These metrics are vital to the success or failure of your email campaigns. The better you understand them, the more likely you’ll be able to improve them and increase revenue for your business. In this post, we’ll explain each metric and how it can help you make intelligent decisions about your email marketing strategy.

But before we dive into the 8 best email metrics to measure, let’s talk about what they are and why they’re essential. (or you can skip the next two headings)

What Is an Email Metric?

You may see the term “email metrics” thrown around a lot. Email metrics are statistics that measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns, and they help you improve your marketing strategy.

Email metrics focus on how many people opened or clicked through one of your emails (and how many times they repeated those actions).

So why do you need the best email metrics? Why do you need to track email metrics at all?

Why You Should Track Email Metrics

If you’re a marketer, you must know how well your content performs.

Email metrics tell you everything you need to know about your email marketing campaigns: from the total number of clicks, opens, and unsubscribes to average open rates, click-through rates, and more.

They can help inform decisions about the effectiveness of your design, layout, or content length. 

In addition, tracking these numbers over time will also give you insight into how certain types of designs may perform better than others in the future.

Ensure that you’re always creating engaging messages for customers who have opted-in to receive them.

Now, let’s dive straight into the 8 best email metrics to track!

The 8 Best Email Metrics That You Need to Track and Measure

1. Open Rate

The percentage of your email list that opens your messages.

Open rates are an important email metric because they indicate interest in what you have to say, which makes them more likely to engage with future emails from you. The higher your open rate, the better—but no magic number makes a good open rate! Benchmark according to your industry average and aim to beat that number.

Additionally, from a content perspective, your subject line is working and getting people to open your email.

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The click-through rate (CTR) measures how many people clicked on the links in your emails.

Calculate it by dividing the number of click-throughs by the number of emails multiplied by 100. That way, you get an excellent percentage and not an ugly decimal.

For example: If you sent 100 email messages with five clicks, your CTR would be 5%.

You could also buy software that’ll do it for you instead, but I’d prefer you talk to us!

3. Click-to-Open Rate

Click-to-open rate is the percent of emails opened, and the links within them clicked. It’s a measure of engagement. This means it’s an email metric that can be used to determine the quality of your content. More specifically, this metric shows how well you’re getting people to click on your links—and a high click-through rate (CTR) is excellent for business!

The higher this figure is, the more likely recipients saw value in what you sent them and were willing to take action based on what they learned. A low CTR could mean recipients weren’t interested in opening or reading anything outside their inbox.

Perhaps they didn’t have time because they were too busy with other things (like playing RAID SHADOW LEGENDS).

4. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of emails sent to an email address that is undeliverable.

To calculate your bounce rate, you’ll need to divide the number of emails that were returned to your domain by the total number of emails sent:

Bounce Rate = (Returned Emails / Total Sent Emails) * 100 (for that sweet %).

5. Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate is simply the number of people who have asked not to receive further emails from you (heartbreaking).

Calculate it by dividing the total number of unsubscribes by the total subscribers over a given period.

For example, if two hundred people unsubscribed from your list and you have four hundred subscribers during a month, your monthly subscription-to-unsubscription ratio would be 0.5%.

6. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the number of people who take a desired action divided by the total number of people who visit your page. It’s one of the top email metrics because it shows content effectiveness and tracks how many visitors engage with your emails.

For example, if only 10% of people who click on an email sign up for a newsletter or download an ebook, that means 90% didn’t take that action—and you know there’s room for improvement!

7. Spam Score

Getting emails flagged as spam will hurt your open rates and engagement. Your emails will start landing in Junk folders; we don’t want that.

The best way to avoid this is by tracking your spam score. This score will help you identify what’s going wrong with your emails and how you can fix it proactively before the damage gets too bad.

Check with your Marketing Automation or webmail vendors about tracking spam scores.

8. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

CPA is how much hard-earned cash you spend to acquire a new client through email marketing campaigns. Calculate CPA by dividing monthly average revenue by the number of new customers.

For example, suppose you have a monthly average revenue of $1 million and have acquired 10,000 customers via email blasts this year. 

In that case, your CPA is $1 million / 10000 = $100 per customer.

Conclusion

Tracking these 8 best email metrics will allow you to see what works (and doesn’t) and adjust accordingly.

If you need help with tracking, we’ve got some great tips to help you get started, so let’s chat!