More than 90% of marketing teams set aside a budget for email marketing because it’s an effective marketing channel that builds customer loyalty, turns warm leads hot and garners a superior return on investment. In fact, 72% of customers prefer email as their main channel for business communication.

Therefore, having over 50% of any given target audience on email makes a compelling case for tracking email marketing metrics. Email KPIs, or key performance indicators, measure the performance of different aspects of an email campaign and provide useful insights to perfect marketing tactics. Be sure to constantly review these 15 metrics when examining email marketing analytics for your business, as they will help you improve your marketing efforts and revenue.

15 Email Marketing KPIs to Measure the Success of Your Campaign

The goal of measuring email marketing KPIs is to learn which users are opening your emails and if they’re positively responding to your calls-to-action. With marketing, it’s mostly about the bottom line, and email marketing is no different.

1. Open Rate

This email KPI compares the number of emails opened by recipients against the aggregate number of emails delivered. It helps businesses comprehend how engaged their target is, what types of content and offers to send, as well as levels of deliverability. Most importantly, the open rate is indicative of subject line effectiveness.

Through the experience research methodology of A/B testing, different subject lines can be used to determine what compels users to open your emails. Sometimes, something as simple as a weak subject line can deter a potential customer from engaging with your content. The open rate can also reveal the best times to send email marketing materials and whether recipients forwarded them to other potential customers.

2. Bounce Rate

Webopedia defines email bounce rate as “the percentage of email addresses in your subscriber list that didn’t receive your message because it was returned by a recipient mail server.” Emails can bounce for many different reasons. The most common: the recipient no longer has that email account, it’s been inactive for a long time, or was deleted.

There are two types of bounces—a hard or soft bounce. The former means the email couldn’t be delivered for a permanent reason, like a deleted address, while the latter indicates temporary issues like a full inbox. It’s rare for an email campaign to have a 100% deliverability rate. An accepted benchmark for bounce rates is around 2%.

3. Number of Unsubscribes

While a high number of unsubscribes can be alarming, campaign tracking software company Campaign Monitor purports that unsubscribe rates under 2% is well within industry norms. Taking stock of these email metrics reveals whether your target audience finds your email campaigns valuable and where there’s room for improvement.

It’s especially helpful to request users complete a short survey before unsubscribing, so you gain insight into their reasons for disengagement. Also bear in mind that if you’re fine-tuning a subscriber list or target market segments, having a few unsubscribes may be an indication that your strategy is working.

4. Click-Through Rate

Most checklists for email KPIs include click-through rates, which indicate how many readers have clicked on a link in your email. This measure divulges if users have engaged with an offer in your email and ventured further down the marketing funnel. If your click-to-open rate is high, but click-through rate low, it may indicate strong subject lines but weak content offerings.

Subjects, calls to action, design, and copy affect click-through rates, as does link position, and the time the email was sent. Using segmentation to send hyper-relevant content, strong visuals, call-to-action-buttons, and creating a sense of urgency can help improve the effectiveness of your emails.

5. List-Growth Rate

When it comes to email analytics, you’d be wise to look at your subscriber list growth rate as it’s one of your most powerful lead retention assets. It shows how well you attract visitors to a landing page or convert them to leads on your website. In eCommerce, email typically retargets customers to make a second purchase or influences them to check out their empty baskets.

Email is by far the most widely celebrated re-engagement channel. Bear in mind, quality trumps quantity. It’s preferable to have a smaller list of loyal customers than a large list with a tiny percentage of customers who regularly engage. And, like any good marketer, you want to grow your list by 5.2% per month.

6. Conversion Rate

Conversion rates are essential email performance metrics because they measure how many subscribers initiated the action you wanted from your email, whether it’s to purchase a product or download a digital asset. A conversion rate’s common goal is frequently purchase-related, although it may simply be about becoming a lead.

According to WordStream, between 2% to 5% is considered a good email conversion rate, but this is industry-dependent. Marketing emails should invariably contain an educational or promotional offer that communicates the value of your product or service offering. If you’re not achieving an acceptable conversion rate, your content may need tweaking.

7. Device Statistics

Mobile traffic accounts for approximately 50% of web traffic worldwide. Desktops, tablets, and smartphones display content differently, so it's essential your emails are optimized across devices, otherwise, your bounce rate may increase, causing you to lose potential leads. Certain devices may match different audience segments, which could potentially make a difference to the way they experience content.

If customers find it a challenge to open your email on their smartphones, they won’t bother to read your content and will unsubscribe. Knowing how your target market accesses emails will help to optimize your content accordingly. For example, if most people read emails on their phones, you’ll want to ensure your email templates’ design accommodates their vertical constraints.

8. Spam Rate

This is the percentage of users who did not receive your mail or reported it as spam. Considering the success of email marketing campaigns is based on a single click, it’s vital your efforts aren’t relegated to the spam folder. The main reason emails end up as spam is because filters have become more sophisticated and can sometimes misinterpret emails if they’re laden with spam trigger words like “massive sale,” for example.

Poor grammar and spelling, providing no opt-out options and sending emails to inactive addresses also reflect badly on spam filters, and perhaps indicate where the quality of your emails can be improved. Currently, there are several software programs available that help marketers test email “spamminess.”

9. Read Rate

While sometimes overlooked, the read rate should always be part of your KPIs for email marketing because it informs whether readers are engaging with your content. It’s not the same as the open rate, as it measures how long a reader spends reading your email, not merely if they open it.

Tracking the time spent viewing emails allows marketers to see at a high level if their content within an email is engaging. Checking email campaign KPIs like read rates reveals target market preferences and what encourages them to engage. If you’re suffering from low read rates, you may want to segment your email subscriber list and improve message personalization for each group.

10. Return on Ad Spend

Return on advertising spend (ROAS) measures the efficacy of an email marketing campaign, and helps businesses evaluate which methods are working and how they can improve. Maintaining and building email lists, crafting campaign content, and sending out emails takes time, which costs money. That’s why tracking profits and losses is key to optimizing strategy.

In terms of email marketing analytics, ROAS lets companies make informed decisions on where to invest their dollars and how their budget can become more efficient. The marketing software company, HubSpot, claims return on ad spend can be anywhere from $4-11 for every dollar spent on advertising if campaigns are executed effectively.

11. Return on Investment

Email KPI metrics like return on investment (ROI) track how much value email marketing delivers versus how much it costs. While return on ad spend focuses on specific marketing campaigns or channels, ROI looks at the overall picture. Ideally, every email marketing campaign should produce a healthy return.

Because email marketing is a versatile strategy, you’ll need to set out clear, measurable goals. Return on investment doesn’t always directly equate to revenue. For example, you may want to measure lead nurturing, website traffic, or raising brand awareness. When you know the goal of your email marketing campaign, you can effectively track ROI.

12. Repeat Opens

Repeat open email campaign analytics are significant because they point to users with an exceedingly high interest in your services or product. Leads who reopen emails can easily be retargeted and encouraged further down the marketing funnel.

For instance, let’s say you’re a retailer selling shoes; you may send an initial email about this season’s new range. If you know a lead has re-opened this email, you might consider sending them a second one with a 10% discount off the shoe range, in an attempt to get them to make a purchase. Don’t neglect to act on these warm leads. Research indicates that closing a deal with a warm lead has a 15% more chance of success than a cold one.

13. Subscriber Lifetime Value

Email subscriber lifetime value determines the average value of a customer who has joined your email list for the entire duration of their time spent on that list. Ultimately, these email marketing KPIs help you understand the worth of the future relationship with a customer, based on the present and future net profit they’ll yield.

To calculate subscriber lifetime value, you have to look at the customer’s purchase frequency, average order value, and their customer value. Gathering data on this metric usually takes time, especially for new businesses, as they first need to acquire a purchasing customer base.

Link clicks are useful email engagement metrics because they tell a story of how many times your email generated an interaction. It helps compare the popularity of different links and campaigns associated with them. Knowing the rate at which each individual element of an email may seem overwhelming, but it can help with a variety of things.

For one, it reflects if your calls-to-action are effective. If your links are not being clicked on, it may be because the design and layout are too distracting, or your copy isn’t enticing enough. Not monitoring what links are being clicked on makes it difficult to determine which elements of your campaigns are working.

15. Mobile Open Rate

In 2019, almost 42% of emails were opened on mobile devices as opposed to desktop, which accounted for a mere 18.2%. Email campaign tracking on mobile can help you plan more effective campaigns. Most target audiences use smartphones, so choosing responsive designs, optimizing email subject lines, and calls to action for mobile may be the difference between making a profit or breaking even.

However, you have to understand the ages and online habits of your subscribers. Different generations don’t engage with technology in the same way; younger generations such as millennials and gen z skew towards smartphones, whereas older ones prefer tablets, laptops, or desktops.

Conclusion

Tracking these email campaign metrics provides valuable data to direct marketing efforts, as well as insight into user activity, and helps your marketing team focus on campaign objectives. The average ROI for every $1 spent on email marketing is $42, which is an impressive amount to aspire to. However, you won’t be able to harness the full prowess of email without tracking and analyzing appropriate metrics.

If you’re searching for tracking software, we can help. serviceminder.io is a world-class customer relationship management tool and email marketing tracker. With it, our clients can measure revenue from their campaigns and track cost per lead and revenue per client at a location and brand level. To find out more about our integrated email campaign tracker, contact us today!