9 Important Email Marketing Metrics to Measure

Do you know how well your email marketing efforts are performing?

To improve the ROI of your email marketing efforts there are 9 important metrics that you should measure on a regular basis. Focusing on the right metrics will help you to analyze and improve any of your marketing efforts.

Among the 9 metrics, some need to be monitored on a weekly basis to know that any of your marketing efforts are going to hit it out of the park or fall short. By finding this out early on, you’ll be able to make changes as needed to meet your revenue goals (by hauling out a backup effort, for instance).

Other metrics should be measured on a monthly basis. In order to figure out which campaigns you need to have on your schedule for the coming months, or how you have to change the campaigns you already have planned.

Here are the 9 metrics every email marketer needs to track to measure the effectiveness of your email efforts:

Open rate is the simplest email marketing KPI, and vital to understanding how many subscribers opened the email you sent. Open rate is the percentage of your email recipients who opened your email. This is an important metric to measure because your email campaigns won’t do a thing unless your recipients are actually opening and reading your emails.

How to Calculate: Total Opens / Emails Delivered

When to Track: Weekly

Factors: There are a few factors which can influence your open rate. The first is the sender name, and the second is your email subject line.

CTR is another common metric that can be telling of how well your campaigns are performing. CTR is the percentage of your email recipients who clicked on a link inside your email. Most of the time, getting your subscribers to click on a link inside your email will be the main goal of your emails, so this is a measure what percentage of subscribers clicked on your links.

How to Calculate: Total Clicks / Emails Delivered

When to Track: Weekly

Factors: Your click-through rate will be affected by the anchor text on the link, as well as the location of the link in the body of your email, the number of times you included the link, and even the copy leading up to the link.

Unsubscribe rate will tell you how many people unsubscribed upon receiving an email from you. Your unsubscribe rate is the percentage of your email recipients who clicked on the “unsubscribe” link inside your email. When you measure the unsubscribe rate it will give you fine-tuned subscriber list.

How to Calculate: Total Unsubscribes / Emails Delivered

When to Track: Weekly

Factors: There are numerous elements which can influence the unsubscribe rate. unsubscribe rate can be high when you don't have a solid welcome mail, if your "sender" name isn't recognizable, in the event that you utilize misleading subject lines, in the event that you don't email as often as possible enough, or if you email too habitually.

Complaint rate is the measure of complaints raised against you by the users. Your complaint rate is the percentage of your email recipients who marked your email as spam. When you measure the complaint rate will help you from getting marked as spam and also from blocking your account by ESPs.

How to Calculate: Total Complaints / Emails Delivered

When to Track: Weekly

Factors: Reasons behind high complaint rates incorporate utilizing purchased email lists, excluding a unsubscribe link in your emails, sending irrelevant content, stale email addresses, and emailing too frequently.

Conversion rates are necessary to measure because they give you unique insight into your ROI. The conversion rate is the percentage of your email recipients who completed your desired action (e.g. purchasing a product). When you know how much you have spent and how many subscribers are converting, it’s easier to determine if the money you are putting into your campaign is really paying off in the end.

How to Calculate: Total Conversions / Emails Delivered

When to Track: Monthly

Factors: There are numerous elements which can influence your conversion rate, contingent upon what a successful conversion is in your specific campaign. In the event that a transformation is a successful action that occurs on your site after somebody taps on a link inside your email, you'll need to ensure that your site is optimized for conversions.

Bounce rate measures how many subscriber email addresses didn’t receive your email at all. Your bounce rate is the percentage of your total emails sent which weren’t successfully delivered to your recipient’s inbox. Measuring bounce rates against open rates will give you a more solid idea of the quality of your subscriber lists.

How to Calculate: Total Bounces / Emails Sent

When to Track: Monthly

Factors: Emails can bounce because of a non-existent email address, if the receiving email server is inaccessible or overloaded, if the recipient’s mailbox is full, if the recipient is on vacation with auto-reply, or if the receiving server has hindered the incoming email.

Forward rate/ share rate measures the percentage of recipients who either shared your post via social media or forwarded it to a friend. Your forward (or share) rate is the percentage of your email recipients who forwarded your email to a friend or shared your email by clicking on a share button inside your email. This metric helps you to track how many brand advocates you have. In other words, it tells you what percentage of subscribers are recommending your emails to others.

How to Calculate: Total Forwards / Emails Delivered

When to Track: Monthly

Factors: Supporting your email list is the greatest factor here. Remember to sustain and reward your existing customers.

Campaign ROI is a metric every email marketer should track. Your campaign ROI is the overall return on your investment for your email campaign. This means the total revenue divided by the total spend. You can calculate this by taking the spent you made in sales from the campaign minus the money you spent to execute the campaign, divide it by the money invested in the campaign and then times that by 100. That will tell your campaign ROI.

How to Calculate: ($ Sales – $ Invested) / $ Invested

When to Track: Monthly

Factors: The above formula to figure campaign ROI is really a quite oversimplified technique, and estimating your actual ROI can be tricky. For example, it's extremely difficult to realize when to measure your outcomes. One marketing campaign today could influence your outcomes a month or even in twelve months.

The list growth rate is the metric to track when you want to see the rate at which your list is growing over a certain period of time. You can calculate this by taking the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, divide it by the total number of email addresses on your list and then multiply it by 100.

How to Calculate: New Subscribes – (Unsubscribes + Complaints) / Total Subscribers (over a specific period of time, e.g. the last 30 days

When to Track: Monthly

Factors: On the off chance that your list isn't developing, it's diminishing. Not exclusively do individuals unsubscribe, yet email addresses will in general go "awful" after some time because of individuals switching email accounts and abandoning the old one. Ensure you are always keeping your list clean, and keeping your unsubscribes at a reasonable rate.

There you have it. Those are the top 9 email marketing metrics every marketer should track. As you set up email marketing campaign objectives, these metrics will enable you to gauge your overall campaign success just as help you make vital changes in accordance with your strategy.