Common email marketing metrics – How to know if you’re doing a good job?
8 min read
8 min read
by Milica Stankić
Email marketing has long been acknowledged as an effective way for companies to engage their audience, strengthen client relationships, and increase conversions. Even with the expansion of digital communication channels, email remains a trusted and economical way to connect and engage with a specific audience. It gives you a direct connection channel with your subscribers and enables you to send customized and pertinent material to their email inboxes.
One of its main benefits remains the option to deliver highly tailored communications to audience segments. Email marketing helps you customize your communications depending on subscriber preferences, demographics, and behavior, whether advertising products, offering important material, or nurturing prospects. This degree of personalization develops deeper relationships and increases the possibility of motivating your recipients to do the appropriate activities.
The performance of your initiatives must be measured and analyzed to fully utilize and maximize its impact. You can evaluate your efforts’ success, spot improvement areas, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your future tactics by measuring email marketing KPIs. Additionally, email marketing stats demonstrate the degree to which your content engages your readers, the potency of your call to action, and the general health of your email list. You would be operating in the dark and missing out on opportunities for development and improvement if you didn’t measure these indicators.
In the next sections, we’ll go over several typical email marketing metrics you should be aware of, explain why they’re important, and cover some methods for analyzing and improving each.
The percentage of recipients who open your emails is the email open rate. It is a preliminary indicator of your email’s readership appeal and relevance. A high open rate means that your subject lines and sender names are intriguing and engaging.
How to estimate it: Divide the total number of unique opens by the total number of emails delivered, then multiply the result by 100 to get the open rate.
You can evaluate the performance of your open rate using benchmark averages and industry norms. Generally speaking, open rates vary by industry and might be anywhere between 15% and 25%. However, it’s always crucial to create your baseline by continuously monitoring your open rates. Consider implementing methods to increase open rates, such as writing enticing subject lines, personalizing emails, audience segmenting, and trying various send times to determine what your subscribers respond to the most.
This term describes the percentage of receivers that clicked on a link in your email. It displays the level of interest and interaction your material has sparked, so a higher CTR shows that your email successfully inspires readers to act.
How to estimate it: Divide the total number of unique clicks by the total number of emails delivered, then multiply the result by 100 to determine the CTR. Additionally, deeper insights can be gained by analyzing unique CTR (number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens) and overall CTR (number of total clicks divided by the number of emails delivered).
The relevancy of your content, the positioning and prominence of links, the clarity of the call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and mobile optimization are some variables that can influence the CTR. Analyze your CTR to look for trends, then modify your emails as necessary.
The conversion rate counts the proportion of users who followed through on a specific action you wanted them to do after receiving your email, like making a purchase, joining up for a service, or downloading a resource. It clearly shows how well your email marketing efforts achieved targeted results. Depending on the goals of your campaign, conversions can be in the form of purchases, lead sign-ups, app downloads, or website visits.
How to estimate it: The conversion rate is derived by multiplying by 100 and dividing the total number of conversions by the total number of emails delivered.
The conversion rate has to be measured to gain knowledge of how well your email’s call-to-action, design, and content are working. You should consistently monitor your conversion rate to spot patterns and evaluate campaign performance. Conversion-optimized landing pages, the use of urgency and scarcity approaches, social proof and testimonials, the implementation of personalized suggestions or offers based on subscriber data, and other strategies are used to enhance conversion rates.
The percentage of emails not successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes is known as the bounce rate. There are two types of bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces. Soft bounces are brief delivery errors, yet hard bounces are emails permanently rejected because of invalid email addresses. Your deliverability and sender reputation could be impacted as a result of bounces. Invalid email addresses, full mailboxes, or server problems are common causes of bounces. Maintaining an adequate email list and enhancing deliverability depends on tracking and lowering bounce rates.
Review your bounce rates frequently and take the necessary action, such as eliminating incorrect email addresses, introducing double opt-ins to guarantee email address validity, or employing email verification tools to confirm email addresses during signup.
This indicates the percentage of followers that remove themselves from your email list after receiving your emails. High unsubscribe rates may result from irrelevant information, excessive email quantity, poor email design, or an imbalance between client expectations and the value provided. Understanding the causes of unsubscribes is essential for modifying your email approach as needed.
Focus on providing helpful and pertinent information, audience segmentation to provide targeted emails, creating clear expectations during the opt-in process, and providing alternative email frequency preferences to reduce unsubscribe rates. Analyzing subscriber feedback and examining your unsubscribe rates regularly might help direct your
List growth is essential for successful email marketing since it provides greater reach and client base, as your audience can grow and the number of people who interact with your emails. How to estimate it: Subtract email opt-outs ad unsubscribes from the total number of subscribers at the beginning of the period, divide the result by the total number of subscribers during that time, then multiply the result by 100 to get the list growth rate.
Optimizing your website’s lead capture forms, providing worthwhile incentives for signing up, advertising your email newsletter on social media and other channels, and implementing partnerships or collaborations to reach new audiences are all strategies to help you build your subscriber list.
You determine the email marketing ROI by comparing the revenue or value gained from your email campaigns against the expenditures incurred to execute them. It facilitates assessing the success and profitability of your email marketing initiatives.
The conversion rate, average order value, customer lifetime value, and the expense of developing and distributing emails affect email marketing ROI. Through targeting and optimization, ROI can be increased. You can also optimize your targeting methods, create individualized content, and use automation to boost productivity and get better results by assessing the performance of your campaigns.
By enabling you to test and improve different aspects of your communication, A/B testing is essential to email marketing. It assists you in determining what most appeals to your audience and gradually increases your metrics. Subject lines, call-to-actions (CTAs), email design, content layout, and sender names are a few elements that are frequently evaluated. You can make data-driven decisions to enhance the performance of your email by experimenting with various modifications and evaluating the outcomes.
By using segmentation, you can divide your subscriber base into distinct groups according to their demographics, preferences, habits, or degrees of involvement. This makes it possible for you to develop personalized email marketing relevant to each generation.
The best methods for segmenting and personalizing customer content effectively include gathering and evaluating customer data, applying dynamic content and customization tags, and continually adjusting your segmentation strategy depending on performance and customer insights.
Operations are streamlined and mass-customized communication is made possible via email automation. You may efficiently send precise and relevant emails by considering elements like subscriber behaviors or particular dates.
By nurturing leads, re-engaging inactive subscribers, and distributing timely content, automated processes boost KPIs. Examples include birthday emails, welcome emails, and reminders for abandoned shopping carts. Successful automated email campaigns contain those that offer customized product suggestions, triggered emails, or re-engagement efforts. Create an automation plan specific to your goals and continuously monitor performance.