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5 Essential Key Metrics to Track Your Email Marketing

If you are running an email marketing campaign and following best practices but are unable to track the results of your campaign, then you’ve landed at the right place. In the end, for any business, what matters is how your marketing strategies perform and their direct impact on the business goals.

This blog will help you identify 5 key metrics to measure the success of your email marketing campaign and how each of them works.

Learning about email marketing metrics and distinguishing them from one another could be quite confusing if you are a beginner. In order to help you get a better understanding, here’s a hypothetical example.

Scenario: There’s a new product line that you want to inform your contacts about through email marketing. So you send an email to 100 contacts.

  • Open Rate
    It shows the percentage of people who have opened your emails, and indicates how engaged your subscribers are with your emails.

    In our example, let us assume 20 emails bounce, and 40 contacts open the email. So the Open Rate would be: [40 unique opens / (100 emails sent - 20 bounced emails)] x 100 = 50%

    On an average, the open rate is between 15-25% and you should aim for that. If your open rates are lower, consider using your subscribers’ first names in emails to personalise your messaging. Also, as subject lines are the first thing a reader sees, try making them clearer and more concise to better entice the attention of subscribers. In order to improve your open rate, A/B testing is a good option to identify what works and what doesn’t. Try different things with your email marketing, use unique subject lines, or send emails at different times of the day or week.
  • Click-through Rate (CTR)
    The CTR shows how many people clicked on a link (if any) in your email, and indicates if your message is appealing to the readers, targeted to the rights audience, or simply getting through or not.

    In our example, let us assume out of the 40 unique opens, 20 contacts actually clicked on the link in the mail. So your Click Through Rate would be: (20 clicks / 100 emails sent - 20 bounced emails) x 100 = 25%

    You should aim for an average CTR of around 2.5%. Add links at the beginning of your email if your CTR rate is below 1%. This can help you improve your CTR rate. Additionally, create eye-catching calls-to-action throughout your emails to entice subscribers to click on your links. Make sure to include tracking codes to each link so you can test which CTAs worked and which didn’t.
  • Click-to-open rate
    The CTOR is calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens. It helps you determine if your content is actually resonating with your recipients.

    In our example, the Click To Open Rate would be: (20 unique clicks / 40 unique opens) x 100 = 50%

    This number shows how effective the email message, design, and content performed, and if at all it created enough interest in the reader to take an action. These clicks show how many people actually viewed your email as compared to the click-through rate metric.
  • Unsubscribe Rate
    The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of subscribers who choose to unsubscribe from receiving your emails.

    In our example, let us assume out of the 100 contacts, 10 contacts unsubscribe to your emailers. So your Unsubscribe Rate would be: (10 unsubscriptions / 100 emails sent) x 100 = 10%

    The average unsubscribe rate is 0.17%, which is quite low but can vary based on the size of your email lists and your email frequency. To avoid recipients unsubscribing from your email marketing campaign list, you might want to consider sending fewer emails each week or each month. This might seem opposite to sales goals, but you’re more likely to keep subscribers engaged if you aren’t spamming them with emails on a regular basis. Limit your emails to important announcements or deals to share with your customers.
  • Bounce rate
    It tracks the percentage of emails that went undelivered to your selected email list. Bounce rates are categorised into two kinds of bounces: soft bounces and hard bounces.

    In our example, since 20 emails bounced, the Bounce Rate would be: [20 bounced emails / 100 emails sent] x 100 = 20%

    A 2% bounce rate is typically acceptable for a good campaign. A soft bounce is usually an issue on the recipient’s end that you can’t control. These may be the result of the recipient's mailbox being full, or their server being down. Whereas, a hard bounce shows that something is wrong at your end. This could mean that either the mail that you have sent is fake or your email has been blocked by the subscriber which is a big sign that you are marked as spam.

    These metrics will not only show the results of your email marketing campaign but also signal what is working and what is not, so you can improve your email marketing strategy.

If you’re looking to adopt a comprehensive email marketing strategy then we can help you. Connect with us now!