Email marketing metrics are imperative in an email marketing campaign. These metrics indicate a business’s email marketing success or failure. Hence, every business owner must understand what are email marketing success metrics and the necessary steps needed to measure these metrics.
This article will review every key email marketing metric and what each metric measures. So, to achieve a successful email marketing campaign, read to the end of this article.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding different email marketing metrics is crucial for assessing campaign performance effectively. Metrics like open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and revenue per email provide insights into how recipients interact with your emails.
- Utilizing a reliable email marketing platform is vital for accurately measuring these metrics, ensuring you can track the success of your campaigns efficiently and make data-driven decisions.
- Revenue Email is important as it helps quantify the return on investment of your email campaigns, showing the direct financial impact of your email marketing efforts.
- A high forward/share rate indicates the relevancy and appeal of your content, showing that recipients find your emails valuable enough to share with others, thus amplifying your reach and impact.
- Monitoring list growth and unsubscribe rates is essential for understanding audience engagement and retention, helping you refine your strategy to maintain a healthy and engaged subscriber list.
What Is Email Marketing Metrics?
Email marketing metrics are the measurable data points marketers use to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of their email campaigns. These metrics provide insights into how subscribers interact with email content and help marketers make data-driven decisions to optimize their campaigns. Here are some common metrics for email marketing:
Open Rate
The open rate is an email marketing metric that indicates the percentage of recipients who opened an email out of the total number of recipients who received the email and is typically expressed as a percentage.
Open rate is an essential email marketing performance metric because it provides insights into how engaging your subject lines and sender information are to your subscribers. A higher open rate indicates that your emails are capturing recipients’ attention and prompting them to open and read the content. Conversely, a low open rate may indicate issues with subject lines, sender credibility, or email deliverability.
However, it’s important to note that the open rate alone doesn’t provide a complete picture of email campaign success.
Revenue per Email
Your revenue per email rate is one of the most important email marketing metrics, and it refers to the amount of revenue generated per email sent. The metric helps measure your email marketing campaigns’ return on investment (ROI). It quantifies the revenue generated from each email sent, giving you insights into the cost-effectiveness and profitability of your email efforts.
Moreover, tracking your revenue per email rate over time allows you to forecast future revenue and allocate marketing budgets accordingly. It provides insights into revenue trends, seasonality, and campaign performance, helping you make data-driven decisions to optimize resource allocation and maximize ROI.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is among the crucial email marketing metrics that measure the percentage of recipients who click on a link or multiple links within an email. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on links in the email by the number of delivered emails, excluding bounces, and then multiplying by 100 to get the percentage. However, the easiest way to check your CTR is through an email marketing platform like the one in our Campaigner review.
CTR provides multiple insights crucial for effective email marketing strategies, as it serves as an engagement measurement, revealing how compelling your email content is to recipients. A higher CTR signifies resonance with your audience, driving them to act by clicking on links.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate in email marketing refers to the percentage of recipients who take a desired action after clicking on a link or engaging with your email content. This action could vary depending on your campaign goals, such as purchasing, signing up for a webinar, downloading a resource, or subscribing to a newsletter.
You must track your conversion rate because it indicates how effective your email campaigns are in persuading recipients to take action and provides insights into areas for campaign optimization. Like your CTR and other key email marketing metrics, you can automatically measure your conversion rate using an email marketing platform. Head to our Ongage review to learn more.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate in email marketing refers to the percentage of emails not delivered successfully to recipients’ inboxes. Bounces can be categorized into two types — soft and hard bounce.
A hard bounce occurs when your emails become permanently rejected due to multiple reasons, including invalid or blocked email addresses and domain errors. A soft bounce, on the other hand, occurs when your emails become temporarily rejected and cannot be delivered at the moment. Among the causes of a soft bounce are oversized mails, unavailable servers, or a full recipient’s inbox.
Forward/Share Rate
The Forward/Share rate in email marketing refers to the percentage of recipients who forward or share your email with others after receiving it. It is an important metric that indicates the virality and shareability of your email content. A high Forward/Share rate suggests that your email content is highly relevant, valuable, and shareable to recipients. Through this rate, you can gauge the quality and appeal of your content, helping you create more engaging and share-worthy emails in the future.
Additionally, when recipients forward or share your emails with others, they find your content valuable enough to recommend to their network. This can increase brand awareness, reach, and credibility among new audiences.
List Growth Rate
The list growth rate in email marketing refers to the rate at which your email subscriber list grows over a specific period. You can calculate this by subtracting the number of unsubscribes and bounces from the number of new subscribers, dividing that by the total number of subscribers at the beginning of the period, and then multiplying by 100 to express it as a percentage.
A positive list growth rate indicates that your email subscriber base is expanding. Hence, constantly monitoring this rate allows you to track the growth of your audience over time, helping you reach a wider audience and increase potential reach and engagement for your email marketing campaigns.
Email Client Open Rates
Email Client Open rates refer to the percentage of email recipients who open and view your emails across different email clients or platforms, such as Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc. This email marketing metric indicates how well your emails are being rendered and displayed on various devices and email applications.
Monitoring this email marketing metric helps ensure that your emails are compatible and accessible across a wide range of email clients and devices. By checking how your emails render on different platforms, you can identify any formatting issues, rendering errors, or design inconsistencies that may affect the user experience and provide solutions to these issues.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate in email marketing refers to the percentage of recipients who opt-out or unsubscribe from receiving further emails from your campaign after receiving a particular email. You must check this email marketing metrics benchmark, as it indicates that your email content, frequency, or relevance is not meeting subscribers’ expectations or needs.
You can gauge your audience’s engagement and satisfaction levels by checking unsubscribe rates. Furthermore, the reasons behind unsubscribes can provide valuable insights into areas for improvement in your email campaigns.
Email Deliverability Rate
Email deliverability rate is the percentage of emails that successfully reach your recipients’ inboxes without being filtered into spam folders or bounced back. It is a critical email marketing metric as it directly impacts the reach, visibility, and effectiveness of your email campaigns. This determines how many of your emails actually land in recipients’ primary inboxes.
A high deliverability rate ensures that your messages are seen by a larger portion of your audience, increasing the chances of engagement and conversions. Furthermore, analyzing deliverability rates allows you to optimize and test email campaigns. You can experiment with different subject lines, content formats, sending times, and segmentation strategies to improve deliverability and engagement rates.
What are 3 ways of measuring success in email marketing?
There are three other ways to measure your access in email marketing aside from keeping track of your email marketing metrics, and they are as follows:
Planning is a crucial aspect of email marketing.Draft A Measurement Plan
Start by selecting the right timing. It’s essential to monitor email performance consistently. However, before setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), it’s beneficial to establish a tracking schedule. This could be weekly, monthly, or based on each campaign. This approach allows you to compare progress against benchmarks and previous performance, making it easier to identify trends of improvement or decline. These trends can then be analyzed concerning specific types of email campaigns, customer segments, product categories, or external factors that might impact campaign performance.
Clearly define your goals and objectives
Effective performance tracking should align with the campaign’s goals and objectives. It’s crucial to define these goals during the initial planning stages. Consider how measurable they are and the methods for measuring progress.
Evaluate what’s effective and what’s not
Analysis can reveal which content resonates with your subscribers, such as identifying the links or images that generate the most clicks. By studying your audience’s behavior, you can gain insights into their interests and determine which content fails to drive engagement or action.
Check Your Emails’ Impact
Understanding the impact of email campaigns on your marketing KPIs requires a comprehensive approach to data measurement. Despite its complexity, it’s crucial to undertake. Several key marketing KPIs indicate how effectively your emails contribute to your overarching objectives. These KPIs are conversion rates, ROIs, CLVs, and CPAs.
- Conversion rate. This stands out as a pivotal metric, gauging the percentage of your audience that takes the desired action. For instance, if your email aims to encourage event sign-ups, the conversion rate calculates the proportion of recipients who actually register for the event. Establishing a clear conversion rate is fundamental for assessing the overall success of your email marketing endeavors.
- Return on investment (ROI). This delves into the cost-effectiveness of an email campaign. Notably, email marketing has shown remarkable ROI, with an average of £42 earned for every £1 spent in 2019, making ROI calculation highly pertinent for profit-driven campaigns.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV). This KPI provides insights into the long-term revenue potential of a customer throughout their engagement with your business. Acknowledging CLV is crucial, emphasizing the significance of nurturing and retaining contacts within your audience.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA). The CPA denotes the expense incurred to acquire a new customer. This metric directly assesses campaign success and cost efficiency in acquiring new customers.
Choose The Right Email Marketing Metrics KPI
What is KPI in email marketing? Discovering the suitable email marketing metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business is essential. These KPIs are essentially email marketing metrics that provide insights into the performance of your email campaigns. Utilizing a marketing platform for email outreach automatically tracks email marketing metrics such as those mentioned in the first part of this article.
This data is then compiled into reports, showcasing the performance of your emails across different time frames, comparing them to one another, and benchmarking them against industry standards in email marketing.
FAQs
- What are the key email marketing metrics to track?
The key email marketing metrics to track include open rate, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, list growth rate, revenue per email, and email client open rates. - How is an open rate calculated?
Open rate is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens by the number of emails delivered (excluding bounces), and then multiplying by 100 to get the percentage. - How to improve my email marketing metrics?
To improve email marketing metrics, focus on optimizing subject lines, email content, CTAs, sender name, and email address, segmenting your audience, maintaining a healthy email list, testing different email designs and sending times, and analyzing data to make data-driven decisions. - Why is the revenue per email metric important?
Revenue per email helps measure the financial effectiveness of your email campaigns, showing how much revenue each email generates. It’s crucial to evaluate the ROI of your email marketing efforts. - How can I use the forward/share rate to improve my email marketing? A5: A high forward/share rate indicates your content is valuable and engaging. Use this metric to understand what content resonates with your audience, and aim to produce similar high-quality, shareable content to increase reach and engagement.
Learn more about relevant marketing metrics in this “Measuring Influence: 6 Key Influencer Marketing Metrics You Need to Start Tracking Today” article.
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