How to to track and monitor the performance of your email campaigns

The only way to know if your email marketing campaign is on track is to identify the main metrics that are used to evaluate your results.

Email marketing KPIs are effectively calculated with software. An email marketing tool for free might be enough: it will depend on the scope of the campaign.

We will go deeper into how to choose a good marketing tool to measure your campaign’s success. But first, you will need to know the most important KPIs in email marketing.

Essential Email Marketing KPIs

What are the most interesting metrics to evaluate the performance of an email marketing campaign?

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Open rate

Indicates a percentage that refers to the number of emails that have been opened in relation to the emails that have been sent. Imagine you have delivered a message to a total of 100 contacts and only 40 of them open it.

This means that you have an open rate of 40%. A proper open rate study gives us a lot of information about the strategy, such as the engagement that currently exists with your contacts, as well as the relevance of the subject lines in the emails.

Click-through rate

This metric measures the number of users who have clicked on the links in the email after opening it. Certain things should be considered to avoid low click through rates. For example, place links strategically and insert eye-catching calls to actions.

If you send a message to a total of 100 contacts and only 20 of them click on the link, this means you have a 20% click-through rate. By correctly interpreting this metric we can assess the interest in the offer you are sending, as well as the effectiveness of your CTAs (calls to action).

Bounce rate

This metric measures the number of users who have not received your email. Measuring bounce rates against open rates will give you an idea of the quality of your subscribers list. You might have fake or old addresses, or they might have spelling mistakes in them.

It is possible to distinguish between two types of bounce rates; on the one hand, there is the Soft Bounce (which is related to a temporarily non-existent destination address, due to a connection error or a full message box). There is also the Hard Bounce (when the destination address will no longer exist).

Unsubscribe rate

It simply indicates the number of users who have unsubscribed. Having a high unsubscribe rate is not necessarily bad news: giving users the opportunity to unsubscribe builds trust and gives the business the opportunity to build a well targeted subscriber list.

Delivery rate

Indicates the percentage of delivered emails based on the number of emails sent. A high percentage means that the missing rate is low.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate or CRO is a modality within web analytics that is used to measure the conversion rate of leads. To calculate it, simply divide the website’s conversions by the audience. A number of 300 converted leads divided by 1000 visitors and multiplied by 100 would give a lead conversion rate of 30%.

Spam complaints

Indicates the percentage of emails that have been marked as SPAM. If you have sent 100 emails and 10 of them have been classified as SPAM, this means you have a spam rate of 10%. Experts do not recommend having a rate higher than 0.1%, as this could indicate that something is not working.

Overall return on investment (ROI)

This KPI is meant to show the return on investment of the campaign. It is calculated by multiplying the average profit from each click by the number of clicks and dividing it by the cost of the campaign.

Forwarding rate/ email sharing

This indicates the number of users who have clicked on the “share” button on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn… and then clicked on “Forward”. This is how you get new users to sign up to the newsletter.

Subscriber List Growth Rate

Finally, this metric is intended to track the evolution of a subscriber list. However, it should be noted that a subscriber does not directly imply a customer or product user. Subscribers will only interact with the content and the external marketing strategy that has been implemented.

This is calculated by subtracting the number of unsubscribes and bounces from the number of new subscribers. The result is divided by the total number of subscribers in the list.