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Top Most Important Email Marketing Metrics & KPIs

February 7, 2022
1:08 PM

Email marketing was and is still considered to be the most effective and powerful marketing tool as it brings out the best results. One of the greatest advantages of email marketing is that it allows businesses to reach their customers along with those interested in their products. Since email marketing has evolved over the years it has become focused and action-oriented.

Email marketing usually takes time to master because it involves the best practices to create, rectify mistakes as well as optimize emails to increase engagement.

According to an article, more than 38% of American consumers are driven to action through their emails.

However, these practices don’t necessarily ensure success, as you must also know how to measure the results of your marketing efforts.

Email marketing metrics play a major role not only in tracking them but also in prioritizing the changes you have to make in your email marketing program or campaign. Once you decide the end goal of your emails campaign and send out the emails to your leads, you can track the campaign to determine how you’re progressing toward that goal. Marketing metrics help you in monitoring your email campaigns, their performances and generate more leads.

This is why every marketer must know all the basic email marketing metrics if they want to gain success through the medium.

In this article, we have listed the top ten email marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help pay attention to your email marketing efforts.

What are Email Marketing Metrics?
Why is analysing your marketing emails important?
Email Open rate
Deliverability Rate
Click-Through Rate
Conversation Rate
Bounce Rate
Unsubscribe rate
Spam Complaints Rate
List Growth Rate

What are Email Marketing Metrics?

Email metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) are tools that help you measure or track the success of a campaign. Numerous metric tools are designed to calculate and keep a track of every single thing related to your email marketing program.

Reviewing or tracking is essential to email marketing campaigns, as it allows you to review and identify areas that need improvement. Email marketing metrics help you track the number of people that open your email, number of people that click, new subscribers, or even the people who have brought more conversions or sales revenue among other things.

To use the metrics on your email marketing campaign, you have to determine the end goal or benchmark that it can be measured against. Once you have a goal and send out your emails, you need to understand what every metric says about the email. This will then help you improve on certain parts of the email campaign and achieve your goals.

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Why is analysing your marketing emails important?

In an ever-changing marketplace where all marketing activities are evolving continuously and increasing rapidly. Email marketing allows you to connect with your leads directly, drive traffic towards your website and generate more sales. According to Statista, there are more than 4.6 billion active email accounts by 2025. Email campaigns analysis is extremely essential to every inbound professional.

Here are some advantages of analysing your email marketing campaigns with email metrics:

You can get to know your leads better, and build your relationship with them.

You can understand where they are interacting with your email and how engagement with your content varies.

It will help you grow and improve your email marketing programs in the future.

Find the most active subscribers and engage with them till they convert into customers.

Metrics can also help you develop a highly effective and profitable email marketing campaign.

They allow you to track performances and check the effectiveness of the campaign.

Helps the marketing team in optimizing their current email marketing campaigns.

Without metrics, you would have a clear image of whether the email campaign was a success or not.

Top 8 Email Marketing Metrics

1. Email Open rate

In simple words, the email open rate measures the rate at which people open your emails once they receive them. The recipient needs to open the email, as otherwise, they would see your content. The open rate represents the number of emails that are opened by your recipients and is not the number of emails delivered.

Here is a fact on open rate, the average email open rate for all industries is 21.33%, according to a study done by Mailchimp.

It is good to have a high open-rate because that shows you how many people are interested in your email content.

Some of the factors that impact an open rate are the industry that your company belongs to, whether it is a B2B or B2C company, the subject line of the email, and the frequency of sending emails. Open rates are the most commonly used email metric around the world and it helps you understand how engaged your leads are and how effective subject lines are.

How to calculate the open rate?

Open rate = number of emails opened / number of emails delivered * 100

Tips for improving your open rate

Come up with stronger or interesting subject lines that will compel your target audience to open it. The email subject line must attract the attention of your audience.

You can also use a tool called Coshedule to test your subject line before sending your emails.

Send emails at different times or days, as some days like Thursdays are said to have high open rates.

2. Deliverability Rate

An email deliverability rate measures the success rate of getting an email delivered to a person’s email address. In simpler words, it represents the emails that reached the recipient’s email inbox. If your deliverability rate is high, then your subscriber rate will be higher as well.

Example:- Let say that you have sent out your email marketing campaign to over 10,000 email addresses and only 5000 of them got delivered to their inbox. This means that your deliverability rate is 50%.

How to calculate the Deliverability Rate?

Deliverability Rate = the number of emails delivered / total email sent * 100

Tips for improving your Deliverability Rate

Remove the email ids that bounce, inactive or inappropriate.

Check your email list quality before sending out your email campaign.

Check if your email subject line has spam words.

3. Click-Through Rate

Click Through Rate is the most crucial and the most commonly used metric by all email marketers. CTR is the metric that helps you measure the number of people that opened your mail and click on the link added in the mail. This in return allows you to determine how your email campaign is performing and how many people have interacted with your email.

Marketers call CTR as the day-to-day email marketing metric because it allows them to track the results of the campaign over time. CTR gives you direct insight into how many people in your email list are engaging with your content and are interested in products, services, or brands. The average CTR for all email campaigns is said to be over 4%.

Example:- Here is an example so you can understand better. Let’s say that you delivered the email to 10,000 people out of which only 500 recipients click on the email then your CTR will be 5%.

How to calculate the Click Through Rate?

Click Through Rate = number of unique clicks/numbers of emails delivered * 100

Tips to improving your Click Through Rate

Make targeted email content.

Segment your email list to specify your target audience.

Add many interesting and eye-catching CTA buttons or links so that subscribers can click on to redeem your offers or discounts.

Add different clicking methods such as buttons, hyperlinked text, or even hyperlinked images all over your email.

Increasing delivery rates with email verification and validation are not easy!

Want to learn how to master it?

4. Conversation Rate

The Conversation rate is another important metric as it assesses the number of recipients that have clicked on the link and then completed a specific action. This is another important metric that should be used because it tells you that your call for action is working.

Conversation rate will help you know the number of people that are converting and determine the extent to which you’re achieving your goals. So, if you send out an email campaign with a link or CTA to an exclusive Black Friday offer, then the conversation rate will tell the number of people that have clicked on the link or CTA.

Example:- Here is an example for you, if you send out 5000 emails and of those only 300 emails are clicked open and interacted with your mail, then your email conversation rate will be 6%.

How to calculate the Conversation Rate?

Conversation Rate = number of actions taken by users/total emails delivered * 100

Tips to improving your Conversation Rate

Improve the quality of your CTA

Design the email in a way that it is responsive

Personalize the email with customer specifications

The clear objective that justifies the CTA to be added

Give simple instructions to what you want your recipient to do

5. Bounce Rate

The Bounce rate tells you the number of emails that dint make it to their recipient’s inbox. When you are running email marketing campaigns you will come across emails that will return as an error after being sent or not delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

The two types of Bounce rates, which are soft bounce and hard bounce. Both the types of bounce rates are different as Hard bounce rate is usually when the email can’t be delivered because they are non-existent. Whereas soft bounce rate is caused when the inbox of the recipient is full, the email is too big or has other temporary issues. Email causing hard bounce rates must be removed from the email lists as they are permanent compared to the soft rate that is temporary. Measuring the bounce rates will help you get an idea of your subscriber’s lists.

Example:- An example of a Bounce rate is, when you send 2000 emails at a given time, out of which only 60 bounced emails are not delivered, that is when your bounce rate will be 3%.

How to calculate the Bounce rate?

Bounce rate = number of bounced emails/number of emails sent * 100

Tips to decrease your Bounce rate

Make sure email content is relevant

Update your email list before sending out your campaign

Verify the emails list and remove the non-existent or bad email addresses

Make sure the size of the email is not big

Reduce your bounce rates by asking a double opt-in

6. Unsubscribe rate

The Unsubscribe rate is the metric that measures the number of emails recipients that unsubscribe from your email list after opening your email. Keeping a track of the unsubscribe rate is equally important to the open rate or click rate. This will also determine the number of recipients that did not like your email or the customer pain points.

Example:- When you send out 1500 emails and there are over 200 recipients who unsubscribe from your list, then you unsubscribe rate will be over 13.33%. The unsubscribed rate should be lesser than 5% as its rate isn’t a reliable picture of the health of your email list.

How to calculate the Unsubscribe rate?

Unsubscribe rate = total number of unsubscribes/number of emails delivered * 100

Tips to decrease your unsubscribe rate

Avoid spam and offensive content

Analyze the sending frequency of your emails

Do not spam your customers with emails, the reason must be relevant

7. Spam Complaints Rate

The Spam complaint rate determines the number of recipients that report your email as spam. The spam complaints have a huge negative impact on your email campaign and can discourage you. It is important to pay attention to the spam complaints rate as it will tell you the things you can change in your email campaign.

If the spam complaints rate gets too high, the email service providers will take an action against you and even block your account. This is why you need to make sure that you don’t get spam complaints.

Example:- For example, you send out 10,000 out of which you find over 400 emails to report as spam, then your spam complaint rate is 4%.

Tips to decrease your Spam complaint rate

Use double opt-in subscription forms

Don’t use spam words in your email subject line

Don’t send repetitive emails

Don’t send emails frequently

Keep your email content relevant and consistent

8. List Growth Rate

List growth rate measures the rate at which your mailing list is growing. The metric also helps you understand the number of leads that can be converted into customers. Every email marketer must aim to grow your mailing list, extend your reach, and expand your audience.

Example:- Your email campaign records over 800 new subscribers, including 200 unsubscribes and spam complaints from the 5000-email address in your mailing list. This is where your growth rate will be 12%.

How to calculate the List growth rate?

List growth rate = number of subscribes – the number of unsubscribes and snap complaints/ number of email ids in your mailing list * 100

Tips to improving your List Growth Rate

Remove the bad email addresses

Engage with your customers and grow more leads

Make sure your email is unique and interesting enough so it can engage the recipient

Receive more insights on email marketing, learn new strategies and campaigns.

And for more such interesting Blogs, Infographics, eBooks, etc.

Conclusion

Numerous email marketing metrics will help you analyse your email marketing campaign. The metric above will help you monitor every single element or result of your email campaigns. Go on what are you waiting set up your campaign goals, these email metrics will help you measure your overall success.

Hopefully, you found this article useful and understood how to use the various metrics in your email campaigns.

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Julie Williams

Julie writes to motivate, inform, and educate people. Her major interests are marketing, artificial intelligence, and related areas. She is passionate about poetry on nature and human psychology. When not writing, she's found dancing or exploring new tourist places around!

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