In an ideal world, all our subscribers open, read, and respond to every marketing email we send. As enticing as that sounds, reality doesn’t work that way.
In truth, email marketers have to work long hours behind the desk crafting and revising email campaigns to move their subscribers down the funnel.
A desired action isn’t always guaranteed, either—marketers often spend hours and thousands of dollars on a campaign that produces little results.
Sound familiar?
That doesn’t mean you should give up. Instead, marketers need to focus on KPIs to quantify the success of their marketing campaigns. These metrics reveal what’s working and what’s not, providing crucial data to alter company behavior to promote business growth.
The Importance of Email Marketing KPIs
KPIs reveal your campaign's current effectiveness by displaying metrics and figures over time. These figures can be compared against company milestones and goals to gauge success.
Besides acting as markers for campaign effectiveness, proper KPI monitoring and optimization can also improve your return on investment. With email marketing capable of delivering returns of up to 4300%, or $43 for every dollar spent, so
By using KPIs to drive decision-making, you can steer marketing decisions to their intended destination with more clarity.
9 Essential Email Marketing KPIs to Track
Open Rate
The open rate is equivalent to the number of times your subscribers open your email. If 100 customers see your email in their inbox, and twenty of them open it, your open rate is 20%.
This KPI is calculated by dividing the total amount of opens by the number of emails delivered, as seen below.
Having a good open rate is ideal because it indicates high customer engagement and a successful subject line and preheader text.
There’s no singular open rate every business should strive to get, as it varies across industries. But broadly speaking, marketers should aim to reach an open rate of at least 17–28%.
Does a high open rate mean everything for a marketer? No. While you should get your customers to click your email, a high open rate isn’t the sole indicator of a successful campaign.
Getting your customers to open your email does help, though. Marketers often set up A/B tests to figure out which subject line captivates users more to click their email and follow through.
Click-Through Rate
Another essential email metric to track is the click-through rate or CTR. This KPI measures the number of people who click the embedded link in your email.
If ten of the twenty people who have seen your email clicked the attached link, then your CTR is 10%.
CTR benchmarks will always be smaller than open rates because subscribers have to open the email before clicking any links. Average industry benchmarks range between 2% and 5%.
Compared to open rates, CTR prevails in measuring customer engagement because it tracks customers who are interested enough to click your call-to-action. Anyone can open an email, but if the underlying message doesn’t resonate with them, they will tune out and forget it.
People who click email links tend to be loyal and invested subscribers. Nurturing and segmenting them is essential for business growth. So if you want to capture this audience and improve your CTR, make it a priority to craft better emails.
How, you may ask?
For starters, write your email in a conversational and easy-to-follow tone. Personalize and add a touch of social proof too. Lastly, provide value and a clear call to action. This can all help increase your odds of ushering paying subscribers further down the funnel.
Conversion Rate
Think of the conversion rate as a more specific version of a click-through rate. It measures the percentage of email recipients who fulfilled a desired action to its completion.
What constitutes a conversion can differ depending on the email and the business goal. On one hand, it could track the number of webinar sign-ups from an email campaign or it might measure the number of sales generated after a recipient clicks a link in a marketing email.
In essence, the conversion rate reflects the effectiveness of your email content in persuading your recipients to follow through with an action.
Improving your conversion rate is a dynamic process. In general, you can improve conversions by writing compelling copy, crafting clear CTAs, and using effective business sales email templates to drive favorable results.
Reply Rate
If you’re engaged in cold email campaigns, then a crucial KPI to follow is your reply rate or response rate. This metric shows how often your subscribers reply per email delivered.
A good reply rate is anywhere between 1–5%.
This may seem like a low percentage, given the low maximum sending limit of most unoptimized email accounts, but with outreach tools like Instantly.ai, you can send thousands of emails a day with some automation magic—granted that you have a fleet of @domain.com email addresses on deck.
While not all emails are crafted to accept customer responses, it’s important to optimize for the emails that do bank on these replies to funnel in customers.
If your reply rate falls short of your company’s goals, then consider adjusting your marketing tactics. You can personalize your subject lines and emails with AI to engage your customers while saving time. You can also create compelling subject lines or improve your email copy and CTA.
Iterate and iterate until you find a winning formula.
Deliverability Rate
Email marketers are well aware that hitting send does not guarantee a read or delivered email.
Knowing the number of emails sent to recipients’ inboxes helps marketers see the full picture of the campaign’s trajectory. This metric is called the delivery rate.
The delivery rate is a number that can reveal the quality of the email list.
If you’re sending emails using bulk email-sending tools, your email deliverability rate reveals the number of emails actually entering inboxes.
A good delivery rate is anywhere between 90–98%. A rate of 80–90% is stable, anything below that can indicate a problematic email list.
Sometimes, the problem could be the email you’re using. A low email deliverability score can also indicate a poor sender reputation.
Your email address may seem untrustworthy to email service providers, leading them to tag your emails as spam or prevent you from sending them altogether—wasting your time and resources.
Considering these factors, marketers should proactively clean their email lists and follow best practices when sending emails to their subscribers.
If you're worried about being on the brink of tarnishing your sending reputation, Instantly’s warmup feature helps your emails look legitimate to both email providers and subscribers.
Our email marketing software does this by using rotating and reputed email addresses to replicate legitimate emails being sent back and forth.
This gives ESPs the impression that you’re sending legitimate emails (and not spam), which boosts both your email deliverability and reputation.
Spam Complaint Rate
The spam complaint rate measures how often your emails get marked as spam by recipients. The global acceptable benchmark for an acceptable spam complaint rate is less than 0.1%, or 1 out of every 1,000 emails sent.
Getting tagged for spam can greatly hinder your sender's reputation. This can lead to your email address entering a blacklist status or the diversion of your emails to spam folders.
There are many ways you can ensure high email quality and avoid the dreaded spam classification. The number one priority is to confirm your subscribers' consent before sending emails to them. Use double opt-in forms to know for certain if they want to receive your emails.
Once you’ve trimmed your list down to only consenting subscribers, meet the expectations you’ve laid out for them in the opt-in. Provide compelling and relevant content at set time intervals, and stay within topic. In each email, place a clear unsubscribe button.
If you do receive a spam report, review your content and refrain from making the same mistakes again. This continuous improvement ensures you maximize your marketing efforts while avoiding bannable offenses.
No matter how you choose to send emails, you’re bound by spam laws like the CAN-SPAM Act Compliance. Read more on Instantly.ai’s spam policy.
Bounce Rate
Another indicator of an unhealthy email list is a high bounce rate. Senders get notified by a bounced email through a generated Non-Delivery Report (NDR) sent by the sender’s email provider. This metric refers to emails that don’t enter a recipient’s inbox.
A good email bounce rate is lower than 2%. Anything between 2–5% is pushing it and above 5%, well, your sending reputation is as good as gone.
There are two classifications of bouncing emails: hard and soft bounces. Both types can lead to a lowered sender score, but hard bounces even more so.
Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures, often caused by issues like server outages, preset filters, or full inboxes.
Hard bounces occur when the recipient’s email address doesn’t exist or is invalid, leading to a permanent failure to send.
To keep your bounce rate healthy, clean your email list and remove these invalid and outdated email addresses. You should also consider using email automation tools to enhance your productivity and precision when clearing your email list.
List Growth Rate
Every fledgling business aims to expand its reach by growing a healthy email list. This rate of growth is trackable using a metric called the list growth rate.
This KPI is a good way to determine your rate of expansion. If you start with 500 subscribers and gain 200 new subscribers in a month, your list growth rate is 40%.
Growth is essential, but it has to be sustainable. Email lists normally decay at a rate of 22.7% with each passing year. People change jobs (and emails), move to other domains, or just stop opening emails.
Therefore, it’s essential to continually update your list to ensure you maintain only active email addresses—or as close to it as possible.
You can facilitate email list growth through various methods, like offering lead magnets to encourage email sign-ups and using pop-up forms on your website to capture new customers. Cleaning your list is also essential to remove inactive accounts.
Return on Investment
Your email marketing efforts aren’t designed to yield imaginary results. They’re made to help your business turn in profit. This degree of profitability is called return on investment (ROI).
The ROI measures the financial return of your email marketing campaign. Running an email marketing campaign, just like other marketing activities, incurs costs.
These cost centers include:
- An email marketing software subscription
- Email template designs
- Copywriters and graphic designers
- Analytic tools
- Deliverability tools
These costs can scale depending on the size of your campaign. However, you can save a little cash by utilizing a tool that bundles these features, like Instantly.ai.
Marketers should strive to minimize costs while maximizing the campaign’s profit potential. As mentioned earlier, a successful email marketing campaign can yield a return of up to 43x, so striving to reach or exceed this figure is a good goal.
You can apply many strategies to improve your campaign’s ROI. Some examples include targeting your campaign to only the relevant subscribers, optimizing your email copy, and using automation to enhance email deliverability efficiency.
Key Takeaways
So now you know why it’s important to track KPIs and familiarize yourself with important KPIs like CTR, open rate, and conversion rate.
These metrics give you a deep glimpse into a campaign’s performance, allowing you to make data-based decisions that will help you inch closer to your business goals.
Leveraging tools like Instantly.ai can provide you with complete access to these metrics to boost your email marketing efforts. Try it out today.
