5 Email Marketing KPIs You Should Track

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels you can use. With an ROI of $57 for every $1 spent and over 4.2 billion email users in 2022, email should be one of your primary lead generation sources. To create powerful emails that drive results, you need to know what type of emails are well-received by your customers. That is, you must account for how customers engage with your emails by monitoring your email marketing KPIs.

What are Email Marketing KPIs? 

Email marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) can measure various aspects of your email marketing campaign. You can use these quantifiable measures to evaluate your progress in achieving your strategic email marketing objectives. Using multiple KPIs, you can obtain different insights regarding how customers respond to your emails, allowing you to adapt and improve your email marketing strategy. As such, email marketing KPIs facilitate a data-driven email marketing strategy; they encourage you to align your email communications with customers’ expectations based on behavioural insights. This makes them vital to the success of your email campaign. 

Benefits of Tracking Your Email Metrics 

Measuring your email marketing KPIs can serve you and your marketing team in many ways. They can:

• Help you determine specific, measurable goals
• Provide insight into your progress
• Allow you to identify trends in user behaviour
• Reroute your marketing decisions toward effective practices
• Facilitate the evaluation of your team’s performance

Top Email Marketing Metrics To Account For 

1.  Bounce Rate 

Your bounce rate reveals the percentage of emails that could not be delivered. Generally, a bounce rate of <2% is a good benchmark for you to aim for.

There are two types of bounce rates: a soft bounce and a hard bounce. A soft bounce is caused by temporary issues with recipients’ servers or email addresses. In contrast, a hard bounce is due to permanent errors such as incorrect email addresses or strict email security filters.

You can easily calculate your emails’ bounce rate using this formula:

Bounce rate = (bounced emails / emails sent) * 100

Your bounce rate can also help you evaluate whether you need to clean your email list, implement double opt-in, or allow customers to update their contact information. As such, this email marketing metric is a robust tool that can empower your marketing decisions.

2.  Email Deliverability 

Email deliverability (also known as acceptance rate) tracks the number of emails you’ve successfully sent to recipients’ primary inboxes. While this metric may sound similar to email delivery rate—another useful metric—there is a slight difference between the two. 

Your email delivery rate only tells you whether recipients’ internet service providers (ISP) accepted your emails—that is, the percentage of emails that haven’t bounced back. Email deliverability extends beyond this, revealing inbox placement. It tells you whether emails arrive in your recipients’ primary inboxes (rather than their spam ones). 

To calculate email deliverability, use:

Email deliverability = (Number of emails delivered to primary inboxes / number of emails sent) * 100

Your email deliverability can also indicate your sender reputation, which dictates how trustworthy your emails are. Internet service providers calculate your sender reputation based on two things: whether you send repetitive emails that have bounced and if you have low subscriber engagement rates.

3.  Spam Complaint Rate 

Your spam complaint rate refers to the percentage of emails your recipients have marked as junk. A figure below 0.1% is generally acceptable, while anything above that would require an internal assessment.

To calculate this email metric, you can use the following formula:

Spam complaint rate = (number of spam complaints / number of delivered emails) * 100

Accounting for your spam complaint rate is essential, as it can affect your deliverability. To ensure deliverability, mitigate the causes of spam complaints. Recipients report emails as spam when they:

• Aren’t supposed to be in your email subscriber list (due to incorrectly typed domains) 
• Don’t recognize you
• Don’t relate to your brand anymore
• Perceive your subject lines as misleading
• Can’t see an unsubscribe button or link

4.  Click-Through Rate 

The click-through rate (CTR) depicts the number of clicks your email links receive. This email marketing KPI indicates whether recipients are actually interested in your email’s content or if they just briefly skimmed it. Incorporating the click-through rate as part of your email metrics gives you a broad overview of how consumers engage with your emails. 

To calculate your emails’ click-through rate, you can use the following formula:

CTR = (Number of link clicks / emails delivered) * 100

To indicate how your CTR fares against competitors, you can use industry-based average CTR rates as a benchmark. You can then see how your CTR compares to the industry standard. Therefore, giving you a better understanding of whether you’re on the right path or need to start A/B testing your emails.

5.  Unsubscribe Rate 

The unsubscribe rate email metric reveals the percentage of people that unsubscribe from your emails after opening one of your emails. To ensure deliverability, it’s best to aim for an unsubscriber rate of less than 2%.

Unsubscribe rate can be calculated by:

Unsubscribe rate = (number of unsubscribers / number of delivered emails) * 100

While this email marketing metric isn’t always accurate in depicting recipients’ interest in your emails, it can still provide valuable insights regarding your email list's health. Moreover, it can show you how compelling your email content is, with high unsubscribe rates indicating that you should revisit your email sending volume, template, or content. Doing so will enable you to create highly targeted emails that keep users interested.

Getting Started

As tracking all email marketing metrics at once can be challenging, you must choose a select few to help you achieve your goals. Using the five email marketing KPIs mentioned above, you can understand how consumers welcome, view, read, and interact with your emails. Equipped with these insights, you can build your arsenal of valuable data and excel in your email marketing efforts.

Need impactful insights for your email strategy? With iwinBACK’s intuitive dashboard, you receive real-time, actionable data to inform your email marketing KPIs and revitalize your emails. Contact us today to get started!