06/16/2022

Email Marketing KPI Metrics That You Need To Know

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Every marketer should know that email marketing is a goldmine. It’s not been forgotten.

It doesn’t matter what it is:

  • Welcome email,
  • Win-back email,
  • Email from an abandoned cart
  • Highlight your most recent products.

Your campaigns must have taken a lot of effort, time, and money.

But, they don’t matter if you don’t measure and track the performance of your campaigns.

What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)? 

Email marketing KPIs will help you assess if your email marketing is helping you achieve your goals. “

Your goal might be:

  • Increasing your subscriber base
  • Turn existing leads into new leads
  • Re-engaging customers,
  • Increasing brand recognition

Once you have determined your goal, you will be able to start to identify KPIs and metrics you should track in your email marketing. This will allow you to monitor your progress and make intelligent optimizations.

Many marketers only keep track of 3-5 KPIs in their marketing. However, you should track more to see the whole picture. 

1. Click-Thru Rate

This is the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within an email.

Divide the number of clicks and clicks you have by the number of delivered emails. Multiply this 100-digit figure.

Example: 600 clicks total/10,000 delivered email * 100 = 6.6% click-through rate.

Tracking the performance of individual emails can be done easily using click-through rates ( ). Track your email conversion rate once you have evaluated your CTR.

CTR can be used to also determine A/B test results.

A/B testing is often used to find new ways to drive clicks. To measure the CTR of each campaign, you can determine its success.

2. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate (or CTR) is an important metric to evaluate the effectiveness of email marketing.

The conversion rate of email marketing is the percentage that recipients take the desired action following receiving your email. This could include clicking on a link or buying a product.

Calculation: Divide the number of conversions (signups, purchases, etc.) by the total number of emails delivered. Calculation: Divide the number of conversions (signups and purchases, etc.) by the total email delivery. Divide the total number of emails delivered by the number of conversions (signups, purchases, etc.)

Example: 200 people completed the desired action/5,000 emails delivered * 100 = 44% conversion.

After you’ve convinced recipients to open your email and allow them to download an ebook, the next step is to convert them. 

What’s an effective conversion rate for email marketing?

Many factors make your email campaign stand out from the rest. 

3. Click-to-Open Rate

An email click-to-open rate is a ratio between the number of click-throughs and the number of emails opened.

What is the Click-to-Open Ratio? (CTOR). 

This KPI is for email marketing. It shows how effective your subject line and copy are. 

A lot of people clicked on your email but did not open it, this means your offer was valuable but your subject line was weak. 

Open rates can be affected by more than the subject line. This also depends on the sender and quality of the email list and the time it was sent

4. Delivery Rate

This doesn’t mean that all your emails were delivered, just because you have sent them to 10,000 people.

Please note that email delivery rates are not 100%.

What does “email deliverability” mean? 

There are many factors to consider when measuring email deliverability rates.

  • It could be that 20% of your emails have not been received by the recipients.
  • It is also important to check for sudden drops in delivery rates.

An ISP may blacklist an address sender if it is a shared IP rather than a dedicated IP. It is important to immediately correct the problem.

Your email could be marked “delivered” but it may still go to the junk folder. Marketers use the Inbox Placement Ratio (IPR) to monitor how many emails reach their inboxes.

5. Open Rate

You must get your emails to the intended recipient

Keep in mind that the success of your open rate may depend on many things. Your industry is the first thing to think about.

MailChimp offers benchmarks to establish industry averages in email open rates.

Different industries have various open rates. Don’t compare yourself to others.

6. List the Growth Rate

Your email list growth rate (or), is the rate at which your email list expands.

It is important to keep track of call-to-action metrics such as CTR and conversion rates. This will help you grow your list and your business.

Calculation: (Number of New Subscribers – (Number of Unsubscribers + spam complaints) / Total number Email Addresses in Your List * 100 = List growth rate

Example: 300 subscribers, 100 unsubscribed, and email/spam complaints. * 100 = 2% growth

7. Bounce Rate (Hard & Soft)

A hard bounce signifies that the bounce will last forever, while a slow bounce can indicate that it is temporary.

Incorrect email addresses can often cause hard bounces. 

It’s important to eliminate email addresses that aren’t relevant. Many email cleaning services can help.

Hard bounces do not cause soft bounces. These soft bounces are not caused by hard bounces.

8. Forwarding/Social sharing rate

The Forwarding rate or sharing rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on the “share” button to send an email to a network or to forward it to a friend. 

Calculation – (Number of clicks to share/or forwarded/Total delivered emails) * 100

Track forwarding and social sharing rate.

Email forwarding is an uncommon feature in email marketing. It can be a useful tool to determine the shareability and quality of your content.

Share your content easily with your recipients using social buttons. 

Email forwarding is essential to keep track

You may use your share rates to determine the most popular offers and articles with your recipients. This information is useful for planning future email campaigns.

9. Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of email recipients who unsubscribe after receiving your email.

The unsubscribe rate, just like the open rate, is not reliable to show how healthy your email lists are. Most recipients will simply unsubscribe if they no longer want your emails.

They may ignore your messages and simply ignore them. This will help you clean up your email lists.

10. Spam Complaints

Not only should you monitor your unsubscribe rates, but you also need to monitor spam complaints. Many people report spam, rather than unsubscribe.

It should be possible to see the number of spam complaints that you receive, particularly if your spam filter is up-to-date.

If spam complaints are high and unsubscribe rates high, this should tell you.

Take a bow

These are the 10 most important email marketing metrics that every marketer should monitor. What goals do you have for your emails?

Remember that goals can vary between companies. An excellent email marketing metric is

  • Give valuable insights into direct email marketing campaigns
  • Provide valuable information about user activity
  • You can have your team work together to reach your campaign goals

About the author

Kobe Digital is a unified team of performance marketing, design, and video production experts. Our mastery of these disciplines is what makes us effective. Our ability to integrate them seamlessly is what makes us unique.