What are Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs?
The KPIs help you make campaign decisions based on what the goals are for the campaign. The success of your campaign can be measured by using one, two, or three metrics.
If you want to get the best results from your email marketing metrics, you should use a balanced scorecard. Remember that it is not easy to set KPIs and metrics. You will need to try several different ideas before you find the one that works best for your brand.
How to measure email marketing success
A company usually has a set of goals to track the success of their campaign. The email should be designed to achieve certain goals, but you should also pay attention to how well it is delivered and how well the content is received.
Keep this in mind as you learn the steps to measure the success of your email marketing campaign.
1. Learn about measurable metrics
As a business owner, it is important to learn about the different ways you can measure the success of your campaigns. This way, you can adapt your tactics to better suit your needs.
What metrics should you use to evaluate your campaigns? You can use the metrics to identify the key selling points that would result in sales.
2. Set up goals
Setting email marketing goals helps to define the metrics. What is your purpose for using email marketing? Is it to re-engage customers, send newsletters to a large audience, or target potential customers with a customized message?
Each campaign has a unique goal that must be possible to achieve. Every email may not produce the desired result. Some may not even generate revenue.
3. Define the KPIs
Done with the goals? Great! Now you can start defining KPIs. When thinking about KPIs, it is important to consider both positive and negative metrics, such as an increase in revenue or open rates, and an increase in unsubscribe rates. This text indicates that if you want to reach your goals, you may need to revise your KPIs.
4. Track metrics
Neglecting it can often lead to poor campaign performance. However, tracking metrics is accessible with customer data platforms. The platform helps you keep track of actions related to email.
5. Evaluate
It is difficult to assess how well each campaign is doing. Sometimes you need to assess your progress on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
- Daily – Check open rate, open rate variation, bounce rate, and soft bounce rate.
- Weekly – Check overall campaign performance, campaign conversion, click-through rates, spam complaints, unsubscribe rate, active audience trend, and revenue reports.
- Monthly – Check revenue per customer, open per customer, mobile open rate, spam score, and email client share rate.
Importance of tracking email metrics
Before looking at the metrics, it is important to understand why you are tracking them, in order to create the most effective email marketing strategy.
Email marketing provides you with the ability to track how subscribers interact with your content. That’s why tracking is important. You can’t tell how your content is being received by your subscribers unless you have feedback. This allows you to make decisions about what is and is not acceptable and makes improvements possible.
15 email marketing metrics
The following email marketing metrics are key to boosting ROI:
-Open rate -Unsubscribe rate -Bounce rate -Spam complaint rate -Delivery rate -Click-through rate
Before continuing, make sure to look into the different email marketing software solutions that can help improve your overall ROI while also tracking your progress against this list.
1. Email list growth rate
Healthy and growing email lists are essential to sustaining the benefits you reap today. To calculate the growth rate of your list: take the number of new sign-ups and subtract the number of unsubscribes, then divide that number by the total number on your list and multiply by 100.
2. Clickthrough rate
This measures the percentage of your email audience that clicks on a link after opening your email. The higher your CTR is, the more effectively your content is working, since you want more people clicking on links associated with your content (for more engagement with your content). A low click-through rate likely means that your content is not interesting or relevant to your audience.
CTR is an important metric to track because it can show how successful your email is in getting new business. If people are clicking on the links in your email, it means they are taking action on your message. The overall user experience of your email can affect CTR. Does the design of the landing page guide the user’s eye towards the conversion point? A UX designer can help improve the click-through rate of your emails.
3. Subscribers vs. Unsubscribers
Every email campaign wants more of the right subscribers. If you see an increase in the number of people subscribing to your content, it means that they find it appealing and are likely sharing it with others. This metric can help you determine if you are having a greater influence.
If a high percentage of people are unsubscribing from your campaign, something is wrong. This is an important KPI to track because it can help you troubleshoot your unsubscribers.
Suppose many unsubscribes occur right after your latest email. This is a sign that the latest email was not interesting to the audience and many people unsubscribed from the mailing list. The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribe from a mailing list after receiving one or more messages. To find out the normal unsubscribe rate, watch for a sharp increase or change.
4. List churn
The rate at which people unsubscribe from your emails will give you an idea of how successful a campaign was, but understanding the overall rate at which people unsubscribe from your emails will give you a better indication of whether your email strategy needs some work. To calculate the list churn rate in the last 12 months, divide the total number of email unsubscribes by the total number of subscribers, then multiply by 100.
5. Open rate
When do most of your email opens occur? How many recipients open your message within the first 30 minutes after you sent it? How many wait for later in the day? Do you get more openings on Thursday mornings? Your recipients may choose different times of day to open your email, depending on your audience, subject line, and other factors. You can experiment with different timing.
In an article discussing metrics that are beneficial to track, Alex Vale, Director of Growth at Attio, explains that opening time is a great metric to track because it can significantly boost your open rate. Vale continues by explaining that if you know when your audience is most likely to open your email, you can schedule your newsletters accordingly and increase your open rates.
6. Heat map tracking
Do you want to know which links in your emails are the most popular? Do emails with lots of links work? Does the audience just click on the top links? Is your call to action optimized to its fullest potential? Answering these questions will allow you to identify areas where you can optimize and test.
Most email platforms will provide you with this report without any additional effort. If you don’t have this information readily available, you’ll need to examine how many clicks each link gets and compare that to your creative content.
7. Delivered rate
The success of your email delivery is one of the most important aspects of your email strategy. If your emails aren’t being delivered, all your hard work on content, creative, etc. will have been for nothing.
The metric will come from your email marketing platform. It tells you how many emails were delivered compared to how many were sent.
8. Bounce rate
An email bounce occurs when a user does not receive your email.
The bounce rate is the percentage of undeliverable emails due to email server rejection. Email servers see high bounce rates as a sign that your account is sending spam, which hurts your brand’s reputation.
Soft bounce
Facing any temporary issues in your emails? You should keep an eye on these things to prevent any bigger issues from arising later. Soft bounce rate is caused by concerns like temporary blacklisting, a full mailbox, connection errors, or graylisting.
A soft bounce rate of less than 0.5% is considered good. A higher soft bounce rate may be due to poor filtering on the recipient domain side.
Hard bounce
If your emails are being blacklisted or you are sending emails to inactive users, it can be the major reason for the hard bounce rate. When an email bounces, take a look at the status messages or the code you receive to determine the cause. It is important to keep the bounce rate below 0.5% to avoid being marked as having bad email list health, which is indicated by a bounce rate of 1% or higher.
9. Inbox placement rate
Your inbox placement rate is a good way to see how effective your email campaigns are. There are many things that can affect where your emails end up in someone’s inbox, so it’s a good idea to look at this number first to see if there’s a bigger issue.
The ones that do might not give you an exact number, but they’ll give you a range. Not all email marketing platforms will give you an exact number for your inbox placement, but some will give you a range. You should calculate the value of your emails if they are not performing well, or if you need to get more value out of your campaigns.
10. Complaint rate
The number of people who have hit the “SPAM” button or classified your email as junk mail. If even a small number of your recipients mark your emails as spam, it will negatively affect your sender reputation. This graph illustrates the number of people who have complained about the number of emails delivered.
11. Landing page bounce rate
Post-click metric tracking refers to the process of measuring the success of a campaign after a user has clicked on an ad. This is important in order to get an accurate picture of how effective the campaign is. It is not important to your boss to know the open rate or click rate, only what happens after they click. The bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site after visiting only one page. Although a high bounce rate is not ideal, it does not necessarily mean that your audience is not interested in taking action.
ESPs usually don’t provide landing page metrics, but you can find this information in Google Analytics. Sign in to Google Analytics. Find your tracking ID and insert it into your landing page. The Landing Page report in Google Analytics will give you data on a variety of metrics.
12. Conversion rate
Now, onto numbers that bring us real money. Your audience found your content interesting and clicked on the links you provided. The amount of conversions you get from an email campaign depends on how strong the email’s offer was and how well the corresponding landing page supported that offer. If you provide a new link, there is a chance that they will sign up and make a purchase.
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who responded to your email and clicked on a link that took them to your desired goal. This metric allows you to see how successful your email marketing campaigns are and whether they are having the desired effect.
To increase the number of people visiting your website, test different versions of your call to action (CTA) in your emails. Try different approaches and see what works best. Make them more specific. Use countdown timers and limited-time offers in your email to create a sense of urgency.
13. Engagement time
The email read rate is the rate that shows how many people open the emails that were actually read. This metric is useful for editorial emails, updates, privacy notices, etc. Adding an emphasizing CTA will help increase the engagement time.
In general, “read” refers to emails that stay open for 8 or more seconds. However, the definition may vary depending on the tool you use.
14. Return on Investment (ROI)
Email marketing produces some of the highest ROI. This service is affordable and easy to get started. You can measure the ROI of your email activity to see if the money and time you spend on it is worth it. This is a key metric that decision-makers use to determine whether to invest more in a business.
If you want to show your ROI as a percentage, you can calculate it by subtracting your total investment cost from your total revenue, and then dividing that number by your total investment cost. To get a percentage, multiply that result by 100.
15. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
The saying that it is cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one is as true now as it ever was. Acquiring a new customer costs over five times more than keeping an existing one. The CLV tells you why there are so many engagement initiatives. If you want your profit margins to grow, you need to engage and grow your business. Your goal should be to improve your customer lifetime value year over year.
There are several ways to calculate your customer lifetime value, and this can often become confusing. Understanding different testing and understanding methodologies can help you find one that will work for your business. You should ask your ESP (email service provider) how they can help you figure out the best way to increase this metric.
THE PROBLEM: YOUR BUSINESS ISN’T GROWING AS FAST AS IT SHOULD!
Your sales have stagnated or decreased, and you can’t figure out why. Discover what’s holding you back from achieving predictable sales growth in your business.
If you want to grow your business, you need a proven plan and framework. That’s what you get with the 2X Your Sales Discovery Session.
Want to learn about a formula for Predictable Growth that will put your business on a 90-day path to 2X Your Sales?