11 Key Email Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking

Are you utilizing these 11 essential email marketing metrics?

List Size

List size matters, but not if it means your customers are disengaged. A large list with poor engagement levels isn’t worth as much as a smaller, more engaged list. A smaller list can be more manageable, making it easier to segment it properly and have only the right people on the list. That said, nothing beats a large list of content-hungry or deal-hungry customers.

Deliverability Rate

This is the number of emails that were actually delivered, but it can include emails that end up in spam or junk folders. Closely examine reported deliverability rates, because they can fail to take into account whether an email service provider actually delivered the email to an inbox.

Open Rate

Getting people to actually open your email is as important as getting the email delivered to them. Monitor and constantly improve upon your open rate.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) 

The click-through rate is the total number of clicks from links in your email through to your website or landing page.

Conversion Rate

Nothing beats being able to see the amount of sales you realized from your campaigns. Google Analytics’ goal and referring sites tools can help you track the actual sales you get from email marketing.

Unsubscribes

A high number of unsubscribe requests may indicate that your content quality, email marketing list, or unique value proposition is poor and should push you to rethink who you are targeting and with what message. An unsubscribe is better than a spam complaint, so make it easy for people to unsubscribe. Don’t bury the unsubscribe instructions in tiny type at the bottom of the page. Make these instructions visible by placing them front and center (at the top of the email in a reasonably large font)

Comparisons to Prior Months/Weeks

Be sure to look at year-over-year and month-over-month data to ensure your campaigns are always improving.

Open-to-Click Ratio

This is the ratio of email opens as a percentage of emails sent.

Growth Rate

This is a measure of how quickly your email list is growing. Take the number of new subscribers, subtract the number of unsubscribes and the number of hard bounces (a hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable). Divide that sum by the previous complete total number of subscribers.

New Email List Subscribers

The number of people who have signed up since your last mailing. As your popularity grows, so should this number.

Which Links Were Clicked

It is also a good idea to track which links get clicked to get a better sense of how customers are engaging with your content.

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