11 Email Marketing KPIs and How to Measure the Success of Your Campaigns

When you set the email KPI targets for your business, you’ll need to consider the following factors:

When you’re setting your goals you can use the SMART method to guide them.

This makes your goals:

This is the first thing you can measure after you send out a newsletter or set up a new email marketing campaign.

Your delivery rate is how many emails were delivered to inboxes out of how many emails you sent.

If your email list is clean, then you should aim for a 99% delivery rate — lower rates are normal for welcome campaigns and if you use double opt-ins.

This is because some new subscribers might:

The second metric you can monitor is your email open rate, which refers to how many people opened the emails out of the number of emails that were delivered.

If you’re looking at the KPIs of a welcome email campaign, then this is one of the first points of direct engagement with your email recipients.

It’s also one of the most important metrics to track because it shows you how interested your subscribers are.

Depending on what tool you use to track your emails, you’ll be able to look at your click-to-open rate, also known as your unique open rate.

This variation of your open rate counts only the first time each subscriber opens an email — the click-to-open rate doesn’t include when people go back to an email and open it again.

There are several ways to improve your email open rate:

A click-through rate refers to how many subscribers clicked on content within your email.

Only those who’ve opened your email will be able to click on a link or image, and so you’ll also get an idea of how many emails were opened.

Here are some ways to measure your email marketing success using this metric:

As a business owner, your goal is to convert viewers into leads, and those leads into customers.

If you’re using your email marketing to promote your offers, studying your conversion rate will give you an idea of how successful it is.

However, not all conversions require a sale to be made — a conversion is any time a subscriber clicks on a link and then completes whatever action you asked of them.

Your conversion rate can be calculated by comparing how many conversions you got out of the number of emails delivered.

Boost your conversion rate by:

While email generally has the highest ROI, you’ll still need to measure the success of your email marketing efforts.

First, subtract the cost of your email marketing from the overall revenue your email marketing has generated.

Then, divide your answer by the cost of your email marketing, and multiply it by 100.

This will give you a percentage value for your email marketing ROI.

You can, and should, calculate the ROI for your email campaigns and compare which are working better.

To calculate your revenue, you’ll need to ensure that your email campaigns, sales funnels, and analytics software are integrated.

However, to ensure the success of your future campaigns, and improve on your current ones, there are other metrics you’ll need to consider.

Your bounce rate, sometimes called a hard bounce rate, refers to the email addresses that your emails will never be able to reach.

Calculate your bounce rate by dividing the number of emails bounced by how many emails you sent.

If you don’t remove these bounced email addresses from your subscriber list, you will get blocked or blacklisted.

Hard bounces can be caused by:

Soft bounces refer to undelivered emails caused by temporary issues with your email.

Depending on your email service provider (ESP), you’ll be able to monitor the number of soft bounces for each email marketing campaign.

While these don’t require immediate attention, they could point to bigger issues like a ransomware attack.

Ensuring the security of your email and your subscribers’ details is essential and will help you build trusting relationships with your audience.

This next email marketing metric also has to do with security and compliance.

When someone receives an email that they didn’t want, from an email address they don’t recognize, they’ll mark it as spam.

Some personal email service providers have spam filters.

This affects your email open rates and can eventually lead to your emails being blocked.

Your spam complaint rate is calculated by dividing the number of spam complaints by how many emails were sent out in total.

There are also several ways to avoid triggering spam filters:

When someone is no longer interested in receiving emails from you, they will unsubscribe and be removed from your list.

Calculating your unsubscribe rate involves dividing how many unsubscribes you got, by how many emails you sent out.

Including an unsubscribe link in your emails might seem counter-intuitive, but it’s a legal requirement of CAN-SPAM and the GDPR.

This, in addition to your spam rate, can indicate whether your email strategy needs a drastic change.

The last 3 email metrics are all about improving your marketing and building better email marketing campaigns.

Your list growth is a KPI that you can’t ignore.

While this might not directly affect your email marketing campaign, it affects the future of your business.

You need to have constant list growth and new subscribers so that you can have new people to market and sell your offers to.

First, subtract the number of unsubscribes from your new subscribers.

Then, divide that result by the number of subscribers on your list, and then multiply that by 100 — that’s your list growth rate.

Here are some ways to see exponential list growth:

This is different from affiliate marketing but is still a great way to get more quality subscribers by reaching out to a wider audience.

Here are some ways to get your emails shared:

Another email marketing metric to pay attention to is the device statistics for your emails.

You can calculate your mobile open rate by dividing the number of mobile opens by total emails opened and multiplying by 100.

With over 41.9% of emails opened on mobile devices, you have to ensure your emails are optimized.

You can optimize your emails for mobile devices if you:

Depending on the size of your email lists, gathering the necessary data for your email KPIs can seem like a mammoth task.

That’s why we suggest you partner with an ESP that gets the information together for you.

We also suggest that you compare your metrics to:

Some email KPIs should be monitored more often, while others need longer to show any real move toward success.

These key metrics should be checked daily:

Systeme.io is a multi-talented platform that has everything you need to run your email marketing.

With systeme.io by your side, you can:

With 4 scalable pricing plans, systeme.io makes it easy and affordable to build your online business.

All of these plans come with these unlimited features:

Mailchimp is an email marketing tool that’s slowly making the move to include more features.

With a Mailchimp account, you’ll be able to:

While Mailchimp does have a Free plan, it’s limited:

Another popular email marketing platform is ActiveCampaign.

The features on this platform are focused on campaigns and automating your email marketing.

With an ActiveCampaign account, you’ll get:

ActiveCampaign has 4 pricing plans that increase in proportion with the size of your email list.

There’s no free option here — just a short 14-day free trial.

With ActiveCampaign’s Lite plan, you’ll pay $30/month for just 1,000 contacts and their most basic features: