How to Measure Email Marketing Success With Metrics and KPIs

Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to connect with your customers. You’re able to communicate directly with customers (and potential customers) and create a positive connection. However, knowing how to measure the success of your email campaigns isn’t always easy. Today, we’re sharing all of the email marketing metrics you need to know along with the KPIs (key performance indicators) you should be watching closely. 

What Is Email Marketing & Why Is It Important?

Email marketing takes time to develop, understand, and master. To see your desired results, you have to consistently study your metrics and apply best practice marketing techniques. There’s a lot that goes into optimizing emails for better engagement, but it’s important to learn and understand what metrics you should be monitoring. When you’re putting effort into any marketing strategy, you must be able to track and understand the results so that you can implement changes moving forward. 

There are a few basic email engagement metrics that everyone should track, and some KPI's which allow you to align your metrics with your goals. We’ll be covering both in this post, so read on to improve your email marketing metrics.

Email Marketing Engagement Metrics to Watch

At the end of the day, the level of optimization and targeting does not matter if you aren’t tracking and understanding the results of those strategic marketing efforts. Are the emails you’re sending actively helping you reach your goals? Do you have specific goals outlined for every email campaign you send out? Whatever your goal is, it’s essential to track basic metrics and specific ones tailored to that goal. 

The Basics Everyone Should Monitor

There are some common email metrics that you should track that provide basic information on how your emails are performing and where you might need to improve or make changes to see better results in future campaigns. 

Return on Investment (ROI) 

The Return on Investment (ROI) measures the profitability of a marketing campaign. To calculate the ROI, the growth (or return) of your campaign is divided by the cost of the investment. The final calculation is represented as a percentage or ratio. ROI is an essential metric that will help you efficiently measure your marketing and promotional efforts and easily identify what email campaigns are the most effective. 

Clickthrough Rate 

Your clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of email recipients who click on at least one link within that specific email. If your email marketing tool doesn't calculate this for you, you can easily calculate the clickthrough rate by dividing total clicks or unique clicks by the number of total emails delivered, then multiplying by 100. Your CTR is one of the most important day-to-day email marketing metrics because it offers direct insights into how many people are actually engaging with your emails and interested in learning more by clicking a link. 

Conversion Rate 

A conversion rate (CTA)  is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on an email link and completed the desired CTA, such as filling out a contact form or making a purchase. This is why call-to-actions in emails are so important—your conversions are directly tied to your CTAs. If your goal is to generate sales or leads, you need to be tracking conversion rates to see how effective your newsletters and emails are. 

Email List Growth Rate

Tracking this metric helps you know how quickly your email list is growing, which matters for knowing when to really concentrate efforts on growing your list. Calculate this rate by first subtracting the number of unsubscribes from the number of new subscribers. Then, divide by the total number of emails on your list, and multiply by 100 to convert to a percentage. You should always focus on growing a targeted list, but knowing how those efforts are working allows you to get specific and actionable results. 

Open Rate for Emails

This sounds like a basic metric, but trust us—you want to track this one, too. Your open rate is just that: the percentage of email recipients who open that specific email. While clickthrough rates are more important than open rates, it’s still worth it to track this metric. The best way to utilize open rates is as a comparative metric. Otherwise, it’s a bit unreliable, so track this one but use it to compare best subject lines, email text, times of sending, and more.

Get More Specific Based On Your Marketing Goals

Your specific email marketing goals and key performance indicators might be different than other companies, so you have to acknowledge your specific goals in order to track the best metrics and measure success. Here are some ideas for aligning your specific goals with key email marketing engagement metrics. 

Track Your Subscriber List Growth Rate

If your main goal is to grow your audience, whether by attracting website visitors, increasing email subscribers, or increasing downloads of a lead magnet or free resource, your emails need to contain calls to action that focus on those goals. Since those CTAs are targeted to your larger goal, tracking the growth rate of your subscriber list is the most important way to track the progress and success of that goal.

Conversion Rate for Leads to Customers

If you’re focused on developing the lower half of your marketing funnel, you’re ready to convert leads into customers. Your emails should provide more specific and relevant content that will entice your audience and give thorough information on your business, product, or service. Then, you need to track your lead-to-customer conversion rates. This is a specific goal that should be followed with specific metric tracking to see how things are going and what you may need to change. 

Effectively measuring individual email performance helps you stay on-par with your bigger goals. After all, having a goal is one thing, but actively working toward and analyzing progress on that goal is another entirely. When you track metrics or KPI’s make sure you can use the information from those metrics to drive forward your goals and improve your email marketing. 

Exact Data makes it easy to create targeted consumer and business email lists to help you find and obtain new customers.