Top Email Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking

You’ve strategised, segmented, and now you’ve sent your campaigns, but have you got a method in place to track your email marketing metrics?

Monitoring metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and bounce rate can help you assess your email campaign performance. Looking at the data reveals what types of content your audience engages with most, so you can optimise your future campaigns for success.

In this article, we’ll discuss how taking a data-driven approach can help you experience the full benefits of email marketing. We’ll also explore the email campaign metrics you should track for the most useful insights.

Why should you monitor email marketing metrics?

With most eCommerce brands now using email marketing to reach their shoppers, it’s no longer enough to simply have an email strategy. To maximise the effectiveness of your marketing emails and stand out from your competitors, you must optimise your strategy using email marketing metrics.

Tracking your email performance and adapting your campaigns accordingly can:

• Improve email deliverability: Analysing email deliverability metrics can reveal any issues preventing your emails from reaching certain shoppers, allowing you to fix these for future sends.
• Enhance email targeting: You can create highly specific segments based on email engagement metrics, such as which shoppers opened your latest campaign.
• Boost your email ROI: Tracking email engagement can reveal the send times, subject lines, and email content that are most likely to convert your shoppers.
• Support a multi-channel marketing strategy: By optimising your emails, you can send campaigns that better reinforce your wider marketing efforts across channels like SMS or social media.

What’s the most important email marketing metric?

When it comes to measuring your email marketing effectiveness, it can be difficult to know where to start. Email performance dashboards can be overwhelming, and knowing what metrics you should be looking for can help you navigate them more easily.

Unfortunately, there’s no single answer to this question. The most important email marketing metric to track will differ depending on the goals of your business and of each campaign you send. 

For example, if you’re sending a campaign to re-engage shoppers who’ve stopped opening your emails, the open rate would be the best indicator of campaign success. However, if you’re sending a basket abandonment email campaign, the success of this might be best measured by conversion rate metrics.

Although no single metric outranks the rest, there are still several statistics it’s important to keep track of. Keep reading to discover how to track the best metrics for your email marketing campaigns.

How to measure email marketing success

Interpreting email marketing results is a skill that every email marketer needs to have. As we’ve discussed, looking at your email analytics can help you uncover insights about the type of content your shoppers like to see and engage with.

Let’s take a look at some of the key email performance metrics for marketers to track, what they mean, and what you can do with them.

1. Open rate

Open rate is simply the percentage of email recipients who opened your email campaign.

It’s calculated by dividing the number of times an email was opened by the total number of shoppers it was delivered to.

Why it matters

The open rate of your email can show how immediately engaging shoppers found it to be.

Your email’s subject line can greatly influence its open rate, as this is the first thing that shoppers will see. A high open rate can suggest your subject line was effective at grabbing the shopper’s attention and enticing them to click the email.

Open rate can also signify the quality of your email list and the accuracy of your segmentation. The average email open rate is 35%, but if you’re sending irrelevant emails to out-of-date email addresses, yours is likely to be much lower.

To consider: For contacts using Apple Mail, the platform’s Privacy Protection feature will automatically register a delivered email as opened, even if it’s unread. This can result in inflated opens, so your open rate may not always be accurate.

2. Click-through rate

Tracking clicks can be a great way to measure the engagement rate of your email campaigns.

Both click rate and click-through rate are commonly used KPIs for email marketing, but they both mean slightly different things.

Click rate is the percentage of shoppers who clicked on a link out of those who received your email. It’s calculated by dividing the number of clicks on the email by the total number of contacts it was delivered to.

Click-through rate is the percentage of shoppers who clicked on a link out of those who opened your email. It’s calculated by dividing the number of clicks your email received by the total number of opens it received. This means your click-through rate will likely always be higher than your click rate.

Why they matter

Click and click-through rate analytics can help you understand how engaging your shoppers find the actual content of your emails.

Once a shopper has opened your email, they will use the content of your email to decide if they should click on any links you provide. Email content encompasses the images, copy and calls-to-action (CTAs) you include within the email itself.

Confusing email design or unclear copy can lead to a low click rate or click-through rate, as shoppers won’t be able to understand your message. So, if you’re experiencing a low click-through rate, it’s a good idea to review and look for areas to improve your email content.

3. Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients who take the desired action after receiving your email campaign.

It’s calculated by dividing the number of shoppers who took the desired action from the email campaign by the total number of shoppers it was delivered to. 

The action you desire will differ depending on the objective of your email campaign. For example, if you send a voucher code confirmation campaign, you’ll likely view a successful conversion as a shopper using this code to make a purchase.

Top tip: Prevent having to manually set your desired action by using an email provider that does this automatically. For example, with Salesfire, you can choose from a wide range of email campaigns that are pre-set to register a certain action as a conversion.

Why it matters

Conversion rate is a useful email success metric as it can help you with analysing your email campaign ROI. It demonstrates the influence your emails are having on sales and helps you calculate the monetary value generated by each campaign.

It can be used alongside other metrics to better understand how you can optimise your email strategy. For example, if your campaigns are getting a lot of clicks but have a low conversion rate, it could suggest that the page shoppers are landing on after they click a link doesn’t align with the email content.

4. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of emails you sent that could not be delivered to their intended recipients. It’s calculated by dividing the number of emails not delivered by the total number of emails that were sent as part of a campaign.

Typically, an email’s overall bounce rate will take into account both soft and hard bounces. These bounce types categorise the reasons and permanence of why an email was unable to be delivered.

Soft bounces happen when an email cannot be delivered to its intended recipient due to a temporary problem, such as a full inbox or the server being down. Contacts who soft bounce can still receive your future emails.

Hard bounces occur when an email cannot be delivered due to a permanent technical error or a strict spam filter. To protect your sender reputation, most email providers will exclude you from sending further emails to these contacts.

Why it matters

Bounce rate analysis is important for ensuring your email campaigns have strong deliverability. Understanding why your emails aren’t delivered means you can address any issues to ensure your next campaign reaches more of your shoppers.

Additionally, assessing your bounce rate can help you check the quality of your marketing lists. A good bounce rate is considered 2% or less. Any higher than this, or lots of hard bounces, could signify your marketing list needs cleansing of outdated or incorrect email addresses.

Top tip: Keep your marketing lists clean and high quality by using ethical and accurate data collection methods. Installing data capture technology on your site can help with this by collecting GDPR-compliant first-party data from your shoppers.

5. Unsubscribe rate

Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who unsubscribed from your marketing emails after receiving your campaign.

This is calculated by dividing the number of unsubscribes by the total number of emails delivered to your shoppers.

Why it matters

Unsubscribe rate is an essential email marketing metric to include in your email reporting. It can reveal a lot about shopper sentiment towards your email campaigns.

Opting out of your marketing communications requires effort, so if a shopper is willing to do this, it’s usually because something about your email bothers them. If your unsubscribe rate is high, this could imply that many shoppers feel the same way. 

Things that could be causing your shoppers to unsubscribe include:

• Sending too many emails too often
• Sending emails featuring non-personalised or irrelevant content
• Sending emails that are difficult to read or understand

To lower a high unsubscribe rate, it’s a good idea to check that you’re not making any of these mistakes.

6. Spam complaint rate

Spam complaint rate is the percentage of your email recipients who report your email as spam.

It’s calculated by dividing the number of spam reports your email received by the total number of shoppers it was delivered to.

Why it matters

Like the unsubscribe rate, the spam complaint rate can tell you how shoppers feel about your brand’s marketing emails.

However, this metric can also have a serious impact on your sender reputation and spam score. These are factors with a major influence on whether your email ends up in the junk folder.

According to Google, you should keep your spam complaint rate below 0.1% and never allow it to reach or exceed 0.3%. This will ensure your emails land in the main inbox of as many shoppers as possible.

7. Delivery rate

Delivery rate is the percentage of emails you sent that actually reached your shoppers.

It’s the opposite of bounce rate, which, as we discussed, is the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered.

It’s calculated by dividing the number of emails that were successfully delivered by the total number of emails you sent as part of a campaign. A successful delivery is when your email does not hard bounce or soft bounce.

Why it matters

Delivery rate is an important email marketing metric because it can provide a quick overview of your email deliverability.

Although it doesn’t distinguish if an email was delivered to the shopper’s main inbox or spam folder, delivery rate can help you quickly recognise any major issues.

If your email deliverability rate is extremely low, considered to be 70% or lower, it could be a good idea to pause any upcoming sends and investigate further. Possible causes of a low deliverability rate can include:

• Bad list hygiene: Not cleansing your email list of outdated or incorrect email addresses can result in a high number of bounces, leading to a low delivery rate.
• Hitting spam traps: Data collected through unethical means, such as bought data, can contain ‘spam trap’ email addresses. These are added by email services to catch suspicious senders, and you can be blocked if you send to them.
• An unauthenticated domain: If you haven’t verified your email domain, spammers could be impersonating your brand, ruining your sender reputation, and preventing your emails from delivering.

A high email deliverability rate, as is the case for many email marketing metrics, can be achieved by following email marketing best practices.

Now you know how to measure success in email marketing, you can use the channel to drive even better results for your brand.

See how your emails measure up

Knowing how to analyse your email campaigns is essential to understanding whether the effort you’re putting into your email marketing is paying off. 

However, beyond simply assessing campaign performance, you can also use email marketing metrics to optimise your campaigns.

Deliverability and engagement metrics, like bounce rate or click-through rate, can offer insights into the effectiveness of your email’s design, content and even the quality of your marketing lists.

By understanding how you could improve your email campaigns and making these changes, you can maximise the conversions and revenue you drive.