11 Key Email Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking

Email marketing can be highly profitable. It’s still one of the best ways to nurture both leads and customers alike across virtually every industry.

That said, you can’t just blindly run email campaigns and assume they’re successful. You need to track and monitor specific KPIs to see if your messages are actually performing.

While there are dozens of different email marketing metrics you could be tracking, I think these 11 are by far the most important.

#1 – List Size

List size matters only if your customers are engaged.

Lots of businesses incorrectly track this metric because they assume a growing list means they’re doing something right. But large list with poor engagement levels isn’t worth as much as a smaller, more engaged list.

Smaller lists are actually easier to manage, meaning you segment subscribers properly and have only the right people on it. That said, nothing beats a large list of content-hungry or deal-hungry customers.

#2 – Deliverability Rate

This is the number of emails that were actually delivered (but it can include emails that end up in spam or junk folders).

Closely examine reported deliverability rates, because they can fail to take into account whether an email service provider actually delivered the email to an inbox.

If you’re getting lots of bounces it could be a problem with your email domain. Or maybe you’re including too many spam-like features in your messages (like lots of links, too many images, and poorly written text).

#3 – Open Rate

Delivering emails is only half of the battle. Now you need people to open those messages, which is where your open rate comes into play.

If rates are low, try experimenting with different subject lines. You can even A/B test the subject lines of every email campaign to see which subjects and which types of subjects lead to the highest open rates.

There is always room for improvement here.

#4 – Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

Your emails have been delivered and opened. Great!

But people still need to click on your buttons.

The click-through rate is the total number of clicks from links in your email through to your website or landing page.

#5 – Conversion Rate

Every email should have a different goal. Examples include:

• Get a new customer
• Upsell or cross-sell and existing customer
• App download
• Improving customer loyalty
• Cart abandonment reminder

The list goes on and on.

You can track the conversion rate of each campaign to see if your goals are getting realized. If not, figure out where the reader is dropping off in your flow.

#6 – Unsubscribes

A high number of unsubscribe requests may indicate that your content quality, email marketing list, or unique value proposition is poor and should push you to rethink who you are targeting and with what message.

However, an unsubscribe is better than a spam complaint, so make it easy for people to unsubscribe.

Don’t bury the unsubscribe instructions in tiny type at the bottom of the page. Make these instructions visible by placing them front and center (at the top of the email in a reasonably large font)

#7 – Weekly and Monthly Comparisons

Ok, technically this isn’t a specific metric. But it’s equally as important, which is why I’m including it on my list.

You should always be benchmarking and comparing your KPIs against yourself for performance purposes.

• Week-over-week
• Month-over-month
• Year-over-year

Are you improving? Getting worse? Is there seasonality to your campaigns?

Taking the time to measure comparisons is the only way to know.

#8 – Open-to-Click Ratio

This is the ratio of email opens as a percentage of emails sent.

Why is this important?

By measuring the number of unique clicks to unique opens, you can determine how effective your campaigns are by asking “did this message trigger enough interest to generate an action?”

#9 – Growth Rate

This is a measure of how quickly your email list is growing.

Take the number of new subscribers, subtract the number of unsubscribes and the number of hard bounces (a hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable). Then that sum by the previous complete total number of subscribers.

Similar to list size, your growth rate is only useful of

#10 – New Subscribers

This tracks the number of people who have signed up since your last mailing. As your popularity grows, so should this number.

I also recommend tracking the source of your new subscribers. Where exactly are they coming from?

Are you getting people to sign up for your newsletter after reading a blog post? Or are you only getting new subscribers when you offer a discount on a customer’s next purchase?

#11 – Clicked Links

We’ve already established the importance of tracking clicks and conversions within your campaigns.

But which links are getting clicked?

Links to download a free ebook are very different than links to a new product page. Tracking this will give you a better sense of how customers are engaging with your content.