Free Marketing Advice from The DofM

Skip the Fluff: 5 Email Marketing Metrics That Matter

Written by Maggie Rees | May 11, 2021 12:00:00 PM

You know email marketing is important (if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here.) Year after year all the major marketing gurus throw around impressive-looking numbers in trend reports. Numbers like:

  • 92% of online adults use email (that’s a whopping 250-ish million Americans),
  • 99% of email users check their emails every day; and, 
  • 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands via email

And these numbers are important. They confirm that you’re doing the right thing by implementing an email strategy to reach your target audience. But they aren’t the only numbers that matter. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, they mean very little to your business. The stats you should be focusing on are the KPIs – the key performance indicators – of your campaigns’ success.

Let’s review the email marketing metrics that actually matter and why. 

Open Rate

We’ll start with open rate because it’s the simplest out of all of the terms to comprehend. It’s also a vanity metric and should be approached with caution. Open rate is exactly what it sounds like: the percentage of recipients who open a given email. Your open rate is determined by a ratio of how many addresses the email was sent to and how many users actually opened the email. A healthy open rate should be between 15-25%. If your emails are falling short of this range, it could mean several different things, including: 

  1. Your email list isn’t accurate or up to date
  2. Your messaging isn’t on point 
  3. You’re not sending the email at the optimal time  

While (of course) you want people opening your emails, your focus shouldn’t be on optimizing opens, but rather on clickthrough rate.

Clickthrough Rate

Clickthrough Rate (CTR) gives you direct insight into how engaged people are with your messaging. CTR is the percentage of people who clicked on one or more links in your email. However, don’t be discouraged if your CTR is “low.” An average CTR is between 2.5% and 5%, and anything higher is exceptional. 

Conversion Rate 

When talking about email marketing, conversions are what you’re really after. A conversion occurs when a reader takes the desired action you sent the email to receive – this could be filling out a lead gen form, making a phone call, or purchasing a product. Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who completed the action, compared to the total number of people that received the message. In 2021 email conversion rates are down, (because email communication, marketing and sales have all gone up!) averaging between 14% and 15%. Need help getting your conversion rates up? We can help. 

Bounce Rate 

While an email’s bounce rate doesn’t tell you anything about its contents, it can tell you a lot about your email marketing platform and current email list. Your bounce rate is the percentage of emails that never successfully make it to the users’ inbox, and is the first metric that we’ve talked about where the lower the percentage, the better.  

If your emails are bouncing before they ever reach their intended inboxes, it could signal a problem with your subject lines, or worse, your domain. Keep a close eye on this metric and if you see drastic changes, it could mean that you’ve run afoul of SPAM filters and need to do some work to whitelist your IP address again. 

Overall ROI

This one should be a no-brainer, which makes it the perfect candidate to wrap up this list. After all, the end goal of email marketing is to make a profit. Your ROI or Return on Investment is the ratio of your net income to your investment. Here’s exactly how you can calculate it: 

[($ in additional sales made minus $ invested in the campaign) ÷ $ invested in the campaign] * 100. 
Now that you’re aware of the most important email marketing metrics, you can have a better understanding of your campaigns and if they’re working. Need a little help with your email campaigns?  Hit our line.