You want your email marketing campaigns to be successful and give your brand the awareness it deserves. In that case, keeping a close eye on specific email marketing metrics and continuously fine-tuning your approach is essential. To achieve this, you can consider implementing some tips and tricks highlighted in this article to help you track and improve performance indicators that can take your email marketing efforts to the next level. By doing so, you’ll be able to maximize the impact of your campaigns and better engage with your target audience, ultimately leading to increased conversions and better business outcomes. The topics that we will cover include:

• Understanding key email marketing metrics: open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate
• Analyzing email metrics: key performance indicators to monitor and improve

Understanding Key Email Marketing Metrics

Before we delve into the KPIs you should be tracking, let’s first understand the most common and essential email marketing metrics commonly used to measure the success of an email campaign.

Understanding the Metrics

Open Rate

Open rate is an important metric for email marketers. By measuring the percentage of subscribers who opened a specific email, we can gauge how engaged our audience is with our content. This information can help us determine which subject lines are most effective and which may need improvement. Understanding and tracking open rates is essential for any email marketing campaign.

Click-Through Rate

To ensure the success of your email campaigns, analyze their performance. One key metric to consider is the click-through rate (CTR), calculated by dividing the number of clicks on your email links by the total number of emails sent. This will provide you with valuable insights into the effectiveness of your content and help you make data-driven decisions to optimize future campaigns.

Click-to-Open Rate

If you want to gauge how invested your audience is in your emails, keep an eye on your Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR). CTOR represents the percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link in your email after opening it and is a more precise measure of engagement compared to CTR, as it only takes into account the subscribers who actually opened your email.

Analyzing Email Metrics: Key Performance Indicators to Monitor and Improve

Now that we have a basic understanding of the key email marketing metrics let’s dive into the KPIs that you should be tracking & monitoring and using to improve your email campaigns.

1. Subscriber List Growth Rate

Expanding your subscriber list should be a top priority if you’re looking to draw more traffic to your site and encourage visitors to interact with your content. Keeping a close eye on the growth rate of your subscriber list is crucial to achieving this goal. By monitoring its progress, you can determine what tactics are effective and tweak your strategy to attract even more subscribers. Remember, your subscriber list is one of the most valuable resources you have as a business owner or content creator, so it’s worth dedicating time and energy to its growth.

2. Conversion Rate

Another important metric to keep track of is your conversion rate. This metric shows how many subscribers have completed a desired action, like buying a product or filling out a form. If your conversion rate is low, it could mean that your email content isn’t resonating with your audience. Analyzing your campaigns and improving your content can boost your conversion rate and achieve better results.

3. Revenue per Email

If you’re running an e-commerce business, it’s important to track the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Revenue per email is a key metric that tells you how much money you make for every email you send out. By dividing the total revenue generated by the number of emails sent, you can optimize your campaigns and improve your bottom line. This metric is handy for businesses that sell products online, as it can be harder to track revenue for service-based businesses. 

4. List Churn Rate

List churn rate is important for email marketers to keep an eye on. It shows the percentage of subscribers who have opted out of your email list or reported your emails as spam. If your churn rate is high, it could indicate that your content isn’t resonating with your audience. This could be due to several factors, such as uninteresting subject lines, irrelevant content, or too many promotional emails. Keeping your subscribers engaged and interested in your content is important to reduce your churn rate and maintain a healthy email list.

5. Bounce Rate

It’s important to monitor your bounce rate. Bounce rate is the number of emails that were not successfully delivered and were returned to your email service provider. 

To further improve your email bounce rate, it’s important to understand the difference between hard bounces and soft bounces. A hard bounce happens when an email is returned as undeliverable. This is usually a permanent issue, such as an invalid email address (spam or no longer active) or domain name. These email addresses should be removed from your list immediately, and depending on your ESP, they may automatically remove them for you.

On the other hand, a soft bounce is a temporary issue, such as a full inbox or a server error. By keeping track of your soft bounces and following up with those recipients, you can increase the chances of successful email delivery in the future and ensure your list stays up to date. Regularly clean and target your email list to maintain a healthy bounce rate.

6. Forward/Share Rate

One effective method for measuring the success of your email campaigns in terms of audience reach is by tracking the forward/share rate. Analyzing the percentage of subscribers who share or forward your emails to others gives you insight into how well your content connects with your target audience. So much so they found it valuable enough to share with others. Additionally, this metric can assist you in identifying which types of content have the potential to go viral, enabling you to optimize your email marketing strategy and achieve even greater success.

Now that you know what to monitor, also consider your platform and your marketing goals.  

Pick A Good Platform

Make sure that you pick an email marketing service that can show you all the metrics and analytics you might need. Most, if not all, email marketing software tools have some kind of dashboard and reporting. They may not all be as robust, and that’s okay as you may not need to track every email marketing metric– make sure that it tracks and shows the data that is important for your line of business. 

 

Define Your Email Marketing Goals

It’s essential to clearly define your email marketing goals before you begin sending and analyzing your emails. Your objectives may differ significantly from those of other companies and may even change within your organization over time. To ensure you’re on track, aligning your particular goals with relevant metrics is important:

👉 Your Goal: increase brand awareness

✓ Then, track metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, and forward/share rate.

👉 Your goal: generate leads 

✓ Then, track metrics such as conversion rate and revenue per email.

👉 Your goal: increase customer engagement

✓Then, track metrics such as click-to-open rate and list churn rate.

Conclusion

Email marketing is a fantastic strategy to explore if you’re looking to boost your brand and connect with your audience. To achieve the best results, it’s essential to keep a close eye on specific metrics. Analyzing KPIs such as open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate provides valuable insights into your email performance. Leverage this data to make informed decisions that enhance your outcomes. To ensure you’re measuring the right aspects, it’s crucial to establish clear objectives for your email marketing and choose metrics that align with those goals.

 

Don’t want to worry about your own metrics? Schedule your consultation call today to get email marketing off of your plate! We’ll worry about the numbers, so you don’t have to.