If you’re using email marketing to reach your customers, you may be wondering about what email metrics you should be tracking. As with anything, you first need to identify your goals for email marketing. Whether you are simply sharing information with your audience or promoting products to drive sales, know your goals before you decide what metrics to track.
After you’re clear on your goals, here are a few email metrics you may want to consider tracking.
Opens and open rate
Email opens is the number of people who opened a specific email, while the open rate tells you what percentage of your list opened it. Opens and open rates aren’t entirely reliable due to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature that launched in late 2021, which can sometimes result in your email provider counting false opens, but it’s still an important metric to track.
Depending on the email platform you are using, you may see both unique opens and total opens in your email metrics. Unique opens is the number of subscribers who opened an email, while total opens counts every time someone opened an email. Sometimes a single person will open your email 10 times or more, which contributes to the total opens being higher than the unique opens.
Clicks and click rate
Clicks tells you how many people clicked on a link in your email and the click rate tells you what percentage of your subscribers clicked. As with opens, your email platform may show you unique clicks (the number of individual subscribers who clicked somewhere in an email) and the number of total clicks (the total number of links clicked across all subscribers).
Conversions and conversion rate
Conversions and conversion rate may not be available as an email metric from some of the smaller email marketing platforms, but it measures how many purchases were made from the email. It generally requires adding a connection between your email platform and your website so that the email platform knows if someone completed a purchase.
Bounces and bounce rate
This is an important measure for the health of your email list. If you have a lot of bounces, it’s time to clean up your list or stop sending regularly to people who haven’t opened or clicked in a while. You should only be sending to people who have actually signed up for your list, not just people you met at an event or whose email address you found somewhere online.
Unsubscribe rate
This one is hard for some people, because an unsubscribe means someone doesn’t want to receive your email. Don’t take it personally, because it’s actually a good thing! If the content isn’t relevant for them, it’s better for them to unsubscribe from the list than continue receiving your emails and never opening them. However, if your unsubscribe rate increases dramatically, it could be a sign that you need to better align your content with your audience or do some list cleanup.
There are many factors that contribute to the success of your email marketing efforts, and knowing what email metrics to track can help you evaluate what’s working and what might need some more attention in your email strategy.
If you need help identifying and strategizing for your email marketing plan, Storypath Communications can help. Reach out to us today to schedule an intro call.