Essential Email Metrics

For any successful marketing campaign, you need to have an objective in mind. And with each objective, you need a measurable goal so that you can be confident in your team’s execution and performance.

For email marketing, there are several services and metrics that can be used to measure the success of campaigns.

List Size

In order to start any email marketing effort, you need to have emails to send to. Your email list size is one of the most basic ways to track email performance. However, the number of people on the list is not the main factor; what is key is the number of people you are adding to your list vs. losing. Emails are added to your list in several ways, such as through signup forms and lead magnets. However, a healthy email list at least stays steady (and hopefully increases in size), where as an unhealthy list loses more subscribers than it actively gains.

Delivery Rate

For any email marketing campaign to be effective, you also need to make sure people are receiving your emails. That’s why we calculate a delivery rate. The delivery rate of the email refers to the percentage of people who received the email, out of everyone it was sent to. For example, if you send an email to 100 people and 99 people receive it, then your delivery rate would be 99%.

The emails that are sent but not received are referred to as bounced emails. Knowing how many of your emails bounce can give you a lot of insight into your email list quality and the legitimacy of subscribers.

Open Rate

It’s great if people receive an email, but it’s even better when they open it.  That’s how we determine an email’s open rate. The open rate refers to the number of people who opened an email out of everyone who received it. For example, if you send 100 emails, 90 are delivered, and 10 open it, the delivery rate would be 90% while the open rate would be 11%. Open rates can be impacted by subject line, preview text, and more.

Click to Unique Open Rate

Even though the open rate of an email is a great way to measure how many people see your email’s content, it is even better if they engage with it. This can be measured with the click to unique open rate (also referred to as a click through rate). The click to unique open rate refers to the number of people who clicked on a link in an email, out of everyone who opened it. For example, if you send 100 emails, 10 people open it, and then 2 people click on a link inside, then the open rate is 10% and the click to unique open rate is 20%.

The click to unique open rate is especially important for email campaigns where you are trying to measure engagement, such as sending newsletters or other emails that contain information hosted on an external landing page.

Conversion Rate

Ideally, after individuals click on a link in your email, they are being driven to do something else. Whether it is to schedule a call, or to download a new piece of content, there is almost always something they can do to convert. Your conversion rate refers to the percentage of people who take the next step and successfully complete your objective. For example, if you are a retailer on an eCommerce platform, it may be nice to see people opening and clicking your emails. However, your top concern should be to see if they are purchasing a product. Check out our case study, where we worked with a digital retailer and helped generate over $100,000 in sales using email as the main traffic driver.

Overall, each email campaign likely has its own goal. Every metric will not be relevant to every email, but knowing what all of the key metrics mean and where they are applicable is central to being able to know how your email marketing is performing.

Interested in finding out what email metrics would work best for your business? Check out Slice’s email marketing services.

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