5 Most Important Email Metrics You Should Track and How to Improve Them8 min read

So far we have established that email marketing is still huge and that its importance hasn’t been diminished by social media and other communication channels. 

For example, 80% of small businesses report that email is their main customer acquisition channel, while 81% rely on this marketing tactic for customer retention. 

At the same time, 30% of marketers say that email marketing has the highest ROI of any other marketing channel. 

But before you can enjoy the benefits of email marketing, you need to get your message across effectively. 

And the only way to know whether all those email campaigns you launch have any impact on your audience is to track key email metrics and transparently see what works and what doesn’t. 

The first step is setting your goals, such as generating more leads, turning leads into buying customers, or growing your customer base. 

Only detailed analytics will tell you whether your emails are helping you achieve them.

1. Open Rate

Simply put, the open rate indicates the percentage of recipients who open a particular email. 

This metric is not considered to be completely reliable, and the best way to make the most of it is to treat it as a comparative metric. 

In other words, the open rate makes sense if you send a different message to the same list two or more weeks in a row and compare the results.

The thing is that this metric is obtained through an image embedded in the email. When your recipient opens the email, it’s displayed. 

However, many email clients block automatic image loading, which means that your results won’t be precise since some recipients will open your email, but this won’t be tracked because the image was blocked by their email client. 

Nevertheless, don’t neglect your open rates, and improve them by creating killer subject lines, as well as paying attention to preheaders.

Here are some tips to get your recipients to open your email. 

1. Keep Your List Clean 

Don’t roll your eyes! There’s a reason why we always insist on cleaning your list regularly. 

This time, we’ll focus on how a fresh and carefully curated list can help you boost your email open rate. 

Remove inactive subscribers from your list, as that way, you’ll keep your open and engagement rates high. Before getting rid of such prospects, send them a re-engagement campaign and offer them some incentive to check whether they’re still interested in your brand. 

If there’s no answer, you know what to do. 

2. Segment Your List 

Sending one-size-fits-all campaigns to your entire list is another culprit behind poor open rates. 

Instead of this, analyze your subscribers and segment your list into several categories. This will allow you to personalize your copy and make it more appealing to them.

As a result, your emails will be more relevant to your audience and your open rates will flourish. 

3. Avoid Spam Filters

Spam filters can heavily impact your open rates, but that’s not the only issue. ESPs can blacklist your entire domain and prevent your emails from ever reaching your prospects’ inboxes. 

To avoid such a scenario, make sure all your recipients have opted-in, don’t send unsolicited messages, eliminate spam words from your copy, and avoid clickbaity, deceptive subject lines. 

4. Deliver on Your Promise

Your recipients expect your emails to be informative, educational, and interesting. This means that you should try to help them solve some of their problems, and your subject lines should indicate which one exactly. 

However, if you use your subject lines only to capture your recipients’ attention and trick them into opening your message without actually addressing the pain point from the subject line, they will stop opening your emails. 

Even worse, they will send your emails to the spam folder. 

So, spark their interest in an intriguing way – yes, deceiving them – no. 

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

This parameter shows the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in your email. The click-through rate is one of the most important metrics, and marketers heavily rely on it to calculate how each individual email performs.

CTR provides you with a valuable insight into how many prospects interact with your content and are willing to find out more about your product or brand.

It’s essential to use A/B testing and find successful ways of getting your audience to click on your links.

To improve your CTR, you need to come up with several versions of the call-to-action copy for each campaign and test them until you find the one that clicks with your recipients.

Other helpful tips for improving your CTR include the following. 

1. Ensure Your Emails Are Mobile Friendly 

A great majority of people read their emails on their mobile devices. 

In other words, if your messages aren’t optimized for displays of all sizes, you’re toast – nobody wants to squint at the smartphone screen, zoom in or out, or struggle to click the CTA button. 

2. Don’t Put the Most Important Info in Images 

If you put your key message in your images, you’re practically hiding them. 

This is a bad idea for 2 reasons: 

• It’s bad for accessibility 
• Most email clients block images by default, which means that your recipients won’t see the most important information that could get them to click. 

3. Improve Readability 

Make your message easily scannable, because your recipients want to be able to find the information they need quickly and easily. 

So, a wall of text is a big no-no, just like in your blog posts. 

Moreover, people are more likely to open and click on emails that are organized using numbered paragraphs or bulleted lists. 

3. Conversion Rate

This one is the holy grail of email marketing. 

Your every email has to have a clearly defined goal, such as for your recipients to sign up for a free trial, read your new blog post, or purchase your product or service. 

The conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients who completed the desired action.

Again, your call-to-action plays an important role in this metric as its wording and design can make a big difference. We’ve already discussed CTAs in another blog post, so we won’t go into more detail here. 

However, it’s always a good idea to emphasize that phrases consisting of action words should be used such as “register for our webinar,“ “read our new blog,” or “grab a discount.”

The conversion rate practically sums up how effective and successful your overall marketing efforts are.

4. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is actually the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered. 

A high bounce rate is, obviously, a very bad thing and it’s usually the result of a poorly managed contact list.

We should distinguish between two types of bounces – soft and hard.

1. Soft Bounces

Soft bounces happen when a recipient’s inbox is full, or when there’s a temporary server issue or something like that. 

In such situations, the recipient’s server might still deliver the email once the problem has been solved, but in case that this doesn’t happen you should re-send the email. If the same happens again, then we’re talking about hard bounces.

2. Hard Bounces

Hard bounces occur when you send an email to a closed, non-existent, or invalid email address. 

Make sure to remove such addresses from your contact list because if you keep on sending emails to them, you might be marked as a spammer by the internet service providers. 

ISPs tend to use closed email addresses as spam traps, and if your emails end up in these traps frequently, your reputation can be ruined.

That’s why it’s essential to clean your database regularly, and with Autoklose you won’t have to worry about all these problems, because it detects potential issues and sorts them out by putting hard bounces in the “Don’t email” folder.

5. ROI

When it comes to the return-on-investment rate of your email campaigns, it tracks how successful they are in terms of cost-effectiveness. 

In other words, this metric shows you how much you earn in comparison with how much you invest.

It’s relatively simple to calculate your overall ROI – subtract all the costs of an email campaign from the total campaign revenue, then divide the result by the same cost. 

After that, multiply the result by 100, and there you are.

It’s worth mentioning that email marketing boasts the highest ROI of all channels – 4,200% and that it’s extremely cost-effective. 

If done right, it can generate a very decent profit without a hefty investment.

Autoklose 🚀 keeps track of all these metrics, and they’re easily accessible from your dashboard in real time. Besides, it helps you automate your email marketing and allows you to monitor the performance of your campaigns. 

Closing Words 

There are different email metrics that you should track, but these five are the staples. Before you start analyzing other, more complex metrics, make sure you know how well you’re progressing towards your email marketing goals in general.