11 Essential Email Marketing KPIs You Need to Track

If you have a business, it doesn’t matter if it’s big or small, the first marketing step you take is email marketing. And this is great because email marketing is proven to be highly effective. 

However, there are many KPIs that you should consider to optimise your email marketing campaigns, which we’ll be discussing at length in this article. But before we go any further, you might want to educate yourself further on why you need email personalisation to get the most out of your marketing plan.

Key Takeaways

• KPIs, key performance indicators, are indicators of how well specific components of an email campaign are doing.
• Tracking email KPIs and monitoring each element can help you spot subtle changes in consumer habits.
• Nobody would want their email to be deleted without being opened. To decrease this, sending the right email to the right person is very important.
• With personalised emails, your open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), website traffic and revenue will increase.

Why KPIs Matter for Email Marketing

What is a KPI?

KPIs, key performance indicators, are indicators of how well specific components of an email campaign are doing. You may gather a variety of information by monitoring your email KPIs. Most of the time, you’ll want to know who views your marketing emails or passes them to other contacts. These measurements won’t actually demonstrate the efficacy of your whole plan. 

You should identify subscriber patterns to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign and adjust your strategy as necessary to stay on trend. If a campaign has a different effect, metrics like unsubscribe, click-through, and bounce rates can rapidly show this.

Benefits of Tracking KPIs

You won’t be able to refine your plan if you’re not monitoring the rates at which users consume your material. While most marketers will examine their efforts holistically, monitoring each element can help you spot subtle changes in consumer habits.

11 Essential KPIs for Email Marketing

1. Open Rate

Open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open a particular email. Most email marketers still go above and beyond to ensure their subject lines are optimised for greater open rates. While this may have a favourable effect, and more openings are always good, they should concentrate on improving their CTRs.

Open rate is a highly deceptive measure for a number of reasons. Most significantly, an email is only considered “opened” if the receiver also receives any attached photos. Additionally, many of your email subscribers probably have picture blocking turned on in their email programme. This makes your open rate an incorrect and untrustworthy indicator since even if they open the email, they won’t be counted in it.

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is defined as the percentage of recipients clicking on any email links. For example, if you send 1000 emails and get 40 clicks, the CTR would be 4%.

The CTR allows you to calculate the results of every email sent. It is instrumental in A/B testing, enabling marketers to determine what links work best. Setting a KPI based on this metric significantly improves your call-to-action (CTA) writing.  

3. Unsubscribe Rate

The ratio of unsubscribed emails to all emails sent over a specific period is known as the unsubscribe rate. Many marketers perceive high email unsubscribe rates negatively, yet they can also be beneficial. An unsubscription just serves as a sign of how your email subscribers interact with your email marketing. 

A link to unsubscribe is a requirement for all marketing emails, and when email marketing initiatives result in high unsubscribe rates, it’s time to revise your approach. Nobody wants to invest their time in email marketing to a list that will not provide high email open rates or effective click-through rates. To maintain the effectiveness of your email marketing plan, having a significant number of unsubscribes is beneficial.

4. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the ratio of recipients who answered your CTA and then took the desired action. This could be anything from filling out a survey or downloading an eBook to visiting your eCommerce store to make a purchase.  

eCommerce personalisation can majorly impact this metric, with personalised emails boosting open rates by more than 40%, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.

5. Revenue per Email

Revenue per email is a crucial KPI since it tells marketers, eCommerce companies, and salespeople how successful their email marketing efforts are. Additionally, many marketers utilise this measure to assess how well they are using their budget. Importantly, it also enables them to set objectives and compare performance to similar companies in the same sector.

6. List Growth Rate

The indicator to monitor your list’s growth rate is the list growth rate. To figure this out, divide the sum of your list’s email addresses by the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, then multiply the result by 100.

7. Bounce Rate

There are over 4 billion email addresses today, with many people having more than one. Unsurprisingly, not all of them are active. Who among us has never abandoned ship when the flood of subscriptions and junk mail gets too much?

The problem this creates for email marketers is that their emails may not be able to reach the recipient’s inbox. This percentage is known as the bounce rate, of which there are two different types:

• Soft Bounce: A soft bounce is caused by temporary issues like a full inbox or server issue. Once the problem is solved, marketers can resend the email.

• Hard Bounce: A hard bounce happens when the email address is invalid or permanently closed. A high hard bounce rate will reflect poorly on the sender’s reputation, making them look like an email spammer. As a result, eCommerce businesses should be vigilant in removing these addresses from their list.

8. Forwarding Rate

People sharing or forwarding your emails increases your brand exposure and reach. This helps generate new contacts, which grows your list and increases leads. All email marketers can benefit from learning how to persuade people to share their email content. Using the tools in your marketing automation software will show how people spread your email content, acting as a good KPI for audience growth.

9. Social Shares

The social shares KPI shows social media involvement and is a reliable measure of the value of your content. By including social sharing buttons in your emails, you may make it simple for readers to share your material. 

It’s unfortunate to see a business that creates impressive content but makes it quite difficult to share. The reader may have to click and go through several submenus if the sole link in the email points to their home page.

10. Spam Complaints

Spam complaints are the percentage of spam rates. It might have a long-term effect on your subsequent efforts in addition to having an immediate influence on your email marketing effectiveness right now. 

Because email service providers will start marking your emails as spam if there are too many spam complaints, a high spam complaint rate might dramatically reduce your email deliverability. The average industry has a spam complaint rate of less than 0.01%. Therefore, anything beyond this should raise red flags, indicating that you should optimise your emails for trust. 

Businesses should avoid using terms considered spam in their email subject lines. They may need to reduce the number of emails they send out to see if they can minimise the number of spam complaints they receive.

11. Email Return-on-Investment (ROI)

This should be an obvious one. The most straightforward way to determine the success of your email marketing campaigns can be laid out with this calculation:

[(Value of sales from an email campaign – Campaign costs) / Campaign costs] * 100

For example, if your eCommerce store makes an additional $3000 after an email campaign that costs $200, you can calculate the overall ROI as follows:

[(3000 – 200) / 200] * 100 = [(2800) / 200] * 100 = [14] * 100 = 1400%

As email marketing has an average ROI of 400%, it is well worth investing in. Tracking this metric and using it as one of your KPIs will allow you to see just how effective your campaign is.

How to Improve Your Email Marketing KPIs

1. Write Great Subject Lines

Subject lines are the first thing that your subscribers read before opening the whole email. A great email subject line is necessary to make the person interested and want to click on the email.

These subject lines shouldn’t be too long and should summarise the whole email. It should be eye-catching and make the person want to learn more about what is to come. Using emojis can be helpful since you can show a facial expression with one emoji; the colours are also eye-catching.

To summarise, these are the main points that email marketers should consider:

• Keeping the subject line short and explanatory
• Using emojis
• Not having generic lines such as “hello”, “good morning”, etc.
• Using the name of the person
• Summarising the whole email with the subject line
• Having an interesting headline

2. Personalise Your Emails

The highest open rate on emails is personalised emails. However, personalising your email does not only mean putting your customer’s name. Personalised email marketing from the beginning to end is essential to make your emails stand out. 

When the emails are fully personalised, the reader becomes more involved with your letter because they believe you are writing specifically to them. Your open and click-through rates will increase when you send tailored newsletters. Additionally, it helps increase website traffic and revenue.

3. Keep Your Emails Short and Sweet

Your email should be brief. Cut the material and keep the critical messages near the top of the email because interest in email content decreases as it goes below the fold. By optimising your headlines, you will reach out to more readers to read your whole email. Keep a headline’s opening two words informative since they are the most significant.

Get straight to the point if you want to keep your readers reading your email. Decide if it’s worthwhile to include any drawn-out introductions or pleasantries because most readers will skip them. Avoid including any crucial information in the introduction if it is required.

4. Segment Your List

Email marketers should segment their subscribers’ lists to have more effective outcomes and decrease unsubscribe rates. You may start sending carefully targeted and customised email campaigns by segmenting your email list into smaller groups. 

Ask pertinent questions about your sign-ups and utilise this valuable data to categorise your audience. For instance, you may inquire about the person’s location, birthdate, or preferred service category.

5. Testing

Before email testing, you may preview your email to your subscriber list to check for links, typos, and other issues before sending your email to your subscriber list. You may repair incorrect subject lines, “From” names, and preview text, broken photos or missing alt text, irregular font or content display, broken email designs, incorrect or untracked links, broken subject lines, and spelling and grammatical mistakes with testing. 

It’s crucial to remember that even though the test email appears fantastic to you, the subscriber’s viewing preferences might make it appear otherwise. To ensure that each email is correctly structured for each recipient, rendering is used in this situation.

6. Post Email Activity

Keeping track of the email activity long after sending them is also essential. An example is when an eCommerce marketer sends a cart abandonment mail, even though that person already knows that they have left something in his cart. They click but never look at their basket; they just wander around the website. This email doesn’t fulfil its purpose technically, but maybe he likes other things and buys them a few days later.

Wrapping Up

As a result, email marketing might seem easy from the outside, but it has many points to consider before and after sending emails. Marketers should be conscious of the KPIs and analyse their email campaigns numerically. In addition to preparing the most eye-catching and interesting emails, you should also personalise the emails and segment your audience. 

Nobody would want their email to be deleted without being opened. To decrease this, sending the right email to the right person is very important. Contact us to try out our email personalisation tools, where you can see the improvements in your email campaigns in all of the previously mentioned KPIs. Start the new year with the best email marketing strategy!