Email marketing metrics

Oooof, once again the task of analysing data from your campaigns creeps up on you. “Where do I even start with all these numbers?!” you say? Never fear, here are some key metrics to help you evaluate the success of your email marketing campaign.

1. Open rates

Start here! Open rates – you guessed it – refers to the number of people who have opened your email. I know what you’re thinking. How often does your phone accidentally open an email? Well, yes, this does happen so there is always a buffer to consider but by doing a month to month comparison if there is a massive lift in open rate – that’s no accident so you can take that as a positive sign. Using compelling, personalised and exciting subject lines will increase your open rates. What’s a good open rate you ask? 20 %- 30% is usually pretty good. 40% is worth a high five and anything above 50% is pretty darn excellent.

2. Click through rates

Measured as a percentage the click-through rate is the ratio of people who saw to clicked the ad. Email clicks are usually a good sign as it’s pretty hard to accidentally click a link an email. Again benchmarks depend on the industry. Anything over 10% is good.

3. Unsubscribe rate

Oh-uh! Don’t beat yourself up if people start to unsubscribe – it happens. All you can do is make sure you keep your content fresh, interesting and relevant to the audience. If you can master your content you’ll keep your mail list. Drop off is natural but if you notice a significant drop – you need to change something. That’s where we come in 🙂

4. Soft bounces

This usually happens when you send an email to an inbox that is full. It’s not something you need to worry too much about but if you see it in your reports it just indicated a percentage of emails that aren’t being delivered to an inbox because it is full or it might be going to their junk folder. Start worrying if the soft bounce is above 1%.

5. Hard bounces

Hard bounces, on the other hand, you need to keep an eye out for. If you are getting a high percentage of hard bounces it means that your email is getting delivered to an address that no longer exists. Yahoo, Gmail, etc keep a close eye on emails that are being delivered to addresses that don’t exist. If you don’t remove these addresses from your mailing list your delivery rate will be affected.

6. Delivery rate

This is the number of emails sent minus the number of bounces, divided by the number of emails sent times 100. A bad delivery rate would be around 80%.

7. Forward rate

Woohoo! This is a good sign. If someone has chosen to forward your email on it means they liked it and have sent it on to someone else, extending your reach and chances for conversion.

8. Complaint or abuse rate

Keep an eye out for this as it’s the number of people who have set your email to spam. If this happens review your content and offering and try identify what part of it seems spammy. Never hide the unsubscribe link from your email. If you do people automatically deem it as spam-worthy.

Running email marketing campaigns and need help improving their performance? Don’t be shy. Get in touch today!