These metrics are data that allow you to keep tabs on specific parts of your email operations, such as revenue or customer satisfaction. A key benefit of these metrics is that they can be used to track the overall level of engagement with your email campaign over time. It may take some time to become proficient at email marketing, but by following these tips, you'll avoid mistakes and increase the number of people who open and click on your emails.
Understanding how subscribers interact with your emails will give you far more information than simply whether or not they opened the message at all. If a recipient responds to your email, you know you're making progress towards your email marketing objectives. In order to be successful in the email marketing industry, you must familiarize yourself with the wide range of email terms and tools made available. Metrics are critical to every business strategy because they let you act on objective facts rather than just assumptions. Every email marketer should keep an eye on these key email marketing metrics.
4 Tools to Help You Track Your Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs
Instead of presenting some similar email marketing tools at you, I’ve decided to cover different aspects of the email marketing process. You can choose to use one of them or combine them accordingly to your goals.
Wait, Google Analytics is for tracking website metrics, right?
Yes, that's right and you’ll need to use another tool to actually set up your email marketing campaigns but that’s a small price to pay for the sheer amount of email marketing metrics GA enables you to track.
All of the tools present below offer analytics tracking but they’re outclassed in that aspect by Google Analytics.
And if you don't like Google products, you can use Matomo for example.
- Enables you to set up multiple conversion goals and track them
- Integrates with email campaigns, websites, and apps
- Supports tens of relevant email marketing metrics and KPIs
2. Mailchimp
MailChimp is one of the biggest players around when it comes to email marketing. They offer a wide variety of features that enable both small and large businesses to run their email marketing needs from their platform. MailChimp is built on top of four key functions: a powerful email automation features, a simple campaign builder, a robust analytics, and hundreds of integrations with other platforms like Joomla.
- Enables you to create email campaigns using dozens of templates with a playful drag-and-drop system
- Lets you automate the frequency of your campaigns, your targeted audiences, and much more
- Includes a powerful analytics system, which enables you to track dozens of email marketing metrics
- Includes and supports A/B testing
3. Sendinblue
To be honest, Sendinblue is a very similar tool to MailChimp. This robust service enable you to create email campaigns, grow your audience using analytics, and integrate with tons of other services. Its also offer similar pricing tiers and share a lot of minor functions.
Choosing between Sendinblue and MailChimp is a coin-toss. I suggest you to try out both their free plans and choose your favorite service from there.
- Enables you to create email campaigns and landing pages using tons of templates
- Integartes a real-time tracking and heat-map reporting
- Includes an advanced open & click stat that let you to track tons of email marketing metrics
- Supports A/B testing
4. AcyMailing
AcyMailing is a famous newsletter extension and emailing marketing tool for CMS like Joomla. The features are powerful - even in the free version - and their support is top notch. AcyMailing integrates their Mail-Tester tool to make sure your email will be well received and lets you send birthday newsletters, abandoned cart reminders and so much more.
- Enables you to create GDPR complient templates with a playful interface
- Lets you customize the behavior of your opt-ins according to your needs
- Integrates with all of the major email marketing platforms like Sendinblue
- Helps track performance with a statistics system
25 Email Marketing Metrics You Ought To Know And Track
For you, your email marketing campaigns are unique, but regardless of which tools you use or the approach you take, chances are you will come across these KPIs sooner or later. Because there is a lot of ground to cover, so I’ve kept each section short and to the point. Keep in mind: you don’t need to memorize all of these metrics right away, you can always check back here later on.
1. Open rate
This is the first and most basic metric to keep tabs on. Readers' open rates are heavily influenced by your subject line, so make sure it's intriguing. Without a catchy subject line, your emails are likely to go unopened and unread. It’s the percentage of people who receive emails and actually open the emails they receive. It is critical to know how well your subscribers are getting your emails because open rate is the most basic email marketing KPI. The open rate measures the number of subscribers who have actually open and read your email.
Keeping subject lines short and direct can enhance open rates. Higher open rates mean you're doing something well, so strive for them while managing your campaigns. Email open rates are an important metric to keep tabs on since they reflect how effective email may be at driving revenue or accomplishing objectives. There is still a lot of effort being put into subject line optimization for email marketers in order to increase open rates. More opens are a good thing, but effort should also be put towards improving their click-through rates.
2. Click-through rate (CTR) Email Marketing Metrics
A campaign's click-through rate (CTR) shows what percentage of those who opened the email actually clicked on a link in it. A key objective for most email marketers is to persuade subscribers to click through and convert on a website after they see a link in an email. After successfully persuading a subscriber to leave their email and click on a link, you may move on to the next step. You must persuade them once again to convert and make a purchase, or persuade them to accomplish another goal.
The click-through rate (CTR) is a useful measure for gauging how well your efforts are doing. You can easily calculate the performance of each email you send using this email marketing statistic. To assess the click-through rate of your email, look at the number of people who actually clicked on the links contained inside the email.When it comes to email marketing, tracking your clickthrough rate is critical because it tells you how many people on your list are actually reading and responding to what you're sending them.
Every successful email marketing strategy should have a clear objective in mind. It could be for a variety of reasons, including increasing sales, providing readers with useful material, or even enticing them to return to your website. A fault with your content, design, or CTA— or maybe all three —may be preventing users from taking action on your website. A call to action should be included in each of the objectives.
There are a few techniques you may use when writing an email to boost click-through rates. Create a call-to-action button that subscribers can click to redeem your offer by including links throughout the email in strategic locations. It can also be used to compare the outcomes of A/B testing, which are conducted with the goal of discovering new ways to increase the number of clicks on your emails.
3. Conversion rate
A conversion refers to the percentage of email recipients that click a link and take an action, like completing a lead generating form or making a purchase or filling out a form. Conversion rate evaluates how many people clicked on your link in a CTA, and went on to perform an action needed to convert. It is critical to keep the ultimate objective in mind while analyzing email marketing statistics - the action you want your reader to take as a result of reading your email. In other words, the rate at which prospects become customers can be thought of as this.
Conversion rates provide valuable information about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. After an email recipient clicks through to your email, your next objective is to convince them to convert on your offer, which means to do what your email has asked them to do.
Take note of any changes in this measure month-over-month and make sure you can track your progress toward your goal. Setting up goals and tracking them with your favorite email marketing software can help you keep tabs on this metric. We call a user 'converted' when we achieve these marketing objectives because we've 'converted' them. The percentage of users you've been able to convert is what you call your conversion rate.
In order to know how well you are doing in reaching your objectives, you must know how many people are responding positively to your call to action. For more information on how many subscribers are engaging with your material, as well as the specific type of content they want, look at your click-through rates. It's crucial to measure your conversion rate in relation to your email's "call to action," which should be related to the overall purpose of your email marketing campaign. The performance of your mailing campaigns may be measured by how many prospects and leads they produce when they are converted into customers.
4. Spam mail Email Marketing Metrics
When your emails are marked as spam, it's discouraging. Spam complaints are essential to email service providers, therefore you need to keep track of them. Email service providers may take action against you and block your account if this rate rises too high. One of the most hated aspects of running an email campaign is dealing with spam complaints.
Senders get blacklisted when someone reports their email as spam. To be fair, most individuals only mark emails as spam if they're either of poor quality or overly aggressive in their sales pitches. As a result, it is important to maintain high email quality.
5. Bounce rate
Bounce rate is a measure of how many emails were returned to your Email Service Provider (ESP). It is the proportion of your total emails sent that were not delivered to the recipient's inbox successfully. This metric indicates the number of unsubscribed email addresses you have. When emails bounce, you can see if there are temporary or permanent issues with the addresses. Hard bounces and soft bounces are the two types of bounces to keep track of.
The quality of your subscriber lists can be determined by comparing bounce rates to open rates. It's possible that your list contains a large number of invalid email addresses, obsolete addresses, or addresses with typos if your bounce rate is high. Erroneous email addresses and blacklisted servers produce hard bounces, which are messages that are never sent.
There are a variety of reasons why an email could be momentarily refused, including a busy recipient's inbox, a malfunctioning server, or a file size limit imposed by the receiver or the Email Service Provider, this is when a soft bounce occurs. Bounce rate also refers to the percentage of email campaign recipients who open the email and then close it without taking any further action (besides maybe scrolling through). Google Analytics can track your bounce rate for you without any additional configuration.
Bounce rates that are too high destroy the credibility of your sender. Bounced emails remind us of the importance of cleaning subscriber data. Increase the quality of your email list by requesting subscribers to confirm their email address and whether or not they wish to receive emails from your business. By demanding a double opt-in, you may lower your bounce rates and improve the overall quality of your email list.
6. Total number of Unsubscribes Email Marketing Metrics
These are subscribers who have opted out. It means that a certain percentage of people who opened your email have unsubscribed from your send list. This metric will alert you to any subscription losses so you can take action and prevent further losses. Any email service provider will inform you of the number of persons who unsubscribed as a result of receiving an email from you. High unsubscribe rates can be demoralizing. In spite of this, many email marketers put emphasis on this email marketing indicator and consider unsubscribes a positive sign because they show that your subscriber list is becoming more targeted.
Allowing subscribers to unsubscribe easily also helps to create trust by letting them know they have control over the type of content they receive from your company and when. If you have a high unsubscribe rate, this indicates that something is wrong with your email marketing campaign, and you need to figure out what it is if you want your campaign to be successful. This would let you know that your audience isn't responding well to your marketing campaign.
Users will occasionally opt out of your mailing list. They may have unsubscribed because they didn't find your content interesting or because you sent them too many emails. It's difficult to pin down the specific reason why individuals unsubscribe, but you can do your part to reduce that number by making sure your campaigns are of high quality.
7. Unengaged Subscribers
Keep an eye on your unengaged subscribers and consider eliminating them from your list altogether as you track and expand your subscriber base. Because sending emails to people who aren't interested in your emails can reduce your email's overall deliverability. You can keep an eye out for unengaged subscribers and decide whether to remove them in the future.
8. Return on Ad Spend
There are costs connected with creating and maintaining an email list. Understanding the gains and losses of your email campaign will assist you in optimizing your strategy. It is necessary to be able to compare actual costs and returns in order to track our progress and effectiveness. An emphasis on optimizing efforts for positive return on ad spend can often help justify marketing expenses invested in email acquisition campaigns.
9. List growth rate
You can measure the rate at which your mailing list is expanding by looking at the list growth rate parameter. By multiplying the total number of email addresses on your list by 100, you may find out how many people have signed up and how many people have unsubscribed so far.
Your subscriber lists are correctly categorized so that users are targeted with email content that is as relevant as possible. You should monitor the size and composition of your mailing list, and of course, attempt to increase your mailing list in order to broaden your reach and increase your audience.
It's critical to keep tabs on both subscriber list growth and decline. Growing your list is critical since it broadens your audience and increases the possibility that subscribers will interact with and convert as a result of your email campaigns.
10. Email sharing and forwarding rate Email Marketing Metrics
If your subscribers are sharing and forwarding your emails to their own contacts at a high rate, it gives you significant insight into how entertained or engaged your email subscribers were, as well as how far that material can go. In addition, tracking forwards gives you the chance to expand your subscriber base by adding contacts who are likely to receive and read your emails. The forwarding rate, also known as the email sharing percentage, is the percentage of recipients that either shared your content on social media or forwarded it to a friend after receiving it. It tells you the number of brand advocates you have.
This metric is calculated by clicking on the "share this" button in your email. Calculating this rate is as simple as calculating the number of "share this" clicks by the total number of emails that have been sent. This does not assist you to generate new leads because the major focus is still on conversion. Persuade those who found the content valuable to forward your email to others, and start keeping track of how many new subscribers you may get this way. Look at your sharing rates to see what kinds of articles and offers are most popular, then use that information when creating future email campaigns.
Your forwarding rate increases every time a user forwards your email campaign to another person. This indicator shows how enthusiastic people are about your content when they forward it to their friends and colleagues. By sharing one of your campaigns, you'll know that the person who did it thought it was relevant.
11. Engagement over time
You may learn the ideal times of day to send messages by tracking engagement over time. Measuring engagement over time will reveal when emails that aren't automated achieve the highest open and click-through rates. These features are often automated by email service providers that will collect the data for you.
12. Links clicks
In other words, your click-through rate just tells you how many individuals opened your email and clicked on one of the links within it. This is the measure to use if you want to go a little deeper and see which links are getting the most attention. The benefit of this is that you may learn more about your readers' preferences and tailor future advertising accordingly. It tracks the clicks within the email. Your emails will have real worth if you can convince people to click on them and go to your website or product or service.
13. Purchase Rate Email Marketing Metrics
This metric tracks the number of subscribers making a purchase as a result of a marketing campaign.
14. Overall Return on Investment (ROI)
Email campaign ROI is a measure of how much money you get back from your email marketing campaign investments. To put it another way, total revenue minus entire expenditure. An important measure for email marketers to keep track of is overall return on investment (ROI). It provides you with an overview of your campaigns' overall return on investment. When it comes to the most return on investment of any digital marketing technique, email marketing tops the list. When you know how much money you've spent and how many subscribers are converting, calculating your campaign's return on investment is substantially easier.
15. Total number of new (or generated) leads
If the purpose of your email marketing campaign is to generate leads, you should keep track of how many leads you're acquiring on a daily and monthly basis.
16. Mobile open rate
When creating an email campaign, one of the most important principles is to see how the email looks on different devices and email applications. As a result of the portability and convenience of mobile devices, recipients are increasingly opening emails on their phones and tablets. So when creating your marketing emails, keep your mobile audience in mind.
Similar to the open rate, but just for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, this rate operates differently. Your subscribers' operating systems, as well as whether they're using mobile devices or desktop/laptop computers, can give you a plethora of information about how your messages are being received and acted upon. Make use of these new insights to send communications that are more relevant to these recipients.
17. Mobile click rate
Mobile click rates work in the same way as desktop click rates, but they're influenced by mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. You should put emphasis on making your email interaction process as user-friendly and feasible on mobile as on desktop, as the user behavior on a phone makes it more difficult to operate numerous windows, which results in lower mobile click rates than on a desktop.
Mobile improvements like larger font sizes, fewer content, and more buttons on your design might benefit you if you notice that majority of your emails are opened on mobile. People use mobile significantly more than desktop. Aiming your emails at them will help enhance your overall clickthrough rate (CTR).
18. Time Spent Viewing Email
This metric allows email marketers to see whether or not the content within an email is engaging. It's easy to tell if your subject line is effective by looking at open rates.
Analyzing click-through rates can reveal a lot about the usefulness of a content offer. This data item can be used to help you optimize emails, and the amount of time people spend seeing them. This indicator measures how much time a user spends on your campaign. The better your emails perform, the more time your users spend on them.
19. Domain open rate
This rate is critical to your deliverability's success. This metric lets you know how many people are actually opening your emails when sent from a particular email address.
20. Domain click rate
To see how many people click on your emails in a given email provider, this will show you how many people click on the domain open rate.
21. Opening time
With this information, you can modify when you publish your newsletter and raise your open rates. You need to know the days and hours your emails have a greater open rate. This can be explained by saying that "the average person" receives a large number of emails. It's possible that he or she will miss your message if he or she doesn't open it within an hour of receiving it because of the flood of other communications. Your email marketing campaign should be initiated when the receiver is most likely to read it; in this way, you can be certain that your message is received by the intended recipient.
22. Repeat Opens
You can use this measure to develop segmented audience lists and email campaigns that are specific to each category. Sending emails with interesting subject lines can entice people at the bottom of your list to open them again.
23. Deliverability
Deliverability is important since it determines whether or not a message is read by its intended receiver. Knowing if your emails are getting to the people who need to see them, can be achieved by keeping track of high bounce rates and high unsubscribe rate.
24. Revenue per subscriber
In revenue terms, this is the entire amount of money earned through advertising, sales of products, and affiliate sales, or from media value, or any combination of valuation indicators.Spending less for subscribers than the subscribers themselves drive in income, and seeing how much money each subscriber brings in to account for amount invested in the campaign. Calculating income per subscriber, like other email marketing performance indicators, gives you a closer look at your ROI.
25. Revenue per email
Tracking revenue per opened email is a similar method for determining which form of email creates the most conversions. It also gives you a better idea of how each email campaign is performing and where you can make content improvements over time, thereby measuring the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
alysis of revenue per email reveals the success of the emails individually while ROI reveals your overall return on investment. If you can figure this out, you'll know which emails are the most effective and which ones are hurting your overall ROI.
Wrapping Up
No matter what you choose as your objective (and there are no limits to the number of them you can have), the next step is determining the metrics you'll need to monitor in order to track the progress of these objectives.
You may have a different purpose for your email marketing than another business like yours, or your goal may change over time within your own company. However, before you begin (or continue) sending and measuring your emails, you must first determine exactly what you hope to accomplish with your email marketing. To succeed, you must understand what metrics to pay attention to, how to interpret them, and how to measure them. When this has been successfully completed, you will be able to choose the right email metrics for your campaign.
