Every email marketer knows the feeling when an email goes out: one part relief, one part anxiety. When you hit “send,” the hard part is over, and you can sit back and wait for the results to roll in to judge whether the email you sent was successful. Knowing these insights is powerful—they fuel future growth for your email marketing program.
But what email metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) should you measure? What does your email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation platform (MAP) and third-party analytics tools offer you?
We asked thousands of marketers what metrics they currently track. Here’s what we found.
What are email marketing metrics?
Email marketing metrics are data points that let you know how your campaigns perform. Metrics can tell you if your emails stand out in the inbox, if they encourage subscribers to engage, and whether they move the needle on goals like increasing revenue.
Keep in mind: it’s best to take a holistic view of email metrics and benchmark against your own program. You don’t know what’s “good” or “bad” for a brand or the tactics used to achieve their numbers. All that matters is that your program continually strives to be better.
Why you should track email marketing metrics
Email marketing metrics the actual success of your emails, instead of just relying on vibes. You can use email marketing metrics to:
- Test your assumptions
- Write better email subject lines and copy
- Send more relevant and helpful content
- Monitor and maintain delivery and deliverability
- Prove the value of your email marketing program
- Improve your email marketing strategy and designs continuously
- Share your progress and insights with your team and leaders
- Get executive buy-in for more email marketing budget
Basic Email Marketing Metrics
Let’s start with the most common and easy-to-track email marketing metrics every team should monitor. Luckily, many of these analytics are available in even simple, free email marketing tools.
Open rate
The open rate is how many of your delivered emails were ‘opened.’ It’s great for gauging the effectiveness of subject lines, monitoring email deliverability, and measuring high-level subscriber engagement—as long as your email ltool’s open pixel loads and the open registers.
Open rates can be inaccurate if someone has their inbox preview pane on by default or opens your email just to delete it. In other words, people may not have actually opened or read your email. It also means if people have images blocked, you can’t see whether or not they opened your email (even if they did). There’s a reason many call the open rate a vanity metric.
And with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, the open rate for your Apple Mail users may be overinflated (and useless). So be careful not to rely too heavily on open rates for overall program success, especially if your audience is largely made up of Apple Mail users.
Calculating open rate
Open rate = (number of emails opened / number of emails delivered) x 100
P.S. Not sure what delivered means? Skip to the bounce rate section below.
Bounce rate
The email bounce rate is how many of your sent emails bounced—or weren’t delivered—regardless of whether it was a hard bounce or a soft bounce.
On the flip side, you may measure the delivered rate instead, which is 100% minus the bounce rate. So, if your bounce rate is 5%, your delivered rate is 95%. Any calculation that calls for the number of emails delivered should use the number of sent emails minus the number of bounced emails.
You want to aim for a bounce rate of 2% or less (or a delivered rate of 98% or more).
If your bounce rate is too high, it’s a sign the email addresses on your list are bad, usually due to poor email list hygiene or problematic acquisition sources (you aren’t buying or renting lists, right?). If you don’t do something about it right away, this can ultimately hurt your ability to land in the inbox.
Calculating bounce rate
Bounce rate = (number of emails bounced / number of emails sent) x 100
Click-through rate (CTR)
The click-through rate (CTR) is how many of your delivered emails were clicked on. Some may refer to CTR as clicks over opened instead, but for clarity, we’re using delivered here and will talk about the measure of clicks against opens in the next section.
The CTR leaves opens out of the equation, giving you an unbiased look at email performance.
Calculating CTR
Click-through rate = (number of emails clicked / number of emails delivered) x 100
Click-to-open rate (CTOR)
The click-to-open rate (CTOR) is how many of your opened emails were clicked on. This is different from CTR as it relies on opens and is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your subject line. Did your email meet the expectations set in your subject line and preview text (high CTOR)? Or was it merely misleading (low CTOR)?
Want to up your subject line game? Check out these 18 subject line tips from experts.
Calculating CTOR
Click-to-open rate = (number of emails clicked / number of emails opened) x 100
Unsubscribe rate
The unsubscribe rate measures how many people opt out of your emails, and in general, you want to aim for less than 1-2% to stay on the good side of deliverability.
Depending on your email platform, an unsubscribe may be recorded if a person actually opts out or if they just click your unsubscribe link.
Keeping track of your unsubscribe rate is a nice way to check on how healthy your email list and permission practices are and if certain content doesn’t resonate well with a specific audience. Unsubscribes are not necessarily bad—letting go is infinitely better than being marked as spam—so be sure to make unsubscribing painless.
Calculating unsubscribe rate
Unsubscribe rate = (number of unsubscribes / number of emails delivered) x 100
Spam complaint rate
What else can throw your emails into the junk folder? The spam complaint rate. It measures how many people report or mark your email as spam.
Anything above 0.1% is concerning. You normally get spam complaints if people don’t know or remember you, are really annoyed by your content, or don’t know how to unsubscribe. That’s why it’s important to make finding the unsubscribe link and the actual unsubscribe process ridiculously easy.
You may also want to take a closer look at your acquisition practices, send frequency, and content or segmentation strategies.
Calculating spam complaint rate
Spam complaint rate = (number of spam complaints / number of emails delivered) x 100
Email list size or growth rate
Without an email list, you have no one to send your emails to. And if your list isn’t growing? Then your email program can’t grow either. Email list growth is how much your list is growing instead of churning. So, you always want this to be positive.
Calculating email list growth rate
List growth rate = ((monthly new subscribers – monthly churned subscribers) / list size) x 100
Feel free to swap the monthly time period with one that makes sense for your brand.
Calculating email list churn rate
Alternatively, you could look at churn rate which measures how many people are removed or suppressed from your email list. This would include unsubscribes, bounces, manual removals, or even unengaged subscribers. It’s good to have this number so you know how much you need to grow your list to have a positive growth rate.
Here’s how to get that:
Churn rate = (monthly churned subscribers / list size at beginning of month) x 100
Email production time
How efficient is your email marketing process? Where can you make improvements? Knowing your email production time can help with that.
Calculating email production time
There are two types of time you’ll want to keep track of:
- Actual time to complete each task (e.g. 90 minutes to code one email)
- Time period from email conception to execution (e.g. 14 days to create and send one email)
While one email may take 10 working hours, people often juggle multiple tasks, which is why you should track at both the granular and high level. For example, maybe it only takes 15 minutes to review an email, but the reviewer isn’t able to get to it until two days later.
