Email Marketing Series: 8 Important Email Marketing Metrics

Email Marketing is considered to be the most effective way of advertising brands and products. However, it is effective only when you can measure the performance of your email marketing campaign. Email marketing metrics can help you in determining the success of your campaign. Using email marketing metrics you can identify why your customers are not opening your email? how you can improve email open rate? and more. 

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Every email marketing campaign has different goals to achieve. So,  If you are planning to run an email marketing campaign then it is important to have an in-depth idea about email marketing metrics. These email marketing metrics can help you to improve your business awareness, acquiring new customers, and improve conversion rates.   

Therefore in this article, we will be discussing the different email marketing metrics present in a campaign. Reading this article will also help you to identify the working of different email marketing metrics and how you can calculate those metrics.

Email Marketing Metrics:

Totally, there are eight major email marketing metrics that will help you in determining your campaign results. 

  • Open Rate 
  • Click-Through Rate  
  • Spam Percentage 
  • List growth rate
  • Conversion rate
  • Bounce rate 
  • Overall ROI
  • Unsubscribe Rate 

1. What is an Email Open Rate? 

Email open-rate helps in analyzing the percentage of emails opened by your existing and new subscribers. Breaking it, even more, simpler, email open rate tell you about how many people viewed or opened the email you sent. 

The open rate helps in determining the performance of your email marketing campaign. If you are getting less email open rate then you should start looking for mistakes and faults in your campaign. We have mentioned the email marketing checklist that will help you in optimizing your emails. An optimized email marketing campaign always gets a higher open rate and click-through rate. 

Method to calculate Email open rate:  Divide the number of unique opens (excluding that bounced) by the number of emails sent X 100.

2. What is CTR in Email Marketing?

CTR (Click Through Rate) is one of the important email marketing metrics in determining the clicks and action taken on your email campaign. Email Open rate may tell you about your email performance in grabbing people’s attention but CTR (click-through rate)  helps in analyzing whether your email can attract people in taking action on it.

Click-Through Rate not only depends on the subject line but elements like time and day (strategic email scheduling), link positioning, email length also helps in achieving more CTR. Every marketer aims to achieve maximum CTR but rates vary by industry, i.e top industries like computer hardware and telecommunication, nonprofits, association & government, and education-related emails get average CTR of 4%. So, it is important to focus on subtle elements to get an attractive email click-through rate percentage for your organization and company. 

Method to calculate Email click-through rate: dividing the number of unique opens by the number of emails sent – bounced emails. 

3. What is Spam Percentage?

Spam percentage tells you about the number of users who marked your email as spam. Nowadays if you try sending emails to irrelevant people then they will not hesitate in marking your email as spam. So, you should pay attention to your email spam percentage. It will help you in analyzing why your emails are getting spammed and how you can avoid it.  

Its is important to know why people are marking your email as spam. If you keep on ignoring your spam percentage then there are chances of getting your email account blocked by your email service provider. 

Therefore, always track your spam percentage in your analytics dashboard. Many top email service providers like Mailchimp, give you metrics about your email campaign performance. 

Method to calculate Email spam percentage: (total number of emails marked as spam / the total number of emails sent by you) x 100.   

4. What is the list growth rate?

Other than the Email CTR and Open Rate, the Email list growth rate is also an important email marketing metrics that helps in tracking new leads and growth of the company. It will help you in tracking the growth of emails in your email list. Every company tries to grow their email list because that will help them in expanding audience and reach. But most of the time companies ignore to check the growth rate in their email list,  as they are more focused on open rate and CTR. 

Method to calculate Email Growth rate:

([(Number of new subscribers) minus (Number of unsubscribes +  email/spam complaints)] / total number of email addresses on your list]) * 100. 

For example if you have (1000 new subscribers – 800 lost subscribers and spam complaints) / 10,000 email addresses on the list * 100 = 2% list growth rate. 

According to Hubspot, the email marketing database naturally degrades by about 22.5% every year. So, If you are running an email campaign then you should maintain a list that can tell you about the new and lost email subscribers.

We at SFWP experts have got 8+ year experienced email marketers that can help you in growing your email list and building a high-quality email marketing strategy for your existing and new customers. 

5. What is the Email marketing Conversion rate? 

“Conversion rate” one of the most liked and loved email marketing metrics by every marketer. Email Click-through rate will tell you about the percentage of recipients clicked on your email. Whereas Conversion rate will give the metrics about the percentage of recipient performed or completed the desired task. For example, if you are placing a new year product offer link in your email and asking users to buy that product. So, the conversion rate will tell you about the percentage of people clicked on your link and brought your product. 

Conversion rate is one of the convenient ways of determining whether the money you are putting in your email campaign is worthy or not. it can help you in identifying your ROI from the email marketing campaign. 

Method to calculate Email conversion rate: Number of subscribers completed the desired task / total number of email sent ) X 100

6. What is the Bounce Rate? 

After the spam rate, the Bounce rate is another type of email marketing metric disliked by most of the marketers and companies. The bounce rate indicated that your email didn’t land in the recipient’s inbox and bounced backed to the sender because the email address of the recipient was invalid. Sometimes due to strict email security filter email gets bounced. 

Bounce rate will help you in analyzing the quality of your email list and according to that, you can segment your email list. If you are getting high bounce then you can figure out that most of your emails are fake or old. To avoid including fake and old emails in your email list then you can opt-in option. By asking your user to verify their email if before performing any further action. Nowadays most of the companies ask their users to verify their email id after signing-up.  

Therefore, it is important to track the bounce rate of your email campaign. As it will help you in building a healthy email list. 

There are two type of bounce 

Hard Bounce 

It indicates that the email address of the recipient was invalid that’s why the email bounced back to the sender. Sometimes due to strict email security filter email gets bounced back. 

Soft bounce 

If emails get soft bounce that means the recipient email inbox was full or there was some problem with the recipient server.

7. What is Overall ROI?

Overall ROI is one of the most important metrics that help in determining the total return on investment of an email marketing campaign. Like other marketing channels, it is important to know the total investment in the email marketing campaign and how much revenue you are generating from it.  

You can calculate your overall campaign by subtracting  the total money you made form you campaign – total money spend to execute your campaign  / the money invested in the campaign X 100)

For example, you spent $1000 in your email marketing campaign and earned a total of  $8000 from your email marketing campaign the Overall ROI will be [ $8000 – $1000 / $1000) X 100 = 700% ROI for your email marketing campaign.  Email marketing requires little investment and in return, it can give you high ROI. 

8. What is the Email  Unsubscribe rate? 

Unsubscribe rate is the metric that tells you about the number of users unsubscribed your email. These types of email marketing metrics are generally observed after you send your bulk emails to your recipients. And it very easy to measure. 

If you are using an email marketing tool then you can check your email unsubscribe rate in the metric dashboard.  you can also ask your email service provider to update you about the number of people unsubscribed after getting your latest email. Email unsubscribe rate is something that can discourage you but it will also help you in analyzing why recipients are unsubscribing from your email list.  

Therefore, always keep track of your email unsubscribe rate. If you are getting a higher unsubscribe rate then you can contact us for improving your email campaign. We at SFWP Experts have email marketing experts that have helped many small and large scale businesses in creating a revenue-generating email marketing strategy.