Check out the main 9 email marketing metrics

Email marketing has been, for years, one of the most efficient strategies when it comes to digital marketing.

However, in order for this strategy to be as successful as possible, you have to plan your campaigns carefully and especially, analyze the results and understand what worked and what went wrong.

This way, the next campaign blasts will be based on a consolidated experience, which helps in the correction of mistakes and the creation of more efficient strategies.

With this in mind, in this post take a look at 9 email marketing metrics so you can better understand how your strategy is working. Check it out!

1. List growth rate

Email marketing campaigns are based on mailing lists. Through them, you can obtain subscribers and the contact information from people who are interested in the services provided by your business.

Therefore, closely analyzing the progress of these lists is essential to understand if your campaigns are working well, and if other advertising strategies are succeeding in forwarding people to your mailing list.

The monitoring of the list’s growth rate is pretty easy. You just need to define a period and check how much your list has grown. The greater the growth, the better.

2. Unsubscribe rate

If the growth of a mailing list is always a positive aspect, you need to keep an eye on the numbers referring to subscription cancellation or to being marked as spam.

Whenever someone decides to leave your list, it is usually for two reasons: the low quality of the content sent or the high frequency of email sends.

If the subscription cancellation rate is high, you should stop and rethink your email marketing strategy.

Ideally, you should maintain your subscription cancellation rate at a maximum of 1% of the list’s total.

Email marked as spam is even more disturbing, because they can damage your reputation on email servers. Here, the maximum rate shouldn’t exceed 0.1%.

3. Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is the metric that indicates how many emails received clicks on their internal links in comparison to the number of emails delivered during the campaign.

For example, if you’ve sent 1,000 emails and 50 were clicked; your CTR will be 5%.

4. Email open rate

On the other hand, the email open rate corresponds to the number of emails that were opened in comparison with the number of people who received your campaign.

This is one of the least reliable metrics, because virtually any email server only considers the message as opened when it authorizes the display of images.

In other words, the actual email open rate will always be slightly higher than the one indicated by your email marketing tool.

Nevertheless, this metric is widely used to analyze the usefulness of campaigns — such as in A/B tests —, in addition to helping you find out the best times to blast your emails.

5. Click-to-open rate (CTOR)

This metric is the result of the ratio between the number of clicks and the number of emails opened.

If a campaign had 100,000 emails opened and 20,000 cliques, its CTOR is 20%.

This is an essential metric to help you understand if the campaign’s message was relevant enough to make the recipient interested and to interact with the internal link.

Just take care to first, analyze the type of email sent. Promotional emails tend to have a lower CTOR than transactional messages for example, which naturally induce clicking.

6. Conversion rate

Like most digital marketing strategies, the email marketing conversion rate is one of the key metrics to help you understand your audience’s behavior.

It corresponds to the number of people who have opened the message, clicked on the internal link, were redirected to a page and then, completed the final actions intended by your strategy.

In order to obtain a good analysis of your email marketing campaigns’ conversion rate, it is essential that you also use tools, such as Google Analytics, measuring conversions and checking where they are coming from.

7. Sharing rate

The sharing metric, also called email sharing, corresponds to the number of people who clicked on share buttons on social media or who forwarded the email to their own contacts.

The analysis of this metric helps you understand if people approve and believe in the content you sent, since the biggest proof of this is that they have become dissemination vectors of your ideas.

8. ROI (Return on Investment)

Another crucial metric for any marketing strategy, ROI corresponds to the rate of return obtained by an investment in marketing. It can be calculated for each strategy or in a more generalized scenario.

The ROI formula is simple. Simply subtract the amount invested from the amount earned and divide the result by the amount invested.

Then, you multiply the result by 100 and you will have the exact percentage of the ROI. Obviously, a good ROI is always positive.

9. Bounce rate

The bounce rate indicates the number of emails that didn’t reach the final recipient.

This type of problem may occur for several reasons, from temporary server errors to deactivated accounts.

There are two types of bounce:

• Soft bounce: occurs due to temporary problems, such as full inbox and busy servers. The message is usually delivered immediately after the solution of these problems.
• Hard bounce: is a permanent bounce, which occurs when an email was incorrectly inserted in the list or when the account has been permanently deactivated by the user.

Monitoring these metrics is crucial in order to keep your email list always clean.

High hard bounce rates can result in internet service providers seeing your company as a spammer.

Using email marketing

This is an extremely interesting and effective digital marketing strategy, provided that it’s used with caution and in the right way. There are several tools to help you in this sense, in addition to providing good email marketing metrics.

Make sure you check out our article on how Hotmart can be a part of your email marketing strategy!