You probably already monitor a handful of email marketing key performance indicators (KPIs), but you can’t always watch everything. That’s why you need to do your research and determine your priorities.
Due to the global embrace of email communications, it’s a marketing channel that has become one of the most powerful assets available to modern businesses. Did you know that more than 333 billion emails are sent daily? If that weren’t impressive enough, the daily total is projected to rise to 392 billion by 2026.
With so many people using email as an essential part of their lives, it’s no wonder that it dominates the marketing world so comprehensively. The statistics tell the tale:
Your business will save money, make money, and because email usage continues to climb, set the stage for even more money by including this crucial channel into your marketing efforts. But email marketing requires more than just writing and designing your content. You’ll also need a way to track your performance to ensure that you can effectively refine your efforts and achieve your goals.
An acronym for the term “key performance indicator,” a KPI is a metric that can be identified and quantified. Each department within your organization should identify and use their own distinct KPIs. Email marketing is definitely no different, with the unifying characteristic being that all these metrics are closely tied to business goals.
There are hundreds of potential performance indicators you could look at when it comes to your email campaigns. They range from commonplace metrics such as delivery and open rates to more obscure data such as how many users click your social media badge in the footer. What sets KPIs apart is the focus on key metrics, so your team will need to decide early on which metrics are most important to achieving your goals.
Email marketing KPIs help you:
Measure the impact: Keeping an eye on your progress is easier with KPIs. Your team will then have a common understanding of every campaign and can gauge where the opportunities and successes exist.
Highlight learnings: With the data from KPIs, you can spot weaknesses before they become damaging to your efforts. Likewise, you’ll be able to draw from top-performing content to bolster the entire campaign.
Refine your strategies: Supported by real-time data, your decision-making is faster and more confident. Not only will your current campaigns benefit from these insights, but future campaigns will be stronger from the get-go.
Let’s take a closer look at 13 of the most important metrics for your upcoming email marketing campaigns. They can provide the clarity and data needed to accomplish the unique goals you’re pursuing.
There’s no email success possible unless the message reaches users’ inboxes, so this metric is a great place to start. Delivery rate measures the percentage of your emails that reach a valid email address, bypass all filters, and can be read by the recipient. It’s important to keep your email lists accurate and your sender reputation stellar in order to ensure high delivery rates.
This metric looks specifically at the percentage of your emails that are considered undeliverable by the mail server. For example, if a subscriber mistyped their email address in your signup form, any message you send to them would “bounce” back to you because it couldn’t be delivered. From a deliverability perspective, this metric doesn’t care if an email goes to a user’s inbox or spam folder—all that matters is that it was received and didn’t bounce.
Speaking of spam folders, this metric tracks how many recipients flag your messages as spam after it hits their inbox. As you can imagine, high spam complaint rates will damage your sender reputation and put future campaigns in jeopardy. You can decrease these issues by using double opt-ins and ensuring that your content is relevant and high quality.
Of your emails that are successfully delivered to inboxes, you’ll want to know how many were opened. This email marketing KPI sheds light on the effectiveness of subject lines and the initial engagement of your audience.
The first click to open an email is incredibly important, because it precedes all other actions. But any click from within the message is also crucial to your campaign’s success. This metric reveals the percentage of emails that generate the action of a click. The higher your percentage, the better you’ve done at showcasing the value you're offering.
Conversion rate highlights the percentage of your recipients who ended up taking your desired action. It’s the final click that leads to the user making a purchase, signing up for an event, or taking some other business-building action. With your eye on this metric, you can test various designs, headlines, and calls to action to find the optimal content for your campaign.
In conjunction with your conversion rate is the amount of money you’re bringing in thanks to those clicks. By quantifying the value, revenue per click guides your budget decisions and helps you project the financials for your campaign.
While a perfect world would be filled with positive clicks and conversions, reality includes people who inevitably decide to opt out from your future messages. This metric keeps track of the percentage of these recipients who click unsubscribe in your message. You can help minimize it from happening with quality content and a send schedule that aligns with your audience’s preferences.
Want to check on the total number of people who have opted in to receive your messages? This metric helps you understand the size of your audience and gives important context for many of your other KPIs.
This metric reveals how many of your precious subscribers are departing from your email lists within a specific period of time. It’s an effective way to track the results from various email sends and identify new best practices for your campaign.
Taking subscriber churn rate into consideration, along with new subscribers and other factors, reveals your list growth rate. It’s an important metric that looks beyond your current moment in time and reveals how well you’re set up for future success. You can increase this rate by streamlining the sign-up process, sharing exclusive perks with your subscribers, and promoting your email list on other channels.
This metric shows you the total revenue each subscriber contributes to your business while on your list. It’s always more effective to retain customers than to win new ones, so focus on loyalty boosting initiatives such as a rewards program.
Of course, new acquisitions are required for a healthy business. This final metric reveals how much money it costs for each new lead you bring into the fold. Leveraging this metric helps you understand which efforts provide the best ROI when it comes to list growth.
This is far from a comprehensive list of email marketing KPIs. But the baker’s dozen we’ve provided here are crucial in 2024 and will provide a strong foundation for your next campaign.
Here are some quick strategies for managing your email marketing KPIs so that you can stay closer to the data and make the best decisions moving forward.
Choose goals that are specific and lend themselves to measurement
Choose complementary KPIs that help you get to your destination
Limit your total KPIs to a dozen (two or three KPIs per goal)
Have an established process for sharing KPI data with your team
Incorporate your learnings on a continual basis
Use A/B testing on all important aspects of your campaign
Adapt your goals and KPIs when the situation requires it
Finally, you’ll need a system for gathering and analyzing your KPI data. In the old days, this was a manual process that required substantial effort and always brought in the element of human error. Team silos thrived in this scenario because the data was hard to share and communication channels varied so much from team to team.
Thankfully, modern email platforms do all the heavy lifting so that you can focus on strategy. Better data and less hassle? It’s a proven recipe for team collaboration and business growth.
For example, Twilio SendGrid delivers everything you need to create incredible campaigns and then reach your goals through email marketing KPIs. Our platform makes it effortless to manage receipt preferences and comply with all anti-spam regulations. We offer industry best delivery rates of 97%, versus the 85% claimed by most of our competitors.
This performance is paired with a robust suite of tracking tools that enable you monitor KPIs and keep your campaign not just surviving, but actually thriving. Want to see it all in action? You can get started today by creating a free account.
