Email marketing can be an excellent means to reach your customers and prospects. But for it to work, you need to track key metrics and perform analytics to determine whether your email campaigns are successful.
Analysis of email marketing performance data helps you optimize future campaigns, target the right audiences, and ultimately get the best return on investment from your efforts. This guide will explore the most important email marketing success metrics, how to analyze them, and ways to take action based on the data.
Why Measure Email Marketing Performance?
Before diving into the key metrics, it’s important to understand why measuring performance matters in the first place. Here are some of the main reasons to track email marketing analytics:
Spot Trends and Patterns
This relates to your ability to see trends and patterns in email data over time. For example, you may see open and click-through rates consistently rising or falling across several campaigns. This helps you address any issues before they evolve into full-blown problems.
Compare Campaigns
With multiple email campaigns, you can compare their performance directly against each other. In this way, you can see which types of emails your subscribers respond to best. Then, you can use these insights to optimize future emails.
Evaluate Against Benchmarks
Rather than looking at your email metrics in isolation, you’ll get better context by comparing them to industry benchmarks. If your open rates are above or below average, this signals how well your campaigns are performing.
Identify Issues Proactively
Quite often, issues with email deliverability or engagement show up in the data before you start to notice them. If you see unsubscribe rate or spam complaints trending upward, you can take corrective actions right away.
Calculate Return on Investment
Ultimately, you want to know if your email efforts are providing strong ROI. Performance data confirms whether your campaigns are cost-effective and drive enough revenue.
Key Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs
Here, we’ll take a look at some of the most important email success metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that every marketer should focus on tracking.
Open Rates
Open rate is the percentage of total recipients who opened your email campaign. This metric tells you if your subject line was compelling enough to get subscribers to open. The average open rate varies widely by industry but is usually around 25-40%. If your open rate is below that, then maybe your subject lines need to be improved.
Some key things to analyze with open rates are:
- Trends over time
- How open rates vary across different segments and campaigns
- At which time of the day or week emails tend to be opened most
Click-Through Rates
Click-through rate (CTR) is a measure of how many recipients clicked on at least one link in your email. Since clicking demonstrates engagement with the content, CTR is commonly used as the top metric for email marketing analysis.
The average CTR also varies widely by sector, though 5-8% is fairly typical. If your CTR is lower than that of your competitors, subscribers likely don’t find your content compelling enough.
Aspects to evaluate with CTR data:
- Which links are getting the most clicks
- Click-through rates for different segments
- Click activity trends over the email’s lifespan
Bounce Rates
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that couldn’t be successfully delivered to recipients. This occurs for a number of reasons like invalid email addresses or full mailboxes. High bounce rates indicate issues with your email list that need to be addressed. The average bounce rate is around 5%, but anything over 10% merits further inspection.
Analyze bounce rates to determine:
- Whether hard bounces point to bad email lists
- If soft bounces signal temporary issues like full inboxes
- Bounce rate differences across various subscriber segments
Unsubscribe Rates
The unsubscribe rate calculates the percentage of recipients who opted out of your emails by clicking the unsubscribe link. A high unsubscribe rate suggests recipients don’t find value in your messages.
The average email unsubscribe rate is around 0.1%, but you definitely want to keep it as low as possible. Unsubscribe rates above 0.4% require immediate action to improve relevancy.
Look at unsubscribe data to find out:
- Which subscriber segments have the highest unsubscribe rates
- Whether unsubscribes spike after certain campaigns are sent
- How do your rates compare historically
Conversion Rates
Conversion rate is the percentage of recipients who took your desired action after receiving the email. This could be making a purchase, signing up for a webinar, downloading content, etc.
Conversion rate measures how well your call to action achieves its purpose, making it one of the best gauges of email success. Conversion rates vary enormously based on factors like your business model and offer. Optimize emails to maximize this metric within your norms.
Revenue Per Email
Revenue per email calculates the average revenue generated per email message sent. This measures how effectively your campaigns contribute to overall sales. To find this metric, divide the total revenue driven by an email campaign by the number of messages sent. The higher the number, the better.
Revenue per email helps you determine:
- Which segments generate the most revenue
- ROI for different types of email campaigns
- Whether your revenue per email hits your target
Email Shares
Email sharing occurs when a recipient forwards your campaign to others. Since this demonstrates very strong engagement, email shares are a powerful metric.
Shares extend your email reach while also improving deliverability by relying on recipients’ reputations.
Check to see if:
- Certain email formats or designs increase sharing
- Particular topics and offers are more “share-worthy”
- Some segments have a higher propensity to share
List Growth Rates
Growing your email subscriber list is a major goal in itself. The list growth rate metric tracks how quickly your list expands over weeks or months.
Faster growth through opt-ins implies your overall strategy resonates with subscribers. Compare your figures against past performance or peer averages.
Evaluate list growth rates to guide decisions on:
- Opt-in incentive effectiveness
- Whether promotions drive sign-ups
- Which segments to focus acquisition efforts on
Analyzing Email Performance Data
Simply looking at metrics for email marketing isn’t enough – you need to properly analyze the data to draw informed conclusions. Use these best practices when evaluating important metrics:
Compare Across Campaigns
One key way to identify high-performing email types is by comparing open, click-through and conversion rates across different campaigns. If webinar promotion emails consistently outperform others, you can optimize your strategy based on what’s working.
Break Down Metrics by Segment
Don’t just look at metrics for your entire subscriber base. The most useful findings often emerge when you break down email performance by customer segments, demographic groups, location, etc.
For example, click-through rates among loyal customers may vastly outpace one-time buyers. Use these insights to fine-tune messaging.
Set Goals Based on Past Performance
The most accurate way to set email success benchmarks is by evaluating historical email marketing performance metrics. If open rates for a particular segment typically fall between 15-20%, use the upper end of that range as a goal for improvement.
Graph Trends Over Time
Don’t just compare one email campaign’s metrics to the next – plot metrics over longer periods as well. This allows you to visibly spot positive and negative trends that indicate whether changes are having an intended impact.
Blend with Other Data
Email data becomes even more useful when combined with other information, such as web traffic, conversion values and CRM records. This complements the picture by confirming the email’s impact on bottom-line goals.
Strategies to Improve Email Performance
The most critical step after analyzing email metrics is taking action to optimize your strategy based on the insights uncovered. Here are some proven ways to immediately boost open rates, click-through rates, conversions and other KPIs based on performance data:
Refine Subject Lines
Since subject line quality largely determines open rates, A/B testing can be used to experiment with different options. Try emphasizing benefits, personalization, FOMO and curiosity to identify what resonates most.
Increase Relevance
If clicks and conversions lag with certain segments, assess whether the email content is relevant enough to their needs. Align messages better with subscriber preferences and interests.
Improve Deliverability
Getting more emails to the inbox boosts all engagement metrics. Reduce soft and hard bounces through list cleaning, better targeting and sender reputation management.
Drive Opt-Ins
Populating forms with relevant incentives lifts subscriber growth. Experiment with lead magnet formats, value messaging and opt-in placements to fuel expansion.
Cultivate Sharing
Adding share buttons alone lifts sharing by 10%. Be sure to also encourage it through compelling content, exclusivity, and social proof elements that subscribers want to pass on.
Automate Workflows
The most sophisticated marketers use behavioral data to trigger automated emails when recipients meet certain criteria. This sends precisely timed, hyper-relevant messages.
These techniques demonstrate how proper analysis of email performance metrics can directly inform better practices. However, they only scratch the surface of potential optimization pathways!
Key Takeaways for Measuring Email Success
With a solid understanding now in place around analyzing email metrics – along with ways to take action on the data – here are some key takeaways to guide your performance tracking efforts:
- Plan measurement upfront when developing email campaigns and set clear goals based on past benchmarks.
- Track open, click-through and conversion rates as core metrics, along with key secondary KPIs like revenue per email.
- Break down all email data by audience segment, content type and other groupings to derive deeper insights.
- Graph trends over weeks and months to quickly spot positive and negative momentum.
- Blend email campaign analytics with data from websites, sales and CRM to connect messaging impact with business outcomes.
- Use subject line testing, personalized content matching and deliverability management to optimize email performance.
- Continually experiment with follow-up sequences and other innovations informed directly by the data.
In today’s saturated email landscape, most messages are immediately deleted or ignored. The only way to consistently cut through the noise is to relentlessly test, measure and refine based on key metrics.
Using the email success tracking and optimization framework outlined here will empower you to create consistently higher-performing, revenue-driving campaigns. Getting messaging right aligns with subscriber needs and takes your program to the next level.
