The Most Valuable Metrics for Email Marketing

Email marketing is estimated to provide an ROI of $44. The reason it is such a profitable investment for businesses is due to the ability to connect with existing and potential customers in a direct and personalized way.

Yet, once your email campaign is up and running, the work is not over. Examining and interpreting the key metrics is crucial for optimizing your campaign. But what are the most important metrics for email marketing?

Keep reading for our guide to the most important metrics to analyze in order to get the most of your email marketing campaign.

Open Rate

One of the most important metrics to keep track of is the open rate. This figure will tell you, out of all the emails successfully delivered, what percentage were opened.

A low open rate is a clear sign that improvements need to be made to your campaign. Your potential customers are not even reaching the carefully crafted content that you’ve designed. A low open rate could suggest the following issues:

Your business is sending too many emails, that have not previously provided value to the reader
Your subject lines may not be appealing or may appear like spam
Your sender name is not trustworthy or recognizable

To calculate the open rate, take the number of customers who opened an email, and divide this by the total number of delivered emails. Then, multiply the result by 100. Businesses should aim for an open rate of 25%, but obtaining 30-40% is a sign of a well-performing marketing campaign.

Here’s one of our tips for improving your campaign’s open rate. Opt for a personalized subject line, as emails with the customer’s name included in the subject tend to result in more opens!

Click-Through Rate

Next, a key metric that indicates the effectiveness of your email content is the click-through rate. This figure tells you how many recipients have followed a link included in the email body.

It’s important to measure this metric because it provides valuable insight into the customer journey. A high click-through rate (5% or more) tells a business their email content is persuasive and engaging. It has convinced the audience to follow the calls to action established in the email body.

This figure can then be compared with the conversion rate (see below). A significant difference between the two numbers would imply more attention needs to be paid to the landing pages that the email campaign leads to.

To work out the click-through rate, divide the number of emails delivered by the number of customers who clicked a link from an email. Times this number by 100 to obtain your figure as a percentage.

Conversion Rate

Our next measure of success for an email marketing campaign is the conversion rate. This tells you how many conversions resulted from the email campaign, and indicates customer engagement levels. Remember that a conversion does not necessarily mean a sale. Businesses might choose to measure conversions as adding an item to the shopping cart or opting-in to a free trial of a service.

To find out your campaign’s conversion rate, take the number of people who completed the desired action (or, made a conversion). Then divide this by the total number of emails delivered, and multiply by 100.

It is important to ensure the content of your email marketing campaign is geared towards maximizing conversions. The calls to action should correspond to obtaining whatever the desired action of your conversion is.

Forwarding Rate

A useful indicator of the success of your email marketing campaign is the forwarding rate. This refers to how many times emails from your business were forwarded by the recipients to their contacts. It also includes when the email was shared via social media.

If you’re interested in finding out how useful the email content you’re sharing is, take a closer look at this metric. Perhaps you have announced a seasonal sale, or you are offering a discount code. A high forwarding rate will likely correspond to a high click-through rate and a high conversion rate.

Work out your forwarding rate by taking the number of clicks on a ‘forward’ or ‘share via social media’ button. Divide this by the total number of delivered emails, and times by 100.

List-Growth Rate

Next up, let’s take a wider overview of how your email campaign is performing by looking at the list-growth rate. It is inevitable that you will lose subscribers over time, so these potential customers need to be replaced by new leads.

To get this figure, minus the number of unsubscribes from the number of new subscribers. Then divide that number by the total number of email addresses on your mailing list, and multiply by 100.

Being aware early on that your email list is shrinking is essential for damage control. This trend can be reversed by examining the other metrics in this article to determine why you’re losing subscribers. It can also provide the impetus to increase brand awareness and consideration, perhaps via social media or PPC advertising.

Bounce Rate

Now, let’s turn to the ‘negative’ metrics, which are those figures that should be kept to a minimum. The first of these is the bounce rate, which can include both soft (temporary) bounces and hard (permanent) bounces. Both soft and hard bounces mean that a business’s emails are not reaching the recipient’s inbox.

Work out your bounce rate by dividing the number of emails that bounced by the total number of emails sent. Then, multiply this figure by 100.

Businesses should aim for a bounce rate of 0.5% or lower. When a bounce rate exceeds 1%, email providers can block domains as this is an indication of bad email list health. A great way of ensuring a healthy email list, and thus a low bounce rate, is with email validation.

EmailOversight’s email validation and hygiene software employs multi-method validation to allow for real-time verification. This allows businesses to keep their domain reputation intact and maximizes email deliverability.

Unsubscribe Rate

Next, another figure that you want to keep to a minimum is your number of unsubscribes. While the number of recipients who have unsubscribed from your email campaign can be disheartening, businesses should view this process as a fine-tuning of your list of potential customers.

You could consider the large remainder of your audience who remain subscribed as a positive indication that these recipients want to continue receiving emails from you.

Find out your unsubscribe rate by taking the number of customers who unsubscribed, and dividing this by the total number of emails delivered. Times this by 100 to see the figure in percentage form.

If your unsubscribe rate is above 0.5%, consider the following questions:

Might you need to reduce the frequency of the emails your business sends?
Does the content of the email fulfill the promise made by the subject line?
Are you providing customers with valuable and/or informative content?

Spam Complaints

A final ‘negative’ KPI to be wary of is the number of spam complaints. This has a huge impact on the deliverability of your emails, so it’s important to keep the number of spam complaints to an absolute minimum.

A sizeable percentage of spam complaints can lead to email providers, such as Gmail or Yahoo, blocking your domain. This would have a calamitous knock-on effect on your remaining email list and signify the loss of thousands of leads.

Calculate your rate of spam complaints by dividing the number of complaints by the total emails delivered, and times that by 100. Aim for a spam complaint rate of less than 0.01%.

Ensure that your emails are not marked as spam by only contacting customers who have opted-in to your marketing campaign.

Overall ROI

Let’s end our list of the most valuable metrics for email marketing with the figure that the finance department will love. This is the overall ROI of your email marketing, in other words, how much money your business is making by investing in the campaign.

Take the amount of money you made in sales from the campaign, and minus the costs of executing the campaign. Divide this figure by the costs of executing the campaign, and multiply by 100.

The overall ROI of your email marketing campaign can be difficult to pinpoint due to the different methods of conversion attribution. However, a well-run campaign that operates using a healthy email list will prove its money’s worth, which the overall ROI will reflect.

Those Are the Most Important Metrics for Email Marketing

We’ve now examined the most instructive metrics for email marketing improvement. By tracking these over time, and particularly following the release of new products, your business can benefit from greater lead generation, brand awareness, and direct sales.

Don’t forget that a clean email list is a crucial component for any business that corresponds with customers via email. To find out more about how our services can help you, get in touch today.