Top 8 Essential Email Marketing KPIs And Metrics to Track
What are email marketing KPIs?
Let us say that you started building your own email list for your business and have a visually appealing email template ready. After testing the campaign on your devices, it has now been triggered. How do you know the performance of your email campaign after sending it out? This is what email marketing KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are for.
In this article, we will help you identify and track important email marketing campaign KPIs and metrics that reflect how your email marketing campaigns perform so that you can take corrective action wherever required. Let us dive in.
How do you track KPIs for email marketing?
A KPI or a Key Performance Indicator measures your email marketing campaign performance against set objectives.
Email marketing KPIs are not just about sending the right campaigns at the right time, you should also learn what works for you and what does not work for you, or rather for your users. This is an ongoing process.
8 Most Common Email Marketing KPIs
You do not need to feel overwhelmed if you have not previously worked with email marketing campaigns. We are here to guide you. Take a look at the 8 most common email marketing campaign KPIs that all email marketers need to start tracking:
Email open rate
Email open rate is probably one of the most basic email KPIs every marketer needs to look at. It defines the total number of emails that were opened divided by the total number of emails that were sent, excluding bounces.
Email open rate is a function of email subject lines, preview texts, and some other important factors
Pro tip: Use A/B testing and experiment with different subject lines.
Email delivery rate
The number of emails in an email marketing campaign that get delivered is often not the same as the number of emails that were sent out. Some of the emails result in bounces.
Email delivery rate is obtained by dividing the total number of emails delivered by the total number of emails that were sent. Multiply it by 100 to get a percentage that will reflect an email marketing campaign KPI.
Click-through rate
CTR or Click-Through Rate defines the percentage of people that click on at least one link in an email marketing campaign. Total CTR and unique CTR are two types of CTRs often used as KPIs to gauge the email campaign’s performance.
CTR = Total number of clicks in your emails / Total number of emails delivered * 100
Unsubscribe rate
Unsubscribe rate is an email marketing campaign KPI that is defined as the number of unsubscribes by the number of delivered emails * 100.
You should always have an easy way for the users to opt out or unsubscribe from your email communication if they think that it is not relevant for them.
Pro tip: Ask them about their feedback while they unsubscribe. You know why they unsubscribed.
Bounce rate
Email bounce occurs when an email marketing campaign does not reach the intended recipient for some reason. It may be due to a soft bounce or a hard bounce. Remove consistent hard bounce cases to improve the performance of your email campaign.
Read more about Email Bounce: Definition, Types, What to Do About Them?
Email sharing and forwarding rate
Email sharing rate or forwarding rate is obtained by dividing the number of clicks that the share and/or forward button receives by the number of delivered emails * 100
Peer-to-peer sharing provides a great opportunity to reach a lot of new users by the creation of viral content that the customers share in their groups.
List Growth Rate
List growth rate tells you how fast or slow your email list is growing. For running successful email marketing campaigns, you need to keep ethically building your email list to increase the scope of your email marketing.
Read 6 Email List Building Strategies for 2022 in detail.
Cost per conversion rate
The ultimate goal of measuring these email marketing KPIs is to get more people to convert. Conversion may be for sign-up, increasing web traffic, up-selling, cross-selling, first-time purchases, or any other action.
The cost per conversion rate considers the goal achieved against the total cost of the email marketing campaign.
Advice for improving email marketing campaign KPIs
By now, you have an idea of what email marketing KPIs are and their importance.
You should be consistent in tracking and studying email marketing KPIs and shaping future campaigns based on learnings from the past.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the KPI of email marketing?
KPIs are Key Performance Indicators that help you gain insights into your email marketing campaigns’ performance. Start measuring KPIs like open rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and others mentioned above from day one, and keep correcting the course as you go.
How can I improve my email marketing KPI?
Improving one or more email marketing KPIs for your email campaigns is not a humongous task. All you need to do is to let the numbers do the talking. Use A/B testing for subject lines, preview texts, email templates, and copy. Make sure that you know what your users are looking for and share it with them when they want to receive communications from you.
What are the 5 key performance indicators (KPIs) in email marketing campaign?
Many key performance indicators are important in email marketing campaigns. Listing 5 of them below:
- Email open rate
- Email bounce rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Click-through rate
- CPC rate