As a business owner, email marketing is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal! You can connect with your customers and nurture those relationships—and your email list is completely your own. But there are some key email marketing metrics that you should track to maximize your efforts!
Tracking your metrics is absolutely essential if you want to find out how successful your campaigns are. That way, you can adjust and strategize in the right way to create better results.
Why Is Email Marketing So Important?
Although social media marketing is a powerful strategy, it has some disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage of social media is that you don’t actually own the platform. On the other hand, YOU own your email list!
As you collect names and emails, you’re able to build a network of people that want to hear from you about your products or services.
When you optimize your emails, it helps you nurture your customers better.
And that is the key to driving sales, boosting conversions, and increasing brand awareness and loyalty!
But to actually optimize your emails, you need to track, understand, and reflect on your email marketing metrics. If you’re putting all of that effort into building your list and creating emails, you need to know what’s working and what isn’t!
There are some basic email marketing metrics that everyone should track. It’s also important to track metrics that are specifically tied to your goals.
Fundamental Email Marketing Metrics You Should Track
Tracking your email marketing metrics is absolutely critical to finding success with your campaigns. Especially because different email sequences have different goals, you need to see what you’re doing really well and where you could adapt and improve.
Let’s start off with the most important fundamental email marketing metrics. Everyone should start tracking these basic metrics. From there, pay attention to your unique goals and amp up your metrics tracking based on those!
Return on Investment (ROI)
You’re probably familiar with the term ROI, or return on investment. But are you tracking it for your email campaigns?
ROI measures how profitable your marketing campaigns are! That means you need to track this metric in order to know how profitable email marketing is.
To calculate your ROI, you’ll need to divide the sales generated from an email campaign by the cost of that campaign. From there, you can turn the number into a percentage!
Setting up goals in Google Analytics will allow you to see conversions by traffic source. And by using UTMS in your email links you can get even more granular and see these conversions by email campaign. This will tell you if your email campaigns are truly converting.
Email List Growth Rate
To be successful with email marketing, you have to focus on growing your contact list! That’s why you need to track your email list growth rate. This sounds like a pretty basic metric, but it really is important.
To calculate the growth rate for your subscriber list:
- Choose a time period to focus on
- Subtract the number of unsubscribes from the number of new subscribers
- Divide that number by the total number of subscribers
- Multiply by 100 to convert to a percentage
It’s always important to focus on growing your list. But it’s even more important to know HOW those efforts are paying off so that you can take the right actions moving forward!
Open Rate
You’ve probably glanced at this one after sending an email campaign…but your open rate is one of the most overlooked email marketing metrics! The open rate is the percentage of email recipients who actually open the email.
Although it’s also important to track clickthrough rates (we’ll cover that below!), your open rates are worth tracking, too.
Instead of using open rates as a blanket measurement of the success of a campaign, use them to compare results between different campaigns. That way, you can see which subject lines and send times work best and replicate them in the future.
Clickthrough Rate
Clickthrough rate is really important to track! It’s the percentage of people who receive your email that actually click on at least one link.
This is obviously important—the goal of your emails is to drive people back to your website. That’s why your clickthrough rate is one of the most important email marketing metrics to track. You’ll get a clear picture of how people actually engage with your emails by clicking a link. And don’t forget to UTM your email links so you can track user behavior and conversions in Google Analytics.
Most email marketing platforms will calculate clickthrough rates for you. But to do it yourself, all you need to do is divide the total clicks by the number of emails delivered for a campaign. Then, convert to a percentage by multiplying by 100!
Conversion Rate
Generally, a conversion rate means the percentage of recipients who both clicked a link and took the action you were prompting with that campaign.
Whether that’s filling out a form, signing up for a course, or making a purchase, conversions mean that your CTA (call-to-action) was completed. It’s so important to add clear calls-to-action to your emails so that you can achieve those key results!
Conversion rates are one of the best email marketing metrics to track.
Even better? You can set up specific goals in Google Analytics to track conversions from certain pages on your website. This gives you an even better picture of how your website is converting.
Consistently tracking your email marketing metrics helps you reach your goals and create an effective marketing strategy.
Putting in the time and effort to create email campaigns is great…but you HAVE to track your numbers in order to make that effort count.
Your email metrics help shape your strategy so that you can improve your emails and see better results.
Check out my Traffic Insights Dashboard to know exactly what steps you should take to find and convert leads in your business.
Check out these other fan-favorite posts for other metric optimizing strategies:
- The 5 most Important Metrics to Measure Your Website’s Success
- How to Boost Conversions on Any Sales Page
- How to Increase Your ROI With Digital Marketing Analytics
- How to Get Started With KPI Tracking
