Looking for the best email marketing metrics and key performance indicators to track in 2023? You’ve arrived at the right place.
93% of B2B companies use email as their primary content distribution channel. Allow this to sink in. The importance of email marketing has never been greater.
There are numerous email marketing metrics and key performance indicators to monitor, but how do you know which ones are the most important for your email marketing growth?
We’ll go over the most important email marketing metrics for your business in this article. Whether you are an entrepreneur or an email marketing specialist, you should read this article.
You’ll be able to troubleshoot your funnels much more efficiently, generate more revenue, and provide a better email marketing experience for everyone by tracking these metrics.
Let’s get started.
What are email marketing metrics & KPIs?
Email metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurements used to analyze the success of your email campaigns.
For instance, an email marketer would like to compare the conversion rates of different variables in an email campaign. By comparing the conversion rates, he can determine which one did better. And this is just one example.
It’s important to track your email performance because it helps you understand how well your emails perform against key objectives such as increasing open rates, click-through rates, or conversion rates.
Keeping track of the right metrics is also important for reducing spam complaints on your email campaign.
When it comes to tracking these metrics, most businesses use software such as HubSpot, Mailchimp, or Salesforce.
Now let’s roll onto the nine most important email metrics to keep track in 2023.
9 Best Email Metrics You Must Be Tracking
1. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a measure of how many people from a mailing list have clicked on a link within it and completed the desired action, for example, making a purchase or filling out a form.
The process is simple. Once someone has opened your email, clicked call-to-action, and for example, filled a B2B lead generation form from your sent email, this is called a conversion.
Then you can call everyone who did this process from your email conversion and calculate the rate.
How To Calculate Conversion Rate?
Example calculation: 1200 people who completed the desired action ÷ 25 000 the total number of emails delivered x 100 = 4,8% conversion rate
Why is it an important metric?
Conversion rate is an important metric to consider in email marketing because it measures how successful your campaigns are in terms of achieving their desired results.
It helps you assess the effectiveness of your emails, identify areas for improvement, and gain insights into what kind of content resonates with your target audience.
With this data, you can make informed decisions about how to optimize your email campaigns and maximize the return on your investment.
Conversion rate also plays a key role in determining the success of other marketing strategies such as remarketing, personalization, A/B testing, and more.
2. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a measure of if an email sent from your email marketing campaign is not successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
Bounce can be caused by either soft or hard bounces, which are attributed to different issues.
Soft bounces occur when an email address is temporarily unavailable, such as when an inbox is full or a server is down.
Hard bounces occur when the email address is permanently unavailable, such as when it does not exist or has been deactivated.
The bounce rate can be improved by ensuring all contact information on file is up to date and monitoring any email addresses that have a high rate of bouncing.
Keeping track of bounce rates will help you better understand your target audience and make sure that your emails are being delivered successfully.
How To Calculate Bounce Rate?
Example calculation: 324 bounced emails ÷ 35 000 emails sent x 100 = 0,92% bounce rate
Why is it an important metric?
Bounce rate helps you identify issues such as bad data, server problems, or blocked senders.
An elevated bounce rate indicates that emails are not successfully reaching their intended recipients, resulting in fewer conversions and lower ROI.
By monitoring your bounce rate, you can take proactive steps to improve email deliverability and ensure that your campaigns are reaching the right people.
Additionally, it can also help you identify problem areas in your list (Invalid email addresses, blocked senders, inactive subscribers, unresponsive email servers, spam filters, etc.) so that you can take action to resolve them quickly and efficiently.
3. Overall ROI
Overall ROI (Return On Investment) is the email campaign’s overall return on investment. This is calculated by dividing total revenue by total expenditures.
How To Calculate Overall ROI?
Example: ( 2500$ in campaign sales – 280$ invested in campaign ÷ 280$ invested in campaign ) x 100 = 792% Return On Investment
ROI can be calculated in several ways, and depending on your business type, you may prefer one over another. The above is, however, the most basic method.
Why is it an important metric?
Overall ROI calculation is an important metric for email marketing because it provides a comprehensive view of the success and impact of campaigns.
It allows you to track their progress over time, determine areas of improvement, and optimize their campaigns for maximum efficiency.
Furthermore, it can also be used to compare different campaigns and identify which ones performed better so that marketers can focus their efforts on those that are more likely to bring in a higher return.
By calculating ROI, email marketers can ensure that they are getting the most out of their campaigns and maximize their chances of success. In the case of low ROI, email marketing teams should sharpen their email marketing strategy.
4. Click-through Rate (CTR)
Clickthrough rate (CTR) in email marketing is a metric that measures how successful an email campaign was in terms of getting readers to click through to the website or landing page associated with the message.
As email campaigns are often designed to get more clicks, click through rate is also frequently used to determine how well they perform in A/B tests.
How To Calculate Click-Through-Rate (CTR)?
Example calculation: 854 total clicks / 15 000 delivered emails x 100 = 5,69% clickthrough rate
Why is it an important metric?
The click-through rate (CTR) measures how successful your email marketing campaign is in getting readers to visit the landing page or website associated with the message.
Your campaigns can be optimized for maximum efficiency and success with the use of this metric, allowing you to identify content that resonates with your target audience.
5. Sharing Rate
Sharing rate is the percentage of people who clicked the “Share” button on the email and shared it on social networks or forwarded it to other people.
It measures how successful your email campaigns were in terms of getting your message out to a wider audience, and can be used as an indicator of how engaging your content was.
Creating engaging content that resonates with your target audience is one of the most important ways to increase email sharing rates.
Additionally, each email should include a clear call-to-action and social media links or buttons so that readers can easily share.
How To Calculate Sharing Rate?
Example calculation: 498 clicks on the share / forward button ÷ 25 000 total delivered emails x 100 = 1,9% share rate
Why is it an important metric?
Email share rates are important metrics for email marketers since they measure how effective their campaigns are at getting their message out to a wider audience.
Their campaigns can also be optimized for maximum efficiency and success by identifying content that resonates with their target audience.
6. Engagement overtime
Engagement overtime is a metric that measures the rate of engagement over time. It is used to track user interactions with content and identify trends in behavior, helping marketers understand how effective their campaigns are and how they can improve them in the future.
How To Calculate Engagement overtime?
Engagement overtime is calculated by taking the total number of user interactions with a piece of content (like clicks, impressions, or shares) and dividing it by the length of time the content was available.
This provides an average engagement rate over that period and gives marketers an idea as to how effective their campaigns have been.
Example calculation: If the total number of clicks on an email over the course of one week is 10,000 and the message was available for 7 days, then the engagement rate overtime would be 1,429 per day (10,000 / 7). This would be the engagement rate for one week.
Why is it an important metric?
This metric provides valuable insights into customer behavior, enabling email marketers to make more informed decisions about the content they create and the strategies they use to engage their target audience.
It provides valuable insight into email engagement and how the emails could be improved for better performance and engagement.
7. List Growth Rate
List growth rate is a metric that measures the number of new email subscribers over a period of time.
How To Calculate List Growth Rate?
Example calculation: (1273 new subscribers – 165 unsubscribes and complaints about spam/email) / 16 212 email addresses on the list x 100 = 6,83% list growth rate
Why is it an important metric?
List growth rate is an important metric for email marketers as it shows them how successful their campaigns and content are in terms of attracting new leads and building an audience.
Also, email databases decay of their own accord by about 22.5% per year. Due to this, it’s more important than ever to pay attention to the list growth rate and maintain steady growth.
8. Open Rate
Open rate is a metric that measures the percentage of emails opened by recipients.
Email open rates are not a great indicator of how well you are doing in email marketing. If you have 20 000 opens, but only 10 conversions, something is wrong.
The conversion rate must be taken care of first, so that part of the funnel works properly. Once it’s working, focus on getting more clicks.
The recipient must also receive the images embedded in the message to count the email as “opened.” The majority of your email users are likely to have their email client set to block images.
Therefore, even if they open your email, they will not count towards your open rate, which makes it a misleading metric for marketers.
Why is it an important metric?
Though Open Rate is ”not so important”, you can still gain valuable insight from it.
Since the variables are somewhat controlled, it might be helpful to compare the open rates of last week’s email sent with this week’s.
9. Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rate is a metric that measures the number of subscribers who have opted out of an email list over a period of time.
In the same way as open rate, unsubscribe rate is not an accurate indicator of the health of your list. The formal unsubscribe process will not be taken by many subscribers who are fed up with your brand’s emails. Your emails will just go unopened, unread, and unclicked.
Your conversion rate and clickthrough rate are two ways to measure subscriber engagement. The non-engaging subscribers can be found there.
Why is it an important metric?
The average growth rate of your list is not that important but it is important when calculating the overall growth rate of your list. It should be checked every now and then, like once a month.
Conclusion
Every email marketing metric is very important to keep track of and measure accordingly. Without the right analysis, all the possible revenue is left untapped.
To determine what needs to be done, it is important to dig deep into your goals according to where you are in your business journey.
Keep these Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs in your mind as you do business, and if you ever forget how one of these was calculated feel free to save this page into your bookmarks for later use!
If you want to get your business to the next level of scalability, check out these Best B2B SaaS Companies in 2023 every business needs to know about.
What do you think? Are there other important metrics we should know about? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
