Top 7 Email Marketing Metrics in Plain English
How to measure the success of your emails when you’re new to email marketing
You’re new to email marketing, it seems intimidating, and you just want the fundamental, most important info on measuring emails to see if you’re doing this email thing okay.
Here are the most important email marketing metrics—or aspects to measure—in plain English!
Maybe this isn’t the sexiest topic, but you know what’s sexy? Your emails doing well. It means your audience is engaged, and they’re buying what you’re selling!
So get a cup of strong coffee and devote 5 minutes to this topic. I promise this won’t hurt too much.
*Full disclosure: There are affiliate links in this post, but I only recommend services and software that I use myself, have used, and like and can recommend!
Open Rate
Open rate is the percentage of people who opened your email out of those to whom you sent the email.
The factors that affect open rate are:
Email subject lines
Your reputation as an email sender, also known as “sender reputation”—the credit score for email senders.
If you write a subject line that is compelling, your email is more likely to be opened, which will improve your open rate.
If your sender reputation is good, your email is more likely to be delivered, which means your email is more likely to be opened, which means your open rate will be better.
And when your open rates are good, your emails get delivered more reliably because you’re signaling to the email sending gods (aka your email service provider, such as ConvertKit*, and the internet service provider, such as Gmail, that you’re a reliable sender, and people want the emails you’re sending).
See how that works?
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through-rate is the percentage of people who clicked out of everyone who received an email. It measures in a more general way how engaged people are with your emails.
Click to Open Rate (CTOR)
Click-to-open rate is the percentage of people who clicked out of everyone who opened your email. It measures the content of your email—because if people who opened also clicked, you must be doing something right!
If people who open your emails aren’t clicking links in your emails, it could be a sign that they aren’t interested in what you’re offering, or that your email copy needs improvement.
It might also be that you’re giving people too many options (aka “calls-to-action”), or that you’re not putting enough calls-to-action in your emails.
Ideally, have one link/call-to-action so people can take action on your emails.
Email Conversion Rate
Email conversion rate is the percentage of people who followed through on your desired action (such as made a purchase) out of everyone who received the email.
It measures how effective your email is to further that desired action, and it can help you calculate your return on investment in email marketing.
Unsubscribe rate
Unsubscribe rate is the number of people who unsubscribed out of the number of people who received your email.
Unsubscribes can give you an idea of whether your content is resonating with your subscribers—but it’s not necessarily a bad thing if someone unsubscribes. You want your list to be full of people who are actually interested in what you have to offer. If people stay on your list and don’t open or click, it’s not good for your open rate or deliverability.
Having said that, a lot of unsubscribes can be a sign that you’re not giving people what they want, so it’s good to look out for it and track it.
And moving forward, you can lower your unsubscribe rate by offering free content and lead magnets (aka free information or incentives to attract your ideal customer to your list) to grow your list, and make sure you only offer content and lead magnets that attract the audience you want—the audience who would want to purchase what you’re selling.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who didn’t receive your email out of those you sent it to.
A “soft bounce” is an email that couldn’t be delivered due to a temporary reason, while a “hard bounce” is due to permanent issues with the email address, such as a fake email address.
You can lower your bounce rate by using double-opt in (aka subscription confirmation emails) and making sure you never send an email to someone who hard bounced (ConvertKit automatically deletes hard bounce emails so that you don’t have to keep track!).
Email Campaign ROI
Tracking your return on your investment for a campaign can help you figure out how valuable and effective your email marketing efforts are.
To track your return on investment, you’d tally up your sales from a specific campaign and then subtract any money you put into the campaign (time spent designing graphics, money spent on an email marketing assistant, etc.).
If you’re spending too much time or money on your campaigns and not getting a return, then you know you need to change it up. You can work to improve your offers, your copy, your open rate, your ideal customer persona—but if you don’t measure it, you won’t know that you need to improve things, and your business will suffer.
Conclusion
That wasn’t so bad! Make sure to keep an eye out for these metrics so you can be constantly improving your email marketing efforts and growing your business.
