to measure it is to track the right email marketing metrics.
By analyzing multiple email metrics, you will be able to understand how well the recipients are responding to your emails.
Right from welcome emails to recommendations, and lead magnets, you can track a variety of emails to gather specific data that throws light on your customers’ interests, preferences, and pain points.
This customer engagement analysis will help you streamline your email marketing efforts and create tailored email campaigns.
Sure, emails can help you drive sales and other great results.
But when and how many emails should you send to ensure maximum engagement?
Email marketing metrics may hold the right answer to this question.
According to Campaign Monitor’s Email Marketing Benchmarks Report, Monday has the highest open rates whereas the unsubscribe rates are the lowest on Saturday and Sunday.
Image via Campaign Monitor
But this too may not hold true for you.
It’s essential to monitor your email metrics well to figure out the days and times when your emails are likely to make the most impact. And once you hit the right frequency, you can nurture your audience with relevant content.
One of the top advantages of tracking email marketing metrics is that it helps you monitor the performance of your email campaign in real-time.
With the help of a capable email marketing tool, you can track the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, and several other metrics in real time and analyze the data.
This can be highly beneficial in assessing the overall performance of the email campaign at every stage and modifying it on the go can help drive better results.
Your email marketing KPIs serve as the point of reference for email marketers to stay focused on the goals you want to achieve.
While you rely on certain general metrics to track the success of an email campaign, you can opt to monitor a few other specific email metrics based on the goals you set.
It is only by tracking such metrics that you can successfully determine where you stand. Based on these email metrics, you can design your email marketing campaigns and target them toward the right audience.
Without the right KPIs, the chances of swaying away from the desired goals are quite high.
Now that you know the benefits of tracking email marketing metrics, let’s take a look at the top 12 metrics every email marketer should track in 2022 and beyond.
Open rate is one of the most important email marketing metrics you should be monitoring. It refers to the ratio between the total number of emails sent and the number of emails opened.
Email open rate can help you understand how effective your email subject lines are and how many of your subscribers are keen to open your brand’s email.
This email marketing metric can be used as a comparative key performance indicator to check the week-on-week performance of your campaign.
CTR is one of the most critical email metrics for email marketers. It tells you how many email recipients clicked on a link you provided in an email. These could be your social media links, affiliate marketing links, special offers, product links, or links to free resources.
This email marketing metric can help you track the performance of each email you send. As the click on the CTA is usually an important goal of any email campaign, your CTR is a metric that you must track.
Remember, click-through rates are typically much lower than open rates. To improve this important metric, you need to deliver what your subject line promised, improve list segmentation, and write compelling CTAs. The CTA design and placing also matters equally.
Needless to say, the conversion rate of any email campaign is absolutely critical as it gives you an idea of where your campaign stands in comparison to your goals.
It measures the percentage of people who completed the desired action against the total number of delivered emails.
Conversion rate shows how successfully the email CTAs were able to achieve the overall email marketing goals you had set.
Let’s say you have sent an email to promote an ebook. So when the reader actually downloads the ebook, it is considered a conversion.
This metric gives a clear perspective of how successful your email marketing strategy was in generating and nurturing leads.
When you execute an email marketing campaign, you not only want to know how many emails were delivered but also how many email addresses didn't receive your email.
This metric can be further categorized into soft bounces, referring to temporary issues) and hard bounces, meaning permanent issues with email addresses.
These email addresses could be fake, old, or may contain errors. Bounce rate can give you a clear idea about the quality of your subscriber list.
Simple measures like double opt-in which requires the users to verify their email address can help you reduce the bounce rate and boost the quality of your list. Regularly trimming your email list helps too.
It's quite depressing to see your emails getting marked as spam by the recipients but tracking such email marketing metrics is important in enhancing the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.
This metric should not be ignored because if your spam complaint rate is high, email service providers may take action against you as part of their customer service policy. This may impact your deliverability.
Attracting new subscribers is one of the major goals of email marketing and that’s why it’s critical to track this email marketing metric.
When you compare the number of new subscribers with the number of unsubscribes, bounces, and manual removals, you will get a clear picture of your reach.
Based on the insight, you can tweak your approach to expand your reach and garner more subscribers for your email campaigns.
Domain open rate shows you the percentage of receivers opening your email for each email service provider. Due to this segmentation among subscribers, it’s an important email marketing metric.
And why is that?
By measuring domain open rate you can identify domain-specific problems and modify your email content to avoid spam filters. For instance, if there’s a sudden drop in domain open rate, it could signify some issues that may need your attention.
This metric may not yield accurate data when it comes to Apple mail users who have opted for MPP, but it can be tracked successfully for any other email provider.
To understand which device your subscribers are using to access your emails, it’s important to measure this email marketing metric. You should know whether a majority of them are using a laptop, mobile phone, or tablet to read your emails.
Why does it matter?
Because the email content is displayed in a slightly different way on mobile devices than on a laptop. With the help of this important metric, you can optimize your email content for the devices most of your subscribers are using.
You can go a step further and check the open rate and click-through rate for each device and gain a better understanding of your audience’s behavior.
With every email marketing campaign you run, you want to measure the ROI. Revenue per email is a vital email marketing metric that allows you to track the precise monetary value of every email you send.
It gives you a clear insight into the effectiveness of your email subject line, content, offers, and CTAs, and how well they are resonating with your audience.
By understanding which emails are driving better revenues for your brand, you can optimize your email marketing efforts.
As discussed above, with every email campaign, you need to quantify how many new subscribers you acquired, and calculating SAC will tell how much it cost you to gain these new subscribers.
This is a critical email marketing metric to measure as it can help you calculate your ROI more accurately and plan more targeted campaigns in the future.
To reduce SAC, you need to understand your audience’s interests and pain points and invest in more valuable lead magnets.
This email marketing metric measures the value a subscriber provides your business throughout the lifetime they spend with you. Essentially, you’d have to calculate all the purchases made by the subscribers to get to this metric.
You can calculate this metric for months, weeks, or years depending on the average subscriber’s lifecycle.
By comparing LTV with subscriber acquisition cost, you can assess whether the cost of acquiring a subscriber is justified or not.
When your subscribers find your email content exciting or useful enough, they tend to forward or share it with their friends.
This could be in the form of clicking the ”share it” button to share the content on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. They could even forward the email to their friends.
Your email tracking software can track such actions and provide you with valuable insights based on it.
This is a very important metric to track if you are a B2C business. These users act as your brand advocates to influence the buying decisions of their connections so the higher this value is, the better it is for you.
Q1. What are KPIs in email marketing?
A. KPIs or key performance indicators help you measure the success of your email marketing campaign.
Different KPIs can be tracked to gather insights about every aspect of your email campaign including how many emails were delivered, opened, leads generated, revenue generated, and so on.
KPIs need to be determined based on the broader marketing goals you have set to ensure that all your marketing strategies are focused in the right direction.
Q2. What are the important KPIs for email marketing?
A. Some of the vital key performance indicators or KPIs you need to measure to quantify the success of your email marketing campaign are:
Q3. What can email marketing metrics help you track?
A. Email marketing metrics can be set to track different types of data. From tracking the number of opens to the revenue generated by each email, you can track everything related to your email campaign using them.
Q4. What are the best practices for email marketing metrics?
A. To realistically measure the health of your email marketing strategy, you need to select the right metrics. Here are some of the best practices to follow.
Q5. How to optimize your email marketing efforts?
A. If better ROI is what you desire from your email marketing strategy, here are some tips to get you started in the right direction.
Q6. What are some of the top email marketing software in 2022?
A. There are several good email marketing tools available in the market today. If you are looking for an all-in-one feature-loaded solution, the top choices would be HubSpot, Omnisend, and Moosend.
It would be safe to say that email marketing will continue to be an effective strategy for digital marketers to achieve multiple goals. But the success of every email marketing campaign heavily relies on the goals you set and the email marketing metrics you choose to measure your progress toward them.
The list of 12 best email marketing metrics that we have shared above is relevant to most businesses and can provide enough data to measure your campaign’s performance.
Go ahead and develop a killer email marketing strategy and track the right KPIs to set your business on a growth trajectory in 2024 and beyond.
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