Do you want to know which email marketing metrics are the most important to track?
Being able to narrow down the metrics you analyze can prevent you from becoming overwhelmed and show you how your email marketing efforts are doing.
In this article, we’ll discuss the top email metrics you should be tracking.
In This Article
Why Email Metrics Are Important
Email metrics are important because you must measure whether your marketing efforts are working.
You’ll want to fix emails that are being flagged as spam, determine whether your subscriber list is growing, and check how much money you’re making.
Let’s take a look at the top email marketing metrics that will matter most to your long term success.
Email Marketing Metrics That Matter
Let’s start with a simple one:
1. Open Rate
Your email’s open rate is the percentage of people who have opened your email.
This email marketing metric helps you determine whether your subject line was successful in getting the reader’s attention.
The formula for this is simple:
Open Rate = Unique Opens / (Number of Emails Sent – Bounces)
However, it’s important to know how open rate is calculated before you rely on this statistic.
Many email providers, including Gmail, will scan your emails before the reader even sees them. Your email marketing service might count this automated scan as an ‘open’, even though the email was never seen by a human.
The intention behind this is good. Services like Gmail want to filter out spam before you see it. And Gmail might also direct your email into a specific folder or tab, which means it needs to analyze the content first.
But for marketing, that makes open rate a difficult number to measure.
If you use any of the top email service providers on the market today, they have already calculated your email open rates for you.
However, some have now introduced something called Click to Open Rate which you may find more helpful.
2. Click to Open Rate (CTOR)
Click to Open Rate is a measurement of how many people opened an email and clicked on a link in the email.
This is a better measurement because you can assume most of those people were human readers.
So if 100 people opened an email, and 10 clicked on something, you have a CTOR of 10%.
3. Click Through Rate (CTR)
Clickthrough rate is simply the number of people who clicked on a link in your emails.
If you’re not sure what to measure, start here. This one is easy to understand.
It’s also easy to see over time whether the percentage goes up or down.
According to HubSpot, companies that send 16-30 email campaigns a month see a clickthrough rate that’s 2x greater than those sending out fewer than 2 campaigns a month.
Keep in mind, these statistics refer to targeted email campaigns sent to a particular group of people, not an email blast to everyone on your email list.
If your clickthrough rate is low, you should start split testing your email campaigns to pinpoint why people are opening your emails but not clicking on the links.
You can A/B test things like:
- Email subject lines
- Format, especially when it comes to mobile layouts
- Fonts, colors, images, and branding
- Length and content format
- Call to action button copy, color, and location
There are also plenty of other email marketing campaign elements you can test and track as an email metric:
Just remember, only split test one element at a time to make sure you get the most accurate data possible.
If you want some more ways to boost your email clickthrough rates, check out these clever email personalization examples to gain more leads.
4. Conversion Rate (CR)
Your email’s conversion rate measures how many people clicked on a link and went on to complete the desired action.
You might want them to make a purchase or fill out a form. Either way, it’s a conversion if it means the person did what you were hoping they would do.
In fact, conversion rate is such an important email marketing metric to track, 60% of marketers claim it’s something they always monitor to determine the progress of their email campaigns.
If your conversion rates are low, make sure the desired action is clear.
The best way to do this is to include a button they can click. Make it prominent and choose a contrasting color.
You can also set a deadline to make it more likely that someone will act.
5. Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI lets you know the money you’re spending on campaigns is worth it.
Luckily, email marketing is the number one driver of revenue for many businesses.
In fact, according to an eMarketer study, email was found to have a median ROI of 122%, which is four times higher than any other type of marketing.
You can calculate your email’s ROI by using this formula:
(Revenue – Expenditure on Campaign) / (Expenditure on Campaign) * 100
Closely monitoring your emails’ ROIs allows you to see which campaigns are working the best and which ones need improvement. By doing this, you can make sure your business is profitable.
And that’s it! Now you know which email marketing statistics matter most when measuring your success.
6. Bounce Rate
When it comes to email deliverability, high bounce rates are bad news.
A bounce means that your email provider tried to send a message, but the receiving server rejected it.
There can be a variety of reasons for this:
- The email address may be misspelled or may no longer exist
- The recipient’s server might be down
- Your email may be marked as spam.
Of all of these reasons, the last one is the one you need to worry about. Email providers use a combination of factors to measure whether emails are spam, and if you’re falling into that category, there’s something wrong.
- Your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records may not be configured correctly. If you’re not familiar with these DNS records, check out this guide on how email authentication works.
- Multiple people on your list might be reporting your emails as spam. This may indicate that they didn’t expect to receive emails from you — a red flag for your email provider.
- Your email spam score may be above the threshold that’s needed to trigger a block. Spam scores can be elevated by things like too many links in an email.
- Your domain reputation is poor, which can result from all of the above combined. When domain reputation drops, recovery can be difficult.
If you suspect you have an issue with your spam score or technical email set-up, check out this guide to email deliverability. It walks through all of the factors we talked about so you can review them and decide if they need to be fixed.
Note: your email provider may measure soft and hard bounces. If either of these soars too high, your sending may be blocked entirely.
And on the receiving end, Gmail is becoming more and more strict about email authentication.
For the success of your business, it’s best to keep an eye on bounce rate after sending every email.
Next, Measure Your Form Conversions
Now you’re measuring the success of your emails, don’t forget to track your forms. Form conversion rates can help you to understand whether your website is driving leads and sales.
- Check out how to track form conversions in Google Analytics. This guide is up to date with all the latest tips for GA4.
- Learn how to track your most successful web pages with the WPForms User Journey addon.
Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.
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