5 Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs You Should be Tracking

Did you know that nearly 60% of expert marketers think that email remains the biggest source of ROI? Yes, that’s right. Despite the eruption of novel marketing channels, email marketing is still king.

Many business firms still use email as the spine of their communication plan. Whether it’s aggregating sales or building long-standing relationships with clients, the performance of your email marketing strategies can have substantial repercussions for the health of your business, overall.

So, it’s vital to have in place specific metrics and key performance indicators for your email marketing to ensure you are getting the heart of the matter in the industry.

If your intention is to generate leads, grow subscribers, or sell products or services, here are the top 5 email marketing key performance indicators that experts from saleshive.com recommend you track consistently.

1. Delivered Rate

You’ve formulated the most captivating emails to entice your prospects. But, are they getting delivered? Creating email marketing campaigns that aren’t getting conveyed to the target audience is a waste of both time and money.

Email delivery rate is calculated by dividing the sum of all emails you send minus emails that bounce and multiplying the resulting figure by 100 to get the percentage. You should always remember that achieving a 100% email deliverability rate is near impossible.

So, if 80% of your emails make it to your targets’ inbox, it means that 20% might as well not exist. As such, if you had 1000 names on your list, 200 of the people never got the message

Take note of what is referred to as soft or hard bounce. A soft bounce occurs when an email can’t be delivered because of one of the following reasons: the server is down, your email is too large, or the recipient’s inbox is full.

A hard bounce rate happens when an email can’t be delivered because an email domain doesn’t exist or the recipient’s email address is invalid.

It is therefore essential to measure delivered/bounce rates to identify ‘black holes’ where emails disappear.

2. Open Rate

Email open rate is calculated by dividing the number of emails opened by the recipients by the number of emails delivered. Again, it is near impossible to achieve a 100% open email rate in the business.

It is estimated that the average email open rate on the desktop is 22.9%, while that of mobile and tablets is 47%. The aim is to increase this rate as high as possible by creating compelling, targeted messages and sending personalized subject emails that speak directly to targets.

As with email deliverability, you might want to track trends in open rates and adjust your strategies accordingly. The best place to start is by comparing your open rates with what’s typical in your industry to achieve a benchmark.

3. Click-through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CRT) is one of the most vital metrics to measure for email campaigns. Essentially, measuring CRT shows you how many emails successfully achieved one click from a subscriber.

It effectively tells you whether your campaign was appealing enough to attract not only an open, but also action from the target.

CRT is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks or unique clicks by the total number of delivered emails. For example, if you achieved a total of 100 clicks from 1000 delivered emails, the click-through rate will be 10% (100 total clicks ÷ 1000 delivered emails).

Determining this percentage through consistent tracking gives you direct insight into how many people (subscribers) are actively engaging with your email content and interested in learning more about your products or brand.

You should aim at tracking both the total click-through rate (TCTR) and unique click-through rate (UCTR). TCRR measures the total number of clicks a certain email link receives. This essentially tells you how popular your content is, depending on how many clicks it generates.

On the other hand, it will tell you the number of unique clicks a certain email will receive. By specifying ‘unique’ emails, UCTR avoids some of the noise that TCTR fails to account for.

For instance, if a recipient opens a link on their laptop and later opens the same email link on their phone, the number of clicks will register twice as TCTR but only once as UCTR. However, this will indicate that the recipient is really interested in this link to click on it twice, at different times.

4. Spam Rate

Spam rate describes the percentage of users who report your email as spam. Your entire email marketing approach is based on one action, the number of users that click on them and follow through.

But what if your target consumer never received the message in the first place? Like bounce rate, this could mean that your whole campaign isn’t reaching the targets and could crumple massively.

It is important to measure your spam rate along with your unsubscribe rate to ensure that your subscribers are potential customers. If both KPIs are trending in the same direction – that’s telling you something.

You can calculate this rate by dividing the number of spam complaints by the number of delivered emails. Such complaints will provide a strong indicator of negative engagement and may be useful in identifying patterns and sources of complaints.

5. Conversion Rate (CR)

Finally, the metric that matters most!

This metric essentially measures the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a certain email link and completed the desired action, such as the purchase of a product or filling out a lead generation form.

While the aforementioned measures are important, CR remains the most critical as it indicates how effective your email marketing is and determines your ROI.

Every email you contrive should have a specific purpose you would like to accomplish, whether it’s selling products and services or inspiring readers to visit a page on your website.

In order to track your email CR, you’ll have to integrate your email platform and your web analytics. This can be done by formulating unique tracking URLs for your email links so that you can be able to identify the sources of clicks coming from specific email campaigns.

(We got this information in a press release).