Email Marketing Metrics - Essential Metrics & KPIs to Track for Your Success

Looking to boost your business or project’s results through email marketing? If you’re already on this journey, this article will be quite useful for assessing the success of your email campaigns and determining if they are helping you achieve your goals. We’ll cover the essential email marketing metrics and KPIs, explore what insights they can provide, and explain how you can use them effectively.

What Are Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs?

Email metrics are simply data points that demonstrate how your email marketing campaigns are performing. Think of them as email analytics that inform you about how many people read your email, how many unsubscribe, how many you convert into clients, and much more. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), are also measurable values used by businesses to evaluate their success in achieving important business objectives. They differ from metrics even though the two are often used interchangeably.

KPIs help track progress, identify areas for improvement, and guide decision-making. They vary depending on the industry and specific goals but typically focus on critical aspects of business performance such as revenue, customer satisfaction, or operational efficiency.

Below, we will describe which are the most important email marketing metrics and what they show. Under each explained metric, we will also give an example of the business insight it could reveal, as well as some tips for improvement. 

We’ll also go over the most common goals business owners have nowadays and give suggestions about which KPIs could be helpful for you to monitor. But remember: you know your business best, so it’s your choice to determine which metrics and KPIs will   best help you reach your goals.

Why Is It Important to Track Metrics in Email Marketing?

We all know the satisfying feeling of crafting an email campaign with great design and all the crucial information you want to share with your subscribers. But let’s be honest – it’s not just about hitting “send” and hoping for the best. Evaluating your campaigns is equally important, as it reveals how they impact your business and marketing efforts in the following aspects:

📊 Campaign performance: analyzing email marketing metrics goes beyond assumptions, offering a concrete overview of the campaign performance and its impact on your subscribers.

🥇 Campaign optimization opportunities: metrics help you find out what aspects of your emails could be changed and optimized for better results.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Audience insights: by reading your metrics, you can gain valuable insights into your audience, such as what types of emails and content they prefer, what time of day they are more likely to open an email, and what they might potentially buy from you.
🎯 Strategic planning: observing your email campaigns will help you make informed decisions in the future (like what’s the perfect time to do a promotional campaign), and tweak your email marketing strategy accordingly.

📅 Reporting: evaluating email marketing metrics is crucial for keeping everyone informed, whether you’re working on a team, as a freelancer, or even independently. It helps you and your colleagues, clients, or managers stay up-to-date on all communications sent to subscribers and understand how they are performing.

What Are Your Goals for Email Marketing?

Before we explain the most important email marketing metrics and KPIs, ask yourself what you want to achieve. Define what your biggest goal with email marketing is and don’t skip setting specific objectives for every email campaign you work on. The metrics you need to measure depend on the exact goals you have. They could be increasing your leads, driving traffic to your website, driving sales, etc. 

Email Marketing Metrics to Track & Monitor

Here are the essential metrics that every business owner and email marketer should know and have in mind when working on an email campaign.

Open rate

Open rate is one of the most common email metrics, and it shows the percentage of recipients who opened your email campaign. However, despite its popularity, the open rate is often seen as a vanity metric, and many marketers even consider it unreliable for several reasons.

Generally, most tracking systems count an email as “opened” only when the email software receives a tiny transparent image (aka tracking pixel) embedded in the email for tracking purposes. However, some email apps block images by default, so unless the recipient manually enables them, the email may not be recorded as opened, even if it was. 

Also, with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which was introduced several years ago, the content of emails in Apple Mail gets preloaded (including tracking pixels) regardless of whether the user actually opens the email. All these things make open rate not a very accurate and reliable metric for your business, so don’t focus too much on it. 

📍 Formula: open rate = (total emails opened / total emails delivered) x 100​​

💡 Business insight: even if not 100% accurate, an open rate can give you an idea about the effectiveness of your subject line, whether it was interesting and compelling to the recipients or not. It also hints at whether recipients are interested in your content. Beyond individual campaigns, though, reviewing changes in your open rate between multiple sends can offer crucial insights, especially if you’re reaching the same audience. Monitoring the shifts can help you identify patterns in engagement. 

Curious if your open rate is good? An average open rate for small businesses using email marketing is around 36%, based on data reported by SiteGround. If your open rates tend to be much lower, consider applying the following tips.  

🚀 Ideas for improvement: if you want to improve your open rates, make sure to write emails that people will read – experiment with the length, style, and tone of your subject lines. Use personalization in the subject line, as well as emojis, and try different sending times to find out what time of day your subscribers are most active and more likely to open an email.  

Click-to-open rate

The click-to-open rate is another popular email metric that reveals how many people clicked on any links inside your email. If, for example, you have included a link or button to a special discount, the click-to-open rate will indicate what percentage of your recipients clicked on it to learn more about your offer. To determine if your click-to-open rate is good enough, you should track it for each email campaign and analyze the trends over time. Based on data provided by SiteGround, the average click-to-open rate for small business owners is approximately 6.4%.

📍 Formula: click-to-open rate = (number of clicks / number of emails opened) x 100

💡 Business insight: The click-to-open rate is a crucial metric for revealing the effectiveness of your email content and whether it speaks to the subscribers. It tells you whether it is compelling and engaging. 

🚀 Ideas for improvement: to improve this rate, first make sure that your email campaign is well-structured, has relevant and helpful content, and has a catchy design. Boost your click-to-open rate by making your call to action visible and clear. 

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is an email marketing metric that shows the percentage of emails that could not be delivered to your subscribers for some reason. This happens when your email gets rejected by the recipient’s email servers and returns to the sender with an automated message indicating a delivery error. It’s important to monitor that metric as a high bounce rate can affect your sender reputation and, in time, even lower your campaigns’ reach. 

📍 Formula: bounce rate = (bounced emails / emails sent) x 100%

💡 Business insight: Along with hurting your sending reputation, a high bounce rate can hint that there will be a potential drop in your open and click-to-open rate, as they depend on actually reaching recipients. It could also suggest problems with the quality of your subscriber list or issues with your email server. A bounce rate under 2% is generally considered a strong performance.

🚀 Ideas for improvement: to lower your bounce rate, ensure that your recipient list is of high quality. Regularly clear it from unengaged and inactive subscribers. Don’t buy email lists and never use spammy tactics in your email campaigns, as this can lead to lots of spam complaints and serious consequences to your sender’s reputation. 

It’s a good practice to implement a double opt-in to ensure that each subscriber is truly interested in receiving your content. 

Unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who opt to leave your list after receiving an email. Even though seeing recipients unsubscribe from your emails can be discouraging, it’s also beneficial, as it’s a good way to efficiently clean your subscriber list. Providing your recipients with the option to cancel their email subscription is a way to ensure good email deliverability, as this is a requirement in various spam laws worldwide.  

📍 Formula: unsubscribe rate = (number of unsubscribes / number of emails delivered) x 100

💡 Business insight: The unsubscribe rate, if high, can reveal that your email content is not relevant, useful, or interesting to your target audience. It could also suggest that your subscriber list is not well-segmented or that your emails are being sent too frequently. To get meaningful feedback about your content, consider sending a confirmation email to unsubscribers, asking them to provide more information on why they decided to leave your email list. Based on our experience with small business clients using the SiteGround Email Marketing tool, a good unsubscribe rate is below 0.5%.

🚀 Ideas for improvement: To minimize unsubscribes, consider implementing a double opt-in, segmenting subscribers into different lists based on various criteria, and focus on providing them with valuable and interesting content. It’s also a good practice to give recipients the option to choose how often and what type of emails they want to receive.  

Spam complaint rate

This metric shows the percentage of people who mark an email as spam after receiving it. This is critical data to monitor, as it reveals that recipients perceive your message as irrelevant, annoying, or even inappropriate. However, note that the spam rate does not account for emails that get rejected at the network level by spam filters, so this metric may not fully capture all spam-related issues. 

📍 Formula: Spam complaint rate = (number of spam complaints / number of emails delivered) x 100

💡 Business insight: Similar to the bounce rate, a high spam complaint rate can damage your sender reputation. It is also a red flag that there’s a problem with your email content (frequency, relevancy, or quality). Keep in mind that the acceptable standard spam complaint rate is less than 0.1%. 

🚀 Ideas for improvement: We have a detailed article that gives you all the tips and tricks on how to avoid your emails going to spam. Generally, to reduce the spam complaint rate, it’s important to only send emails to people who have opted in to receive them, and to avoid sending emails too frequently. Additionally, always include an unsubscribe option in your email campaigns. People often report messages as spam when they get frustrated by not being able to find an unsubscribe link. 

Focus on building your email list organically and improving it by incorporating double opt-in signup. Also, authenticate your sender domain as it is an effective way to prove your emails come from you.  

Delivery rate

Email delivery rate indicates the percentage of emails successfully delivered to the recipients without bouncing or being reported as spam. That means they have passed all the email filters and reached your intended audience.

📍 Formula: delivery rate = (number of successfully delivered emails / number of emails sent) x 100

💡 Business insight: A high delivery rate is important as it is proof that your sender reputation is intact. It could also reveal to you that your email and its content are relevant to your audience as it is not reported as spam. However, a low delivery rate might suggest problems with the quality of your email list hygiene and issues with your server sending infrastructure. Consider that the average delivery rate typically ranges between 90% and 98%. Remarkably, data provided by the SiteGround Email Marketing tool shows an average Delivery Rate of 98.8%, ensuring your messages consistently reach their intended recipients and maximizing your potential for engagement and conversions.

🚀 Ideas for improvement: To boost your delivery rate, regularly clean your email list, and remove inactive or unengaged subscribers. Improve your sender credibility by using a reputable email service provider that maintains a good sender reputation for their servers. 

Also, be mindful of how often you send email campaigns: don’t do it too frequently, as it might lead to overwhelming your recipients, and therefore result in more complaints, unsubscribes, and even spam reports. For further help on this topic, we have a great article that explains in detail how to ensure high email deliverability.

Forwarding rate 

This rate (also quite similar to ”email sharing”) measures the percentage of people who forward your email to others. It’s a strong indicator of how interesting, helpful, and engaging your email is, as subscribers are more likely to share useful content with their friends and family. Keep in mind that not all email marketing tools measure this metric, so if you want to track it over time, you might have to use unique URLs or social media sharing buttons for this purpose. 

📍 Formula: forwarding rate = (number of forwards / number of emails delivered) x 100

💡 Business insight: The forwarding rate reveals whether your content resonates with your target audience. It could unveil whether word-of-mouth organic growth is feasible for your business. A good email forwarding rate is typically between 0.5% to 2%. 

🚀 Ideas for improvement: To encourage your recipients to share your email campaigns, make it easy for them to do so. Include a clear call to action asking them to forward or share it. Provide helpful content, expert tips, or other valuable information that is worth sharing, and ensure your email design is visually appealing and easy to navigate.

Key Email Marketing KPIs to Track 

There are countless KPIs you could monitor, but how do you decide which ones to track? Here we’ll highlight the most popular KPIs, explain their benefits, and help you determine which ones are best suited to your email marketing goals.

As we mentioned earlier, a KPI can be a single metric, or a mix of metrics, specifically aligned with your goals. They are tools that help you and your team monitor progress toward your objectives. As a result, it’s crucial to identify which KPIs are the most important for your business or project early on.

Note that some email service providers automatically provide such metrics. If not, consider tracking the key ones for your business yourself, as they can significantly impact your strategy.

Conversion Rate

One of the essential KPIs that you can monitor as a small business owner is conversion rate. The conversion rate is the percentage of recipients who complete a desired action after receiving your email. This action can vary depending on your specific goals and may include making a purchase, converting a lead into а client, filling out a form, reading a blog post, signing up for a webinar, or visiting your website, among other actions.

📍 Formula: conversion rate = (number of conversions / number of delivered or sent emails) x 100

Tracking conversions typically requires integrating data from two sources: your email marketing platform and your website analytics. To accurately attribute conversions to specific email campaigns, it’s crucial to use UTM parameters in your email links. These are tags added to URLs that allow you to track the source, medium, and campaign name in your analytics tool.

💡 Business insight: The conversion rate can reveal how effective your email campaigns are in encouraging subscribers to engage and take action with your business. The higher the conversion rate, the better your email campaigns are performing. But what qualifies as a good conversion rate? 

Research suggests that the average conversion rate in email marketing hovers around 3%. Note that to truly assess your email performance, it’s important to track conversion rates over time and compare them. Keep in mind that these rates can be influenced by factors such as your industry, your content, sending times, and more. 

🚀 Ideas for improvement: To improve your conversion rate, you need to ensure that your email campaigns are relevant, useful, and easy to navigate. Clear inactive users from your recipient list, write attention-grabbing subject lines, include visible and compelling call-to-action buttons or links, and experiment with sending times.

Subscriber acquisition cost (SAC)

Subscriber acquisition cost is a critical KPI to track in order to make informed decisions about your marketing spend. In the context of email marketing, SAC represents the cost of acquiring a new subscriber to your list. 

📍 Formula: SAC = total cost of acquisition / number of new subscribers acquired through email

To calculate SAC, divide the total cost of acquiring a new subscriber by the number of new subscribers gained as a result. The total cost should include all the costs, including marketing, design, ads, sales, and everything else that you might have used in the acquisition process. 

If your SAC is high, it could indicate that your marketing efforts are not cost-effective. Note that SAC varies significantly across industries, so you should research what the estimate is for your specific industry and analyze your results for a longer period. It’s also useful to keep in mind that a good SAC is lower than the subscriber’s lifetime value (which we explain down below). 

💡 Business insight: By tracking SAC, you can get an idea of how effective your overall marketing efforts are in acquiring new subscribers and respectively whether you need to change something to help increase your email list. A lower SAC means you’re spending less to acquire each new subscriber, which is crucial for profitability.

🚀 Ideas for improvement: If you discover that you need to lower your SAC after researching your industry’s average, focus on improving your ad design and copy, and create useful and educational content on your website, social media and on any other platforms that you may use for collecting leads. Try incentivizing readers to subscribe to your email list with different free resources and materials.

Subscriber lifetime value 

Subscriber lifetime value is another useful KPI that estimates the revenue a subscriber is expected to generate for you over the course of time as your newsletter subscriber.

📍 Formula: Subscriber lifetime value =  (average revenue per email subscriber x average subscriber lifespan) – the cost to serve them

Calculating this KPI might not be straightforward, as you need to have specific data. If you are able to calculate it, it will help you to decide how much to invest in acquiring your subscribers and, in the end, will optimize your marketing spend. 

💡 Business insight: Lifetime value is one of the most important KPIs to track because it can give you insights into how much to invest in acquiring new subscribers and how well you are performing in monetizing your audience.  

🚀 Ideas for improvement: To improve the lifetime value of your subscribers, work on enhancing engagement with your email content. Make it more personalized and actionable, and provide more value to your audience with different exclusive offers and promos. Try boosting upsells by sending email campaigns offering related products. 

Return on investment (ROI)

Return on investment is a popular KPI that measures the revenue generated from your email campaigns compared to the cost of running those campaigns. It unveils whether your email campaigns are profitable or not. 

📍 Formula: ROI = (revenue from email campaign – cost of email campaign) / cost of email campaign

To calculate it, you need to subtract the money you spent to run the campaign from the revenue – this represents the money you earned from it, which will show you how much profit you made after covering your costs. Then dividing by the cost of the email campaign will reveal how much profit you made for every dollar spent. 

Note that to correctly calculate the cost of creating and sending your email campaign for that KPI, you need to again consider the email tools you use to do it, as well as internal writers, freelancers, agencies, and/or design costs.

💡 Business insight: A positive ROI is a sign that your marketing efforts are working and generating more than you spend. According to research, the average ROI for email marketing is $36. Keep in mind that as with most of the other KPIs, the ROI also varies greatly depending on your industry. 

🚀 Ideas for improvement: You can improve your ROI by making your offers more appealing to your readers. For example, you could use personalization, and experiment with different content and the way it’s presented. You could also review how you segment your email lists and make changes in order to improve your targeted messaging. 

Revenue per email

The revenue per email KPI could help you assess the profitability of individual campaigns and identify which types of emails are most effective at driving revenue. You can calculate it easily by dividing the revenue of an email campaign by the number of emails sent. 

📍 Formula: revenue per email = revenue from email campaign / number of emails sent

💡 Business insight: This KPI allows you to compare the effectiveness of different campaigns and email strategies. It will help you reveal which email types work the best at driving revenue – whether they are promotional, newsletters, or otherwise. A higher revenue per email shows that your content, CTAs, and targeting are resonating with your audience. Since there isn’t a specific industry benchmark, you need to track and analyze the results for your particular business. 

As a general guideline, the revenue from your email campaign should be equal to or close to the amount you invested. This way, you can ensure that your campaigns are paying off, and you can determine the budget for future campaigns.  

🚀 Ideas for improvement: To drive more revenue for your campaigns, it is again important to increase engagement. Optimize your email content specifically for each segment of your subscribers to make it more relevant. A/B test various subject lines, design styles, buttons, and visuals (one at a time) to see what will bring you the most clicks, engagement, and revenue. 

Choose the Right Email Marketing Tool to Track Metrics 

Having the right Email Marketing Tool by your side is crucial for optimizing all your tasks related to creating, sending, testing, and analyzing your email campaigns. When selecting an email marketing service, make sure you choose a tool that provides you with all this functionality – and that is easy to use and to get started.

With the SiteGround Email Marketing tool, you can rest assured that you have everything in one place. Developed by experts with 20+ years of experience in hosting email, our platform provides an intuitive no-code builder, customizable email layouts, AI copywriter, unlimited audiences, subscriber management, and friendly reporting features. 

You can enjoy automated essential email analytics like open, delivery, click-to-open, bounced, spam, and unsubscribe rates, and interactions stats showing you clicks on specific URLs, the type of the element that has been clicked (button, link, image) and the caption text.

Conclusion

Monitoring your metrics and adopting a structured approach to evaluating your email marketing work will empower you to make data-based decisions and boost your business. Don’t miss out on that opportunity! Now, tell us in the comments: Are there any metrics you already track for your business? Which ones have most helped you to reach your goals?

BONUS: Email Marketing Glossary