Your Top 6 Email Metrics – Learn Which Email KPIs Actually Drive Results

You know email marketing can be wildly successful for your business. That’s why you’re investing time, money, and effort into doing it correctly.

But just how do you know if your email marketing is performing as well as it could?

Don’t worry.

Today at Maggie Writes Copy, I’m pulling back the curtain on which email metrics matter… and what exactly your email Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tell you. Learn whether your email marketing efforts need a boost or not.

Let’s start with one of the most popular email metrics…

1. Open Rates – Your Vanity Email Marketing KPI

One of the first things many business owners tell me when we talk about their email marketing is their usual open rates.

Yes. It is good to be proud if you have a great open rate.

But it isn’t the be-all, end-all of email marketing. Let’s face it… you don’t make money just from someone opening your emails.

Here’s what a good open rate means for your email marketing:

1. Your email content is actually getting in front of your audience. Very important.
2. Your subject lines and pretext are on point. Engaging, intriguing, and eye-catching.
3. You’re likely doing a good job nurturing your audience. People like it when your emails land in their box.
4. You probably have a good sender reputation and your emails will be delivered to people’s inboxes or promotions… rather than their spam folder.

These are all great things. But they don’t mean your email campaigns and flows are working.

Open rates are often not very accurate either. If there is any kind of blocking plugin on a person’s computer it can greatly impact whether your results are accurate.

Let’s face it, in today’s world, most are using pop-up blockers, image blockers, ad blockers, etc.

So the best way to use the open rate metric is actually to compare it to other campaigns you’ve sent. Rather than as a stand-alone metric.¹

Use it as more of an A/B test to other campaigns to see what subject lines work, what topics people are interested in, and what your audience may be ready to hear more of.

The next email marketing KPI will actually tell you a whole lot more about your offer AND your audience.

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2. Click-Through Rates (CTR) – Your Engagement Email Metrics

Your CTR metric is very important for determining engagement. Many people will open and skim an email right before sending it to the trash.

Your CTR tell you whether your emails are actually engaging your audience.²

A high CTR means you’re:

• Providing relevant content
• The audience is interested in your offer
• Content stands out and catches the attention
• Including a great Call to Action throughout the email

CTRs can tell you that your emails are working. A good CTR means that the email part of your marketing funnel is likely on point.

Which brings us to the next email KPI…

 

3. Conversion Rate – Your Action Email Marketing KPI

When we talk about conversions we’re talking about your audience completing the action you sent the email for.

Was it to:

1. Make a sale?
2. Get a social media follow?
3. Fill out a lead form to book a call?
4. Take a quiz to conduct market research?

All of these are considered conversions. Not only are conversion rates a sign of action – they’re a sign of a highly engaged audience.

Whether your audience converts is directly tied to the CTA included in your email as well as the content or page they land on when they click it.

To accurately track conversions, you’ll need to create custom URLs to include in your emails.³

Next, we want to see if your emails are actually being delivered.

4. Bounce Rate – Your Spam Email KPI

Bounce rate doesn’t directly affect your email marketing success. But if too many of your emails bounce, it can cause different email providers to start looking at your emails suspiciously. This affects your deliverablility.

This means spam, my friend.

Since you don’t want to wind up in the spam box, it’s a good idea to check your bounce rate regularly.

If your emails are “bouncing” it means they aren’t making it to your recipient’s box. This can happen for a variety of reasons. They aren’t necessarily tied to you.

There are two different types of bounces:

1. Soft Bounce: this could be a full inbox, or your recipient is having server problems. Typically temporary. You could try resending your email to them. Their email provider may also deliver your email at a delayed time period.
2. Hard Bounce: The email doesn’t exist anymore. Your emails will never reach an inbox.

It’s best to delete hard-bounce emails so you maintain your email credibility.

But what about the people who don’t want to receive your emails?

5. Unsubscribe Rate – Your Irrelevancy Email KPI

Sometimes people make it onto your list who don’t want your emails. It’s important to determine what is causing your unsubscribes to see whether you need to change some of your messaging.

Unsubscribes are a normal part of email marketing. But if the percentage of unsubscribes gets too high it can affect your deliverability.⁴

Reasons your unsubscribe rate may be too high:

• Your opt-in forms are promising something that your emails aren’t delivering.
• You’re sending too many sales emails and not enough nurture emails.
• You’re targeting multiple different audiences ineffectively.
  Your offer is confusing and doesn’t align with your brand.
• You aren’t segmenting your list correctly leading to people receiving irrelevant emails.
• Your audience is outgrowing their Audience LifeSpan (ALS).

While there may be more reasons that you are getting a high unsubscribe rate, these ones are fairly typical.

Take a look at what kinds of emails have the highest unsubscribe rates. It may be time to clean or segment your list more effectively to maintain your deliverability rate and avoid people’s spam folders.

If people are unsubscribing from your list – I guarantee your next email KPI is suffering…

How to Measure Email Marketing Success

While there are lots of different metrics you can use with email marketing, these are some of the most informative. They can tell you if your emails are landing with your audience. – and whether it may be time to look for some help.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you don’t have to. As an email marketer with experience auditing, building, and troubleshooting email marketing campaigns – I’m ideally placed to help you make the ROI you deserve… Without the overwhelm!

There’s no time like the present to book a call.

Resources:

¹ Open Rate Metric – Hubspot

² Click Through Rate – Campaign Monitor

³ Custom URL for tracking – Google Analytics Support

⁴ Unsubscribe Metric – Litmus

⁵ ROI of Email Marketing – Shopify