You did all you could to optimize your email campaign- short and catchy subject line, relatable and conversion-driven content, avoided spam triggers, offered value, and a lot more.
But did it resonate with your audience? If you can’t see the end results of your efforts, can you really hit your goals?
So before you send your next email campaign, ensure you get the email marketing metrics right.
Be it generating leads, brand awareness, increasing sales, or free trial sign-ups, measuring the performance of an email marketing campaign is vital.
Let’s check out the most essential KPIs for the success of an email marketing campaign:
What are email marketing campaign KPIs?
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, measure the different aspects of your email campaign.
These metrics can be open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. However, these metrics alone won’t suffice in showcasing the effectiveness of your overall email marketing strategy.
Hence, there is a need to go beyond the basics. Let’s check out how some of the most important KPIs help.
15 vital email marketing KPIs
Whether it is a welcome email, retargeting email, cart abandonment email, or a sales pitch email, you can track these essential KPIs for email marketing to get a complete picture.
The above image shows some important KPIs for an email campaign sent using the Icegram Express plugin. While there can be multiple metrics, it is vital to analyze the ones that matter the most.
Email deliverability rate
Email deliverability rate refers to the number of marketing emails delivered.
Your email list could be endless, but that doesn’t mean that all those emails can get delivered.
Here’s why:
- A chunk of your audience could have marked you as spam.
- Blacklisting and ISP filtering
- Bounced emails
- Lack of authentication and compliance
- Issues with email infrastructure
- Lack of list hygiene
- Overuse of attachments
- Using suspicious links
- Sending too many emails in a short period
If you want to keep the possibility of emails landing in the spam folder at bay, check out how to prevent them from landing in the spam folder.
Open rate
As the name suggests, this refers to the number of emails opened.
We may receive hundreds of emails in our inboxes from banks, hotels, and e-commerce sites. But how many do we actually open?
Because, after all that hard work, we want people to read our emails. It’s how well you optimize your emails for better open rates.
What makes an email successful is the clicks it gets. More on that in the point to follow!
Click rate or Click-through rate (CTR)
This metric indicates how many people clicked on a link in your email.
The link can lead the audience to a blog, product page, landing page, affiliate product page, sign up for a membership, or start a free trial.
Tracking each link separately helps you understand the links that get a higher CTR and eventually more conversions.
Another example would be checking links that are put as buttons or as text. You can analyze which performed better and use the data to craft future campaigns.
Text, buttons, images, videos, unsubscribe links – track them all.
Unsubscribe rate
The most hated one, but can’t be ignored – unsubscribe rate!
This metric indicates how many people choose to opt out of your list and don’t want to receive further emails.
While a low unsubscribe rate means that most people liked your content, a high unsubscribe rate could signal that the readers don’t want to hear from you anymore. This could give sanders an opportunity to remove inactive subscribers, clean the email list, and boost deliverability rates as a result.
Pro tip: A great way to lower your unsubscribe rate is to segment your email list and communicate the right messages to the relevant audience.
Click-to-open rate
The number of email opens compared to the number of email click-throughs is your click-to-open rate.
This metric can tell you a lot about your email’s performance.
Pro tip: Note that higher open rates but lower click rates indicate good subject lines but less relevant content. However, low open rates but higher click rates indicate missing out on an excellent conversion opportunity.
A good practice would be to stay away from clickbait headlines in your emails. Moreover, you must never let your content stray from the actual headline.
Conversions
A high conversion rate not only means that emails are being opened but also leads the audience to take the desired action.
Conversions do not always mean sales, rather, it could also mean any marketing goal that is relevant to your business.
- Subscriptions
- Downloading a resource
- Event registrations
- Free-trial signup and others.
Focusing on conversions alongside deliverability ensures that emails are not just reaching the inbox but also driving meaningful business impact.
Bounce rate (hard & soft)
A hard bounce is permanent, while a soft one is temporary.
Hard bounces are usually caused by invalid, deleted, or wrongly typed email addresses. It indicates that you’re falling behind on your list cleansing.
When you get hard bounces, remove those addresses from your list immediately to avoid skewed data for other KPIs.
On the other hand, soft bounces are temporary. For example, the recipient’s inbox may be full, or their server could be down. In such cases, your email service provider or email marketing platform will automatically try to resend the message.
Spam complaints
This KPI tells you how many people marked your email as spam. The more spam complaints you have, the more irrelevant your emails are to the audience.
However, you must keep track of this metric. If it is frequent, then there could be an underlying technical problem that needs to be taken care of.
Email sending information
Get information on when they are sent and opened. This KPI will help you determine the best day and time to send your emails.
Email list growth rate
This metric tells you how many new people are signing up for your email list.
If the number is higher, your lead magnet or incentive, as well as the content, is working efficiently.
Email client usage
This KPI tells you which email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.) people use to open your emails.
It helps you determine which email clients you should craft your emails for.
Mobile vs desktop
Wondering which device your audience reads their emails on? Or do they prefer a tablet?
Keeping tabs on the type of device your audience uses makes it easy for you to craft emails likewise. This will help in creating responsive emails that fit diverse screen sizes, pictures that load faster, and make navigation easier.
Likewise, you must also identify the browser and operating system that your audience uses to view their emails.
ROI
Revenue is the bloodline of any business!
Know how much money you are making from each campaign. It’s important to track this metric because it tells you how successful your email marketing is at making money.
Time spent viewing the email
This measures how long the recipients engage with your email. It helps identify how well your content can hold the audience or if it needs improvements for better readability and impact.
Analyzing this can help with optimizing the content, layout, content length, and CTAs for better engagement and conversions.
Engagement over time
This measures the recipient’s interactions, such as opens, clicks, and conversions over a specific period (days, weeks, or months). This helps in identifying the best times for sending your emails, spot fatigue, refine the frequency, and find the right balance to ensure engagement.
Why choose Icegram Express for email marketing and tracking KPIs?
Icegram Express is a popular WordPress plugin with 80,000+ active installs for email marketing.
It shows you some of the important email marketing KPIs mentioned above and other powerful automation features that save you time and money:
- Drag and drop blocks to create email campaigns without any code.
- Build email sequences and create trigger-based automation workflows.
- Automatic email verification and bounce handling.
- Smart spam protection, list hygiene, and junk mail cleanup.
- Single/double opt-in, spam-bot protection.
- Set up abandoned cart recovery emails and send coupon codes.
- Integration with Amazon SES, Sendinblue, or any SMTP server to send emails
and a lot more…
Icegram Express makes sure your email gets delivered to the right audience, paving the way for a sure-fire way to success.
We hope now you can let your emails confidently navigate their way to your audience’s inbox!
Get Icegram Express
Conclusion
Email marketing is a potential goldmine and one that has never fallen out of favor.
Make sure it is effective, optimized and regularly monitored.
And that is exactly where the above-mentioned email marketing KPIs enter the picture!
While it can be daunting to handle all the KPIs, it certainly isn’t difficult!
Check out how Icegram Express makes the way easier!
FAQ
What causes high bounce rates in emails?
High bounce rates occur due to invalid email addresses, outdated lists, or domain restrictions. Regular list cleaning can help.
What is the ideal email frequency for better engagement?
The ideal frequency depends on your audience, but 1-4 emails per month generally perform well without overwhelming subscribers.
How does mobile responsiveness affect email KPIs?
Since most emails are opened on mobile devices, non-responsive emails lead to poor user experience, lower click-through rates, and higher unsubscribe rates.
What is an email churn rate, and how do I reduce it?
Email churn rate is the percentage of subscribers lost over time due to unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints. Reduce churn by delivering valuable content, personalizing emails, and optimizing send frequency.
How do spam complaints impact email KPIs?
Spam complaints lower deliverability, affect sender reputation, and can lead to emails being blocked by ISPs, reducing overall engagement metrics.