Email marketing metrics vary depending on your goals, but some of the most important ones include deliverability, open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, unsubscribe rate, forward/share rate, and ROI.
If your goal is to drive website traffic, track how many visitors sign up for your email list using the subscriber growth metric.
Open Rate
Email open rates are a key performance indicator for both clients and agencies. A high open rate signals that the content resonates with subscribers, encouraging further engagement and potentially increasing ROI. It’s also a useful benchmark for comparing email marketing efforts against industry standards. An unimpressive open rate can prompt a strategic reassessment, such as optimizing subject lines and sending times.
Although average email open rates vary by industry, it’s important to keep in mind that every brand’s audience is unique. It’s also vital to analyze a full year of data, which can help you identify trends and seasonal fluctuations. For example, email subject lines and the sender name are two common factors that can influence open rates. Try experimenting with different variations to find what works best for your audience.
Creating clear, engaging visual representations of email open rate trends can help you communicate insights to stakeholders and foster data-driven decision making. The simplest way to do this is by creating a simple chart that displays your email open rate over time, compared to the industry average. This type of graph is often easier to interpret than a table of numbers and can make a big impact in convincing stakeholders that your email marketing is successful. Emails Nest offers a perfect platform for that.
Click-Through Rate
Email marketers need to know more than just the number of people who open their emails. They also need to understand what happens when those subscribers click on a link in an email. That is the measure of how effective an email campaign really is.
Using a variety of links throughout the body of an email and making sure that they are well-placed can help to improve click rates. In addition, keeping email content short and focused is also helpful. Emails that are centered around a single call to action can be particularly effective in driving clicks.
For ecommerce brands, especially those with a high number of online sales, the conversion rate is a key metric to look at. This measures the percentage of email recipients who take a particular action, such as purchasing a product or service on your website. If an email has a very high conversion rate, you can use this information to determine what type of content or call-to-action is most effective for your subscribers. You can then replicate the content that performed best in future campaigns. This is a great way to increase your ROI. Ultimately, email marketing is all about delivering the right message to your audience at the right time, so it’s important to pay attention to the metrics that will help you do just that.
Conversion Rate
While open and click-through rates are useful indicators, you should be looking at actual revenue generated and ROI to truly gauge the success of your email marketing. This metric will tell you the number of conversions your campaign produced, and it may also help identify opportunities for improvement. A conversion may be as simple as signing up for a newsletter, or it could be purchasing a product or service on your website. You can track conversions by analyzing the success of your website landing pages, as well as by using data integrations with tools like Google Analytics.
Depending on the goals of your campaign, other metrics can be equally important, such as list growth rate, forward/share rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might measure the rate at which new customers sign up for your email list. In addition, you might track total orders (if your business has an ecommerce website) and calculate the return on investment to get a clear picture of how effective your email campaigns are. However, it’s important to remember that these metrics are only meaningful if they are in line with your overall goals.
Unsubscribe Rate
An email’s unsubscribe rate indicates how many people are opting out of your emails. While some people will always leave, assessing data and identifying reasons behind spikes in your unsubscribe rate can help you address any problems with your content or strategy.
For example, if the majority of your unsubscribes stem from subscribers receiving too many promotional emails, you can adjust your content to ensure that each campaign is aligned with the needs and interests of your audience. Alternately, you can segment your email list by industry to target campaigns that are more relevant and provide value to your recipients.
Keeping your unsubscribe rate stable and low shows that your audience is engaging with your emails. This, in turn, can increase your open and click-through rates as well as conversions. Additionally, a low unsubscribe rate allows you to maintain compliance with data privacy laws and keeps your domain from being blacklisted by spam filters. This can be achieved by regularly cleaning your email list and removing dormant recipients. This also helps to prevent your emails from being marked as spam and reduces your bounce rate.
Bounce Rate
There are a lot of statistics about email marketing floating around the internet, but it’s one thing to have these stats and another to understand what they mean and how you can use them to measure your own success. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at five key email marketing metrics and what they can tell you about your campaign.
The deliverability rate is the percentage of emails that reach their intended inboxes rather than being filtered as spam or bounced back. A high delivery rate is a good sign that your list is healthy and that you’re doing an excellent job of keeping your subscribers engaged. A low delivery rate, however, could indicate that your subscriber base isn’t interested in receiving your emails anymore or that they aren’t interested in what you have to say.
Marketers should also pay attention to general increases in website traffic after distributing an email, which can be an indicator of the effectiveness of the campaign even if the recipients don’t open the specific email they received. This can help marketers identify the elements of their campaigns that are working well and those that may need to be tweaked.
Forward/Share Rate
The forward/share rate is a measure of how many recipients shared your email content by clicking on a “forward to a friend” link or otherwise sharing it via social media. Increasing the forward rate of your email marketing can help you expand your reach and gain new customers. To encourage more forwarding, try to include a call-to-action in your emails asking your recipients to share the message. You can also keep an eye on which types of email content get shared the most to learn more about what your audience finds valuable and engaging.
While some of these metrics are more important than others, it’s important to look at all of the information available to you in order to gain a full picture of your email marketing performance. By tracking these KPIs, you’ll be able to see if your campaigns are meeting their goals and achieving the desired results. By identifying any issues, you can then make the necessary adjustments to improve your results. This will ultimately lead to better results, a more effective email marketing strategy, and an overall higher return on investment.
ROI
Emails have been around for a long time, but how they fit into the customer journey and what marketers focus on when measuring ROI has changed. Instead of the open rate that many still use as a benchmark, it’s the value that email marketing generates—be it revenue, clients, or leads—that matter most.
The way this is measured depends on the goals of the campaign. If your goal is lead generation, the conversion rate measures how effective your call-to-action links are in generating valid leads and prospects. If your goal is ecommerce sales, you would track total orders, which measures how well your email campaigns drive traffic to your online store and convert them into customers.
Regardless of the goal, it’s important to measure and evaluate email performance on an ongoing basis. By tracking metrics on a regular basis, you’ll be able to identify patterns and make changes that improve the overall performance of your campaigns. The key is to plan your measurement strategy from the beginning, so you can know what success looks like and what improvements to make. Fortunately, with a good email marketing platform, these metrics are easy to track. The best ones will also provide you with the tools to create eye-catching emails and intelligently segment your subscribers for maximum effectiveness.
