13 Email Marketing Metrics You Need to Follow in 2023

You are wondering which metrics of email marketing are the most significant? What do all these numbers mean?

Email marketing metrics are not something you need to know. Most email marketing platforms do the calculation for you. However, the numbers don’t mean much unless you understand what they represent about your company.

We’ll be covering all important metrics in email marketing and why they are so vital. Also, how to increase your email marketing success.

This table contains key information to assist you in finding your way.

Let’s get started!

Email Marketing Metrics Vs. Email Marketing Key Performance Indicators

Let’s first explain what email marketing metrics are before we move on.

Measurement is what “metric” refers to. You’re measuring customer engagement with email marketing campaigns. Metrics provide data on how well your business is running.

KPI is another term that you will hear often. KPI stands to indicate key performance. KPIs are indicators of how well your company is doing in achieving its strategic objectives. Not all KPIs include metrics.

A KPI might include increasing sales revenue. This goal might be achieved by tracking several metrics such as click-through, open, conversion, revenue, etc.

Tracking these metrics together will allow you to see your progress towards your ultimate goal of increasing sales revenues and help you make any necessary adjustments.

This article will discuss the top metrics that are important for email marketing. You can combine and leverage these metrics to your email marketing KPIs.

17 Key Metrics to Email Marketing

Remember that performance can be measured in many ways as we look at the metrics used for email marketing. The metrics can be viewed over time or for an individual campaign.

Don’t get too focused on the performance of one email campaign. It is more important to consider the patterns and contexts of digital marketing.

Now let’s look at some of the most important metrics for email performance.

Email Rate Open

The open rate refers to the number of people who actually read an email you have sent.

Your open rate is 50% if you send a marketing email out to 100 subscribers and only 50 people read it.

The general rule of thumb is that the greater your open rate, the better your email marketing campaigns will be. Open rate can be misleading as it is not always simple to measure.

An image of a small size is often used for tracking open rates. An open is when the image is saved to an email client. If the recipient opens an email without images enabled, however, this won’t count.

Also, simply because somebody opens an email does not mean that they have read it. Let’s take a look at other metrics in email marketing that will give you more insight.

Clickthrough rate

Clickthrough rate (CTR), is the number of subscribers who click on links in an email.

You would get 27% clickthrough rates if 100 recipients opened your email and clicked on the CTA (call-to-action) button.

Most likely, someone who clicks on a link within your email has read some or all of it. It means they’re more likely to read the content than someone who clicked nothing.

Clickthrough rates are similar to open rates. They require interpretation. Clickthrough rates can be artificially elevated if multiple people click the same link or use different devices. Email service providers may measure both the total clickthrough rate and unique clickthrough rates.

Click to Open Rate

CTOR is the ratio between clicks and email openings. CTOR only tracks clicks that are related to emails being opened. It therefore provides a better view of email engagement than clickthrough rates alone.

Imagine that you send emails to 100 people. You sent emails to 100 subscribers. 50 opened them, while 10 clicked on a link. It would equal 10 clicks multiplied by the number of email sent. This is 10%. However, the click-to open rate is 10 clicks divided with 50 unique opens. This would equal 20%.

High CTOR is a sign that you email campaign was successful in at least two aspects. The first was that you persuaded people to open the email. You convinced them to click the link to your social media pages, sales page or any other URL.

List growth rate

List growth rate measures how successful your email acquisition efforts have been. High list growth rates indicate that your email list is attracting a lot of subscribers. Low list growth rates could indicate that optin forms or lead magnets need improvement.

The list growth rate is calculated by taking the number and subtracting the total number subscribers during a given time.

Let’s say you started the month with 1000 subscribers and you add 100 more subscribers the next month. Your list growth rate is 10%.

Share Rate

A sharing rate measures how many people are sharing your email with others. You can use it to gauge how viral you emails are as well as how effective your network is.

Divide the number times you have shared your email by how many times it was opened. This is the sharing rate. It’s simply a measurement of the number of people who have opened an email and shared it.

Let’s say you email 100 people. 50 opened it and shared it. Your sharing rate would then be 20%. This is 20% of those who read the email and shared it.

High sharing rates indicate that you emails resonate with subscribers, and they are eager to share your messages with friends and coworkers. This is a great way to increase your reach and to bring in new subscribers. It’s important to note that not all email are suitable for sharing, so low share rates do not always indicate ineffective marketing campaigns.

Forwarding Rate

The forwarding rate measures how frequently your subscribers send your email to another person. This is similar to the sharing rate, in that it assesses how useful your content and how many people are receiving your emails.

The number of emails that have been forward can be used to calculate the forwarding rate. This is done by multiplying the forwarding rate by the number email opens. Not all ESPs track sharing or forwarding automatically. These “shareability” metrics can be tracked using unique URLs, forwarding forms or buttons for social media sharing.

Conversion Rate

We’ll now dive deeper into the email marketing metrics that relate to conversions. The email conversion rate is the percentage of people who take an action following receiving your marketing emails. This could be reading your blog, following you on Twitter, making a purchase, and visiting a sales site.

Your conversion rate for 1,000 subscribers who clicked the link to your sales page would be 8.9%. If you measure conversions as actual sales, it will be less likely to convert because not every person who views your sales pages makes a purchase.

It can be difficult to determine conversion rate, as you may have guessed from the definition. There are many factors that can affect your conversion rate. These include the action you want people to take, the subject line and the design of the email.

Earn Revenue per Email

The revenue per email simply refers to how much you make from every email that is sent. It is an easy way to gauge how well your email marketing campaigns generate revenue for you business.

The revenue per email can be calculated by multiplying the total revenue from an email marketing campaign with the number of email messages sent. This amount is then converted to dollars and euros.

If you send an email to 100 people, and generate $500 revenue, then your RPE is $5.

Your email success is determined by your RPE. RPE, like any other metrics can be affected by many factors. Your RPE could look high if your offer is exclusive to VIP subscribers. This would make your RPE appear very high, even though you don’t take into account the RPE of other members who aren’t interested in your product.

This is why it’s so important to link your KPIs to email marketing metrics.

Revenue per subscriber

Revenue per subscriber is the revenue generated for each subscriber. This is done by taking total revenue from campaigns and multiplying it by number of subscribers that received them.

Sending a promo email to 100 subscribers would generate $5,000 in revenue. Your RPS would then be $50.

RPS can be used to determine how important each subscriber is for your bottom line. RPS can be defined as the average of all subscribers, including those who do not buy anything and those who purchase a lot.

Subscriber Lifetime Value

The subscriber lifetime value represents how much a single subscriber will contribute to your revenues over the duration of their subscription. This number is not an exact figure, it’s an average.

Take the average revenue per email to calculate your subscriber lifetime value. Then multiply that number by how many emails you plan to send. You should not assume that every email sent will be high in RPE.

Consider this: If you plan to send at least 10 emails annually to your subscribers and earn an average $10 per email from revenue, the lifetime value of your subscriber would be $100.

You would subtract from the subscriber life value the subscriber acquisition costs to calculate the profitability of each subscriber for your company.

Cost to Subscriber Acquisition

Cost of subscriber acquisition is the amount spent on average to get a new subscriber. It could be buying ads, paying marketing staff for optin forms to be set up, or writing content which drives traffic to search engines that converts into subscribers.

Your subscriber acquisition costs would then be $10 if you spent $1,000 to build your list and acquire 100 new subscribers. If your subscriber life expectancy was $100 then you would make $90 per subscriber.

Return on Investment (ROI).

Return on investment (or email marketing ROI) measures your marketing’s profitability. This is a measure of how much you are making on your email marketing campaigns relative to the amount you spend.

Calculating email marketing ROI is as easy as dividing your total revenue and the cost of the campaigns. This percentage then becomes the number.

If you spend $1,000 on email marketing and generate $5,000 revenue, then your email marketing ROI will be 500%. It means you would have made $5 on every $1 that you spent in email marketing.

The highest return on investment of any digital marketing channel is often email marketing. Your ROI can be improved by either increasing revenue or decreasing costs.

Email bounce rate

The email bounce rate refers to how many emails are returned as undeliverable by the sender.

Two kinds of email bounces exist: hard bounces or soft bounces. If an email is sent to a recipient and the address of the receiver is not valid or is no longer available, it is called a hard bounce. Soft bounces are when the email address of the receiver is invalid or no longer exists and the email is sent back to sender.

By dividing bounce rates by total emails sent, the email bounce rate is calculated. The percentage is the result.

Let’s say you send 100 emails but 2 bounce. Your email bounce rate will be 2%. This would mean that 22% of your email messages did not reach the intended recipients.

High bounce rates can occur for many reasons, such as a low quality subscriber list or outdated email addresses. It is important to maintain a clean email list and keep it updated to reduce your bounce rate. Also, you should monitor your campaigns for technical problems and resolve them.

Unsubscribe Rate

Unsubscribe rates are the percentage of subscribers who unsubscribe from your list within a given time frame. Divide the total number subscribers by the unsubscribes to calculate the unsubscribe percentage.

Unsubscribers can be for many reasons. Some of these are your fault and others are not. If your unsubscribe rates are high, it could be a sign that your emails don’t offer value for your subscribers or that the content of your emails is too repetitive, irrelevant or frequent. Some people simply lose interest in receiving too many email messages.

It is important that you constantly test your emails to ensure your subscriber satisfaction. It is possible to give subscribers greater control over how often and what type of email they get, which could help decrease unsubscribes. Double optin is another strategy to make sure that your subscribers actually want to receive your content, and not just for a chance to win a prize.

Spam Complaints

This number is how many people mark your emails spam. If someone puts your email in the spam folder, it’s likely that they don’t want any further emails from you. It is possible that they do not believe your email messages are of any real value.

Spam complaints could seriously damage your reputation. Spam complaints can cause your email to be delivered only to spammers, not legitimate recipients.

It’s essential to use best practices in email marketing to reduce spam complaints. Make sure that you have clear permission to send emails to subscribers and to include them in your email list. Make sure you create content subscribers will actually enjoy reading.

Make it simple for them to unsubscribe and manage their email subscriptions. Many subscribers will make a spam report if they can’t find an unsubscribe button. A few unsubscribes can do more damage to your reputation as a sender and for email deliveryability.

Email Delivery Rate

The percentage of email that reaches the inbox successfully is called the email deliverability rate.

Email deliverability can be calculated by multiplying the number of delivered successfully emails by the total amount of email sent.

Your email marketing strategies will work better if you have a higher email delivery rate. An increasing email delivery rate could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. High spam complaints or deliverability problems can indicate to Internet service providers that your server may be unreliable and potentially dangerous. It is important that you monitor and address issues that may be affecting your email delivery rate.

These tools are available to you Mailgenius And Test your mail To test your deliveryability.

Use of Email Clients and Devices

It’s important to note that the metrics we have listed might look differently on mobile than they do on desktop.

People are surfing from smartphones more than ever before. You can optimise your email campaigns if you understand which devices and apps your subscribers use.

How to improve your email marketing KPIs

Although each of these metrics can be very useful, they may not all mean much. Your email marketing KPIs, taken together can tell you if your business is doing well or not.

Your lead quality is one of the most important ways to increase your email marketing metrics. Qualifying new leads is key to ensuring that you only send emails to those who really care about your message. Here’s how OptinMonster can help you do this:

Page-level targeting: OptinMonster makes it easy to tailor your lead generation campaigns towards specific pages or categories of posts. Based on which pages are the most popular, optin and lead forms can be tailored to those pages. A visitor who is interested in a recipe for cupcakes would be much more likely to read a list of party planning tips rather than an ebook on interior design. Paint Your Life’s conversion rate jumped to 28.57% by using page level targeting.

The field map for lead segmentation You can also target visitors by browsing page, or any other activity. You can ask new subscribers what interests them, their demographics, when they would like to hear from your company, and any other pertinent data. This information will allow you to send the correct emails to the right people. This will increase their likelihood to read your email, click the links and share them with friends.

2-step optins: We aim to minimize friction when it comes to the user experience. Two-step optins may be a good option to increase your email marketing ROI. Visitors who choose “Yes”, are likely to sign up again and will be more interested. This is true for double optin emails, which new subscribers need to click to confirm subscription.

A/B testing: Split testing or A/B testing is when you test different design and messaging elements in order to find the best. Split-testing email subject lines and copy as well landing page designs, CTA text, and any other elements can all be done. Email marketing tools can be used to split test subject lines. However, advanced testing will require you to use other tools.

Summary: Which are the most important metrics for email marketing?

Your goals are the key to determining which email metrics will be most valuable for your company. You may have different business goals over time, and that is perfectly okay. Make sure to establish your benchmarks for each measurement so you know where and how you should be going.

We recommend that businesses in the early stages of their development focus on metrics such as engagement.

• Click-through rates
• Sharing and forwarding rates
• List growth rate

For example, a more advanced business with a strong list of customers can start to maximize revenue.

• Revenue per Subscriber
• Cost to Subscriber Acquisition
• Return on Investment (ROI).

Each business should be concerned about overall list health, such as:

• Rate of bounce
• Unsubscribe rate
• Deliverability

This article should help you understand the basics of email marketing analytics. We recommend these tips to increase your subscribers and boost conversion rates:

OptinMonster is able to improve any stage of your email marketing efforts, regardless of your current status. Start OptinMonster risk-free today