The only way your email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns can improve and be per­fect­ed is through tri­al and error. Mon­i­tor­ing sev­er­al key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors (KPIs) will allow for the track­ing of email cam­paigns in a wide range of ways so that no issue goes unno­ticed. How­ev­er, which KPIs are the most useful?

Email marketing is still thriving

Com­pared with 78% in 2020, only 41.5% of brands say email is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of their mar­ket­ing success.

Does this mean that email is becom­ing an extinct form of marketing?

No. We do not believe so.

This fig­ure mere­ly sig­ni­fies the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of oth­er for­mats amongst mar­keters. Plat­forms like social media net­works have become a favourite for mar­ket­ing teams, mak­ing email a lit­tle less competitive.

So, it’s good news for email!

With few­er brands using email for mar­ket­ing, your prospec­tive cus­tomers’ inbox­es are emp­ti­er than ever. Rather than join­ing these com­pa­nies in their use of Insta­gram and Tik­Tok for mar­ket­ing, email remains full of poten­tial for all those build­ing sales fun­nels and gen­er­at­ing leads.

Though there may be less com­pe­ti­tion, you must still work hard if your email mar­ket­ing cam­paign is to be successful.

Why are email marketing KPIs so important?

Many things con­sti­tute a thriv­ing and effec­tive email cam­paign, includ­ing great email design, effec­tive CTAs, A/B test­ing, per­sua­sive email copy, and a trust­wor­thy image.

Above all, though, the prac­tice of track­ing and mon­i­tor­ing email per­for­mance is more effec­tive than any of those aspects men­tioned above. The rea­son for this is that the act of mon­i­tor­ing per­for­mance allows for future improve­ment.

Track­ing email per­for­mance means you can spot flaws, make pos­i­tive changes, and con­stant­ly improve. Email mar­ket­ing KPIs take away the guess­ing: they shine a light on what needs more work and what’s func­tion­ing as it should. Bet­ter yet, mon­i­tor­ing the right com­bi­na­tion of key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors (KPIs) means every aspect of your email mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy is surveyed.

Select­ing a set of KPIs is much like putting sol­diers at every door: it ensures every area is cov­ered and pre­vents any issue from being missed. In that vein, your KPIs should cov­er every­thing from lead nur­tur­ing and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion to sales, con­ver­sions, and re-engagement.

There are sev­er­al KPIs worth track­ing and oth­ers that are non-essen­tial. The ones you’ll choose will depend on your busi­ness aims; how­ev­er, you can always dip in and out of non-essen­tial KPIs if you need a lit­tle extra data.

This arti­cle high­lights the top 11 KPIs you should be track­ing for max­i­mum suc­cess. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1.Conversion rate
2.Bounce rate
3.Net pro­mo­tor score
4.Click through rate
5.Unsubscribe rate
6.Open rate
7.List growth rate
8.Time of day emails are opened
9.Earnings per subscriber
10.Return on investment
11.Sharing and for­ward­ing rate

Let’s dive in:

11 email marketing KPIs you should be tracking

1.Conversion rate

(num­ber of recip­i­ents who took desired action / num­ber of emails deliv­ered to recip­i­ents) x 100

Con­ver­sion rate is an impor­tant met­ric for prac­ti­cal­ly every email mar­ket­ing cam­paign, as it sig­ni­fies the num­ber of sub­scribers who com­plete a desired goal after open­ing and read­ing your email.

The goal could be to make a pur­chase or to fol­low a link to read a blog post. What­ev­er it may be, your con­ver­sion rate will let you know how many sub­scribers feel com­pelled to action it.

If your con­ver­sion rate is low, there are cer­tain actions you can take to improve it. For instance, it could be that the intent of your email isn’t clear enough. In this case, focus­ing on one pri­ma­ry CTA is much clear­er and less over­whelm­ing to readers.

It’s unlike­ly that you’ll see a sig­nif­i­cant increase in con­ver­sions overnight. How­ev­er, you can improve this issue over time by con­sis­tent­ly pro­vid­ing your sub­scribers with val­ue and remain­ing rel­e­vant to them.

2.Bounce rate

(num­ber of bounces / num­ber of deliv­ered emails) x 100

Whilst bounce rate in the e‑commerce world refers to the per­cent­age of web­site vis­i­tors that leave a page with­out inter­act­ing with it; it means some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent in email campaigns.

In email mar­ket­ing, a bounce rate sig­ni­fies the per­cent­age of email address­es from your list that did­n’t receive your email. There are two types of bounces: hard and soft bounces. Here’s what they mean:

Hard bounces occur when the recip­i­en­t’s email address is either non-exis­tent, invalid, or closed. In these cas­es, there’s no chance your email can be sent suc­cess­ful­ly. It’s essen­tial that you clear your mail­ing list of these address­es, as a high bounce rate can neg­a­tive­ly affect your rep­u­ta­tion as a sender.

Soft bounces are only a tem­po­rary issue due to things such as a full inbox or a faulty serv­er. You can try resend­ing these emails after a short peri­od of time, or the serv­er may deliv­er the email once the issue is resolved.

Across all indus­tries, the aver­age bounce rate is 9.96%.

Though nei­ther hard or soft bounces reflect on you as a busi­ness or the qual­i­ty of your email cam­paigns, it’s good to mon­i­tor these in case they affect your sender rep­u­ta­tion. Inter­net ser­vice providers (ISPs) will iden­ti­fy you as a spam­mer if your bounce rate is too high.

3.Net promoter score (NPS)

Ask cus­tomers to rate your busi­ness on a scale of 0–10. Cal­cu­late the total of these scores and divide by the num­ber of par­tic­i­pants to find the aver­age score.

Your busi­ness’s NPS mea­sures things such as cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, the like­li­hood of some­one refer­ring some­one to your busi­ness, and future growth and sales.

Although this KPI is about more than your email mar­ket­ing cam­paign, it’s still a rel­e­vant mea­sure­ment to have when think­ing about your busi­ness’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion with its cus­tomers. Plus, much of the feed­back from the sur­vey will like­ly be imple­ment­ed via email – whether that’s improved cus­tomer ser­vice, less fre­quent emails, or chang­ing the time at which you send emails.

4.Click through rate (CTR)

(num­ber of peo­ple that have clicked on your email cam­paign / num­ber of emails sent) x 100

If your cam­paign sent emails to 200 peo­ple, and 20 peo­ple clicked on a link in that email, your CTR would be 10%.

You can use this for­mu­la to fig­ure out how “click­able” your emails real­ly are. Are your CTAs per­sua­sive enough? Is your email design attrac­tive enough? Is the cam­paign rel­e­vant to readers?

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, these ques­tions aren’t answered direct­ly by cal­cu­lat­ing a CTR. Know­ing this met­ric, though, can set you on the right path. To mea­sure the effi­ca­cy of the vari­ables above (per­sua­sive copy, attrac­tive design, rel­e­van­cy), you’d use A/B testing.

It might help to know that CTRs are high­est for B2B mar­keters when their emails announce new fea­tures or products.

5.Unsubscribe rate

(email unsub­scribes / emails deliv­ered) x 100 = per­cent­age unsubscribes

Your unsub­scribe rate shows the per­cent­age of sub­scribers that are unsub­scrib­ing from your mail­ing list. Email recip­i­ents can choose to opt-out of your mail­ing list – whether they feel like they’re receiv­ing too many emails or because they’re not rel­e­vant to them. Though unsub­scrib­ing is pre­dom­i­nant­ly neg­a­tive for your busi­ness – there is a positive.

Since some recip­i­ents will find your con­tent irrel­e­vant or unin­ter­est­ing, they’re not going to be engag­ing with your emails or make pur­chas­es. A high num­ber of inac­tive recip­i­ents means a low­er open rate – which can affect your sender reputation.

Providers such as Google do mon­i­tor this kind of thing, and if you’ve got too many inac­tive recip­i­ents or a very low open rate, they could mark you as spam.

To pre­vent this, say good­bye to inac­tive recip­i­ents your­self by remov­ing them from your mail­ing list, and don’t feel too regret­ful when they unsub­scribe your­self. In the end, you want high-qual­i­ty leads, i.e., those like­ly to make a purchase.

Obvi­ous­ly, if your unsub­scribe rate is high, your first steps should be to make your emails more rel­e­vant, inter­est­ing, and use­ful, as well as reduc­ing their fre­quen­cy if this is an issue. But beyond that, unsub­scribes are actu­al­ly pro­tect­ing you from a worse fate – a rep­u­ta­tion as a spammer!

If you feel the inevitable need to replace those leads lost through unsub­scrib­ing, it’ll be time to focus on lead gen­er­a­tion out­side of your email campaign.

6.Open rate

(num­ber of emails opened / num­ber of emails sent) x 100 = per­cent­age open rate

This KPI shows the per­cent­age of your sub­scribers that open a giv­en email. From that, you’re able to glean an under­stand­ing of how inter­est­ing your emails are to your subscribers.

Sub­scriber “inter­est” can be affect­ed by sev­er­al things such as time, day, email copy, email intent, sender iden­ti­ty, device type, and rel­e­vance, amongst others.

If your open rate is low, you may want to inves­ti­gate inef­fec­tive sub­ject lines, the fre­quen­cy of your emails, and whether you’re send­ing con­tent to unin­ter­est­ed sub­scriber segments.

Wel­come emails see the high­est open rates, with more than 8 out of 10 peo­ple open­ing them. How­ev­er, this could skew your data as it gen­er­ates four times as many opens than oth­er email types.

7.List growth rate (LGR)

((num­ber of new sub­scribers – num­ber of unsub­scribes) / total num­ber of email address­es in list) x 100

You’d track LGR if you want­ed to know the rate at which your mail­ing list is grow­ing. If you recent­ly updat­ed the mail­ing list sign-up CTAs on your web­site, you’ll want to mon­i­tor their effectiveness.

Know­ing how many peo­ple are will­ing to join your mail­ing list can be real­ly telling when it comes to your web­site or social media plat­forms. It relates to every­thing from com­pa­ny val­ues to web design. If this rate is high, it’s a sure sign you’re doing some­thing right. If it’s low, you may want to recon­sid­er your lead gen­er­a­tion process­es and exam­ine how you can draw in more sign-ups.

8.Time of day emails are opened

When do your sub­scribers open their emails? Per­haps they’ve even let you know the time they pre­fer in a feed­back survey.

Though it’s not an indi­ca­tor of per­for­mance, look­ing at this data does pro­vide cru­cial infor­ma­tion that can ben­e­fit your cam­paign’s per­for­mance in the future.

Find­ing out this fig­ure allows you to iden­ti­fy the most opti­mal time to send emails – a time at which there’s the high­est chance sub­scribers will open, read, and engage with your emails.

Across the world, Fri­days see the high­est open rates for emails at just under 19%.

If you have mixed data about this issue, you could find it out your­self using A/B testing.

9. Earnings per subscriber (EPS)

(total rev­enue gen­er­at­ed / num­ber of subscribers)

This KPI helps busi­ness­es put a mon­e­tary val­ue on each of their mail­ing list sub­scribers. It’s cal­cu­lat­ed by look­ing at the rev­enue gen­er­at­ed by one or sev­er­al email mar­ket­ing campaigns.

You could com­pare the EPS of dif­fer­ent cam­paigns to mea­sure the effec­tive­ness of cer­tain vari­ables and their impact on rev­enue. You can also use EPS to mea­sure the life­time val­ue of a subscriber.

Like many of the KPIs on this list, EPS is help­ful for deter­min­ing the suc­cess of your email cam­paigns. On top of that, though, EPS can indi­cate the lev­el of loy­al­ty and com­mit­ment sub­scribers feel towards a business.

Upsells at check­out may help with increas­ing EPS, as well as per­son­al­i­sa­tion tech­niques and dis­count coupons. In the long term, EPS will increase when your mail­ing list is full of high-qual­i­ty leads that feel an affin­i­ty with your busi­ness and what it offers.

10. Return on investment (ROI)

(mon­ey gained – mon­ey spent) / mon­ey spent

The ROI KPI is used to eval­u­ate how prof­itable email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns are. Out of all the email mar­ket­ing KPIs you could track, ROI is one of the most com­plex. Here’s why:

Many of the goals that busi­ness­es set out to reach with email mar­ket­ing are dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy. For instance, you can’t put an exact fig­ure on rais­ing brand aware­ness. There­fore, cal­cu­lat­ing the ROI isn’t always straightforward.

To com­bat this, you must iden­ti­fy the mea­sur­able aims of your strat­e­gy in order to tar­get spe­cif­ic met­rics that, in turn, indi­cate ROI.

For exam­ple, brand aware­ness means more web traf­fic, increased search vol­ume, and more inter­ac­tions on social media, among oth­er things. These results are mea­sured more eas­i­ly than some­thing like brand aware­ness. Though indi­rect, mea­sur­ing these fac­tors will help track your goals.

So, if you can track web traf­fic, search vol­ume, social media engage­ment, and the leads and income result­ing from those chan­nels, you can obtain the data required to cal­cu­late ROI.

Cal­cu­lat­ing ROI isn’t always com­plex. Name­ly, if you aim to acquire more leads, you can use Google Ana­lyt­ics to cal­cu­late the val­ue of each lead obtained via your email cam­paign, includ­ing web traffic.

If you want to improve your ROI, you could con­duct A/B test­ing to iden­ti­fy the fac­tors that gen­er­ate more revenue.

11. Sharing and forwarding rate

(num­ber of clicks on a for­ward and/or share but­ton / num­ber of deliv­ered emails) x 100

This KPI is used to mea­sure the per­cent­age of email recip­i­ents who share or for­ward your email con­tent with a friend, fam­i­ly mem­ber, or social media net­work community.

Busi­ness­es are more like­ly to val­ue this KPI if their email cam­paigns con­tain long-form con­tent. For instance, those want­i­ng to become Thought Lead­ers or attract more inter­est in their blog will prize shares and forwards.

If you want to increase your shar­ing or for­ward­ing rate, why not encour­age sub­scribers with a reward? You could offer refer­ral codes that result in dis­counts or enter them into a prize draw if they share your content.

What to do with your KPI information

There’s no use mon­i­tor­ing KPIs if you don’t take advan­tage of their data. For instance, did you know that 1 in every 5 email cam­paigns isn’t mobile-opti­mised? If your KPIs showed that emails opened on mobiles had low­er CTRs, it’d be clear that mobile opti­mi­sa­tion was necessary.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, tak­ing action isn’t always straight­for­ward, as KPIs don’t explic­it­ly explain email recip­i­ent behav­iour. Some­times some­thing like A/B test­ing is nec­es­sary to con­firm or deny sus­pi­cions. Addi­tion­al­ly, seg­ment­ing the data from your KPIs can add extra colour to your sketch – such as in the case of the mobile optimisation.

Gen­er­al­ly, keep­ing a keen eye on your KPIs can ensure you catch prob­lems when they arise and keep you more in tune with your cam­paign’s health.

Start tracking your email KPIs today

Evi­dent­ly, with the right com­bi­na­tion of KPIs, you can have eyes on every aspect of your email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns – miss­ing no detail.

By cal­cu­lat­ing every­thing from open rates to earn­ings per sub­scriber, you can col­lect all the rel­e­vant data you need to make appro­pri­ate­ly informed deci­sions for your email cam­paigns. With no stone unturned, you’ll have every­thing you need to craft the most effec­tive email sequences possible.