Email Marketing Metrics Every Marketer Needs to Know

Steve J
8 min readOct 25, 2022

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Learning email marketing can take some time. It entails applying best practices to each campaign you design, avoiding typical rookie errors, and improving emails for higher engagement.

These techniques by themselves do not guarantee success, though. Additionally, you need to know how to gauge the success of your efforts.

Like the rest of g, these analytics are also dynamic. When tools like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection are made available, our perception of success in email marketing may shift. Therefore, it’s crucial to stay current.

Take a step back, identify your goals for email marketing, and then choose how you will assess your success before you spend too much time studying everything there is to know about email marketing.

Every email marketing campaign can be unique, especially if you have various goals for each one (such as increasing your subscriber base and producing leads). Still, there are several fundamental metrics that every email marketer should learn how to track.

Rates of click-through (CTR)

A popular measure that can be used to assess the success of your email marketing activities is CTR. CTR counts the number of users that clicked on the links in your email. As an illustration, the CTR would determine what proportion of subscribers clicked on your links if you included a link to redeem an offer.

There are a few strategies to improve click-through rates while creating emails. For instance, insert links in suitable locations throughout the email and include a prominent call-to-action button that subscribers can click on to take advantage of your offer.

Open rates are often substantially higher than click-through rates. Most campaigns have an average click-through rate of just over two percent.

Open Rate

One of the oldest, most popular, and most straightforward KPIs email marketers use is the open rate. We can learn how engaged our subscribers are and how effective certain subject lines are by monitoring the percentage of subscribers who open a particular email.

The functionality would effectively prevent open-tracking for those who choose to utilize it when Apple makes Mail Privacy Protection accessible to the general public, making the open rate a somewhat unreliable indicator. The reliability of the open rate will only worsen when more inbox providers follow suit.

Conversion rate

Your click-through rate counts the number of individuals who clicked on your link, whereas your conversion rate counts the number of people who clicked on the link and subsequently took a particular action. The conversion rate would reveal the proportion of people who clicked the link to participate in a Black Friday sale, for instance, if you included a link in your email inviting subscribers.

You can gain a unique insight into your return on investment via conversion rates. It is simpler to assess whether or not the money you are investing in your campaign is yielding results when you know how much you have spent and how many subscribers are converting.

Hence this is another email marketing metric you must remember as a marketer!

Bounce rate

You should keep track of the bounce rate when sending an email campaign. The bounce rate determines how many subscriber email addresses did not receive your email. Hard bounces track persistent issues with email addresses, whereas soft bounces track transient issues.

You can better assess the calibre of your subscriber lists by comparing bounce rates to open rates. Your list can contain a lot of bogus email addresses, outdated email addresses, or incorrectly entered email addresses if you have a lot of hard bounces.

By requiring a double opt-in, which asks subscribers to confirm that they want to receive emails from your business, you can preventively lower your bounce rates.

Spam grievances

Receiving a spam report for one of your emails can be incredibly demoralizing. Though you might prefer to disregard these occurrences, spam concerns must be taken seriously.

Email service providers want to monitor spam complaints and maintain quality. Your email service provider will likely act against you and block your account if this rate rises too.

This figure will likely be tracked for you by your email service provider, but you should keep an eye on it to ensure that your emails are error-free and that your copywriting adheres to your intended standards. To maximize the opens, clicks, and conversions you generate from your email marketing, avoiding spam filters is crucial.

Total number of unsubscribes

Unsubscribe rate measurement is straightforward. Any email provider will inform you of the number of subscribers that unsubscribed after receiving one of your emails. Usually, your primary or metrics dashboard will contain this email metric.

Unsubscribes in large numbers can be demoralizing. However, email marketers prioritize this measure and frequently see unsubscribes as positive signs because they show that your subscriber list is being refined.

Additionally, making it evident that subscribers may unsubscribe gives them control over the type of content they receive from your brand and when it promotes trust.

List expansion rate

The list growth rate is the statistic to monitor the growth rate of your list. To figure this out, divide the sum of your list’s email addresses by the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, then multiply the result by 100.

Focus on ways to expand your list, interact with subscribers, and attract new, devoted subscribers, as attrition is inevitable.

Forwarding rate/email sharing

The proportion of receivers who forwarded your email to a friend or shared it on social media is measured by the email marketing metric, the forwarding rate. You may indicate how many brand advocates you have by monitoring the forwarding rate or sharing. It reveals the proportion of subscribers that promote your emails to other people.

Creating brand champions through email marketing is smart because friends’ social media posts affect 81% of consumer purchasing choices.

Percentage of mobile opens

The only difference between this metric and the standard open rate is that it only pertains to mobile devices, such as phones and tablets.

Mobile, open rates are more common on the weekends than open desktop rates, which are more likely to occur during the week while individuals are at work.

It will be impossible to measure openings, but Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection function will also impact this metric. When consumers opt into MPP, we will no longer be able to see if they are opening on a desktop or mobile device because MPP disables our ability to identify what kind of device or operating system a user is on.

Click rate on mobile

Although they are tied to mobile devices like phones and tablets, mobile click rates function similarly to their desktop counterparts.

Because users frequently employ multiple windows and other complex surfing techniques, which are considerably easier on a desktop than on the phone, mobile click rates are typically much lower than desktop click rates.

My MPP, like the mobile, open rate will impact the mobile click rate. The weekends are often the most excellent time to accomplish it, though, if you’re primarily trying to reach your audience via their mobile device.

Overall ROI

You should be able to calculate the real ROI of your email marketing, just like you do with any other marketing channel. If you haven’t already, build up an SLA system that allows you to evaluate different lead kinds according to how likely they bring in money for your business.

How many of each of these kinds of leads did email marketing help you produce? How might this affect prospective earnings? Real money earned? These data will enable you to demonstrate to your manager and sales team the value of email marketing as a channel that produces tangible, measurable outcomes.

This may be calculated by dividing the amount invested in the campaign by the amount of money you made in sales, less the amount you spent to carry out the campaign, and then multiplying the result by 100.

Email marketing has the highest return on investment (ROI) among all digital marketing strategies.

Profit per subscriber

Calculating revenue per subscriber enables a more in-depth examination of your ROI, similar to other email marketing success measures.

The capacity to differentiate between which demographics generate revenue and which do not is what sets this apart from revenue per email. By learning this information, you can modify the emails, narrow your attention to a specific group, or reallocate your resources to concentrate on that demographic.

Domain open rate

This rate is one of the most crucial email marketing metrics because it is crucial to the success of your deliverability. This rate lets you determine the proportion of recipients who open your emails on a particular email service provider.

Doing this might determine your issues with a particular domain’s spam filter. Again, Apple Mail users won’t be able to measure this metric accurately, but those who choose not to use MPP will still be able to do so.

Domain click-through rate

Like the open domain rate, this will allow you to see how many people click on your emails in a particular email provider.

This metric will help you see if there are any problems with an email domain’s spam policy by comparing the click rates between providers. All you have to do is find the average click rate between all providers and compare it with the individual providers.

The quantity of fresh (or overall) leads produced.

Maybe you’d want to work on increasing lead generation rather than concentrating on subscribers. If this is the case, you ought to send emails promoting lead-generating content, which is material that readers must access by completing a lead capture form.

If generating leads is your email marketing’s primary objective, you should monitor the number of leads you generate daily and monthly. Depending on your preferences, you may select whether to concentrate on all leads generated or just those added to your database.

Conversion of Leads to Customers

Let’s imagine that you want to increase the conversion of your existing leads into customers by concentrating more on the middle and bottom of your marketing funnel. If you want to do this, your emails will probably contain more relevant content to your company, product, or service.

You can use “Start a Free Trial,” “Watch a Video of Our Product in Action,” or “Get a demo” as calls to action. You should monitor your lead-to-customer conversion rate changes if that is your goal.

Even though all of this sounds so basic, you’d be astonished at how many email marketers choose their objectives without monitoring their progress toward achieving them.

Ensure that you can monitor your progress toward your objective at any time during the month and pay close attention to any changes in these metrics from one month to the next.

Conclusion: That is it for this complete guide on the email marketing metric every marketer needs to know to evaluate the success of their email marketing campaigns and make better decisions. Get started today!

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Steve J
Steve J

Written by Steve J

I am a passionate content marketer and love to write on technology.

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