Editor’s note: This article was updated in September 2021 to ensure accuracy and freshness.
Email marketing may take time to master. It involves keeping best practices in mind for every event you create, overcoming common novice mistakes, and optimizing emails to increase engagement.
However, these practices alone cannot ensure success. You must also understand how to measure the results of your efforts.
These metrics, like the rest of email marketing, are constantly changing.When the characteristics are like Apple’s email privacy protection After the launch, our views on the success of email marketing may change. Therefore, it is important to stay up-to-date.
Before you dive into all the knowledge about email marketing, take a step back, determine the goals of email marketing, and then decide how to measure success.
Every email marketing campaign may be different, especially if you have different goals for different campaigns (for example, generating leads and increasing subscriber base), but every email marketer should learn how to track some basic metrics .
Email marketing metrics every marketer needs to know
1. Open rate
Open rate has long been one of the simplest and most commonly used indicators for email marketers. Tracking the percentage of subscribers who open a particular email, the open rate gives us insight into subscriber engagement and the effectiveness of different subject lines.
In other words, when Apple publicly provides email privacy protection, this feature will effectively disable the open tracking of users who choose to use it, making the open rate a relatively unreliable indicator.And more inbox providers Ready to follow suit, The open rate will only become increasingly unreliable.
Fortunately, there are more indicators in this list to track success.
2. Click Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate It is another common metric that can help you determine the effectiveness of your campaign. Click-through rate measures how many people clicked on links in emails. For example, if you include a link to redeem an offer, the click-through rate will measure the percentage of subscribers who click on your link.
When creating emails, there are several ways to increase click-through rates. For example, include links in appropriate places throughout the email, and add an eye-catching and conspicuous call-to-action button that subscribers can click to redeem your offer.
The click-through rate is usually much lower than the open rate.The average CTR for most campaigns is Slightly more than 4%.
3. Conversion rate
Your clickthrough rate measures how many people clicked on your link, and your Exchange rate It will evaluate how many people clicked on the link and then completed a specific action. For example, if you include a link in an email for subscribers to participate in a Black Friday promotion, the conversion rate will tell you the percentage of people who clicked on the link to make a purchase.
The conversion rate gives you a unique insight into the return on investment. When you know how much money you’ve spent and how many subscribers are converting, it’s easier to determine whether the money you invested in your campaign is paying off.
4. Bounce rate
When sending email campaigns, you also want to track the bounce rate. Bounce Rate Measure how many subscriber email addresses did not receive your email. Soft bounces for temporary issues with tracking email addresses, and hard bounces for permanent issues with tracking email addresses.
Measuring the bounce rate based on the open rate will give you a clearer picture of the quality of the subscriber list. If your percentage of hard bounces is high, your list may be full of fake email addresses, old email addresses, or incorrect addresses.
You can lower the bounce rate in advance by requiring double opt-in, which requires subscribers to verify their email address and confirm that they want to receive emails from your brand. The dual opt-in requirement is a great option to help ensure higher quality email lists and lower bounce rates.
5. Number of unsubscriptions
Measurement Unsubscribe It’s very simple. Any email provider will tell you how many people have unsubscribed after receiving your email. This email metric can usually be found in your main dashboard or metric dashboard.
Large unsubscriptions can be frustrating.However, email marketers prioritize this email marketing metric and check it often Unsubscribe is a good thing Because they indicate that you are fine-tuning the subscriber list.
In addition, clearly giving subscribers the opportunity to unsubscribe lets them know what and when they can choose to receive from your brand, which helps build trust.
6. List growth rate
The list growth rate is an indicator that tracks the growth rate of the list.
You can calculate this value by subtracting the number of canceled subscriptions from the number of new subscribers, dividing by the total number of email addresses in the list, and multiplying by 100.
It’s natural to experience some loss, so focus on ways to keep growing lists, attract subscribers, and find new loyal subscribers.
7. Spam complaints
Your email is marked as very frustrating spamYou may prefer to ignore these situations, but it is important to be aware of spam complaints.
Email service providers want to ensure quality and track spam complaints. If this ratio is too high, your email service provider may take action against you and block your account.
Your email service provider may track this number for you, but you may need to pay close attention to it yourself to ensure that your email is technically correct and that your copy meets the standards you need.
8. Forwarding rate/mail sharing
Repost rate/email sharing measures the percentage of recipients who share your post via social media or forward it to a friend.
Repost rate or sharing is a useful tracking metric because it allows you to understand how many brand advocates you have. It will tell you how many subscribers recommended your email to others.
Cultivating brand advocates through email marketing is a good strategy, especially considering 81% of consumers buy The decision will be influenced by friends’ social media posts.
9. Participate over time
Tracking engagement over time will provide you with information about the best time of the day to send a message.
You can use the automated features of your email service provider to send emails based on customer behavior or triggers, but tracking engagement over time will tell you when you get the highest click-through rate for non-automated emails.
Some email service providers perform this function automatically and collect data for you. However, it’s not a bad idea to track this metric yourself and determine the best delivery time for your industry and subscriber base.
10. Overall return on investment
The overall return on investment is an email metric that every marketer should track. It will tell you the overall return on investment of your campaign.
You can calculate it by subtracting the funds spent to execute the activity from the sales revenue received from the activity, dividing by the funds invested in the activity, and then multiplying by 100.
Email marketing can be an investment, but it also has Highest return on investment Outside of any digital marketing strategy.
11. Email sharing rate
The email sharing rate indicates the number of times the recipient has shared your email via their social media, but it has nothing to do with sharing email via email.
This metric is calculated using the “Share this” button on the email. To find this ratio, divide the number of “share this” clicks by the total number of emails sent, and then multiply by 100.
This statistic also allows you to establish some useful email benchmarks.
12. Mobile phone open rate
This indicator works in the same way as the regular open rate, except that it is specifically applicable to mobile devices such as phones and tablets.
Unlike desktop open rates, which are more likely to occur when people go to work on weekdays, mobile open rates are more popular on weekends.
But please note that This metric will also be affected by Apple’s email privacy protection feature-not just because it is unable to track openings. MPP prevents our ability to see which device or operating system a user is using, which means that when they choose to join MPP, we will no longer know whether the user is opening on a desktop or mobile device.
13. Mobile CTR
Mobile CTR works in the same way as its desktop alternatives, but is related to mobile devices such as phones and tablets.
The mobile click-through rate is usually much lower than the desktop click-through rate, because users often operate multiple windows and other complex browsing operations, and these habits are much easier on the desktop than on the mobile phone.
Similar to mobile open rate, mobile click-through rate also affects my MPP. However, if you primarily want to reach your audience through mobile devices, remember that the weekend is usually the best time to do so.
14. Domain name open rate
This ratio is very important to ensure your successful delivery, which makes it one of the most important email marketing statistics.
With this ratio, you can see the percentage of people who open your email at a particular email provider. By doing this, you may be able to determine if you are experiencing issues with spam filters for specific domains.
Similarly, you will not be able to accurately track this metric for Apple Mail users, but it still applies to users who do not choose to join MPP.
15. Domain click rate
Like the domain open rate, this will allow you to see how many people click on your email in a particular email provider.
By comparing click-through rates between providers, this metric will help you understand if there are any issues with the spam strategy of the email domain. All you have to do is find the average CTR among all providers and compare it with each provider.
16. Revenue per email
ROI will show your overall return on investment, but Analyze income Each email will show the personal success of the email.
Determining this number can help you easily determine which emails perform best, and whether any emails will reduce the overall return on investment.
source: Very good email
Focusing on metrics such as clicks, web traffic, and conversations is the best way to track the return on investment of a given email.
17. Revenue per subscriber
Like some other email marketing performance indicators, calculating the income of each subscriber can provide a more microscopic view of your return on investment.
Unlike the revenue of each email, it can analyze which demographic data generates revenue and which does not. By discovering this, you can change your email to reduce focus on specific groups of people, or redistribute resources and focus on specific groups of people.
wrap up
These are the top 17 email marketing metrics that every marketer should track. Moreover, although some of these indicators are facing major changes, they are still worth knowing.
In terms of tracking the effectiveness of marketing activities, look for email marketing metrics that consistently meet the following criteria:
- Provide valuable data for direct email campaigns
- Provide insight into user activity
- Help your team focus on the goals of the campaign
As you set your campaign goals, these email metrics will help you measure your overall success and help you make the necessary adjustments to your strategy.
For an overview of all the content of email privacy protection, please check our Comprehensive guide.
