Despite being one of the oldest forms of inbound marketing, email marketing is still one of the most effective. One reason is that with over four billion daily email users, it is one of the most convenient ways to contact someone. Not to mention, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies available, generating an estimated $42 for every $1 spent.
But simply sending an email marketing campaign won’t guarantee success. The key is to track your email marketing efforts so you can tweak and improve your strategy over time. Analyze your email marketing metrics to do this. Keeping this in mind, here are eight key email marketing metrics to track.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Open Rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
- Subscribe Rate
- Email Conversion Rate
- Email Viewing Time
- Opening Time
- Active Audience
1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Once subscribers open your emails, you want them to be engaged enough to click on any CTAs you include. Your CTR shows whether subscribers are clicking on your links. If they open your emails but don’t click through to another page (like your website), they either weren’t interested in the content, or your CTAs weren’t convincing.
The CTR should be 2-5 percent. Contrast CTR and CTOR (click-to-open rate). How to find CTR? Subtract the number of users who clicked at least one link from the number of emails sent. CTOR also compares the number of people who opened your email to those who clicked. That’s why you should aim for a CTOR of 10-22 percent.
2. Open Rate
The average email open rate is 12-15 percent, according to research. If your open rate is low, it means your subscribers aren’t interested in your emails and don’t bother to open them. You can’t convert subscribers who don’t open your emails. A low open rate can be caused by poor timing, poorly written email subject lines, or simply irrelevant content.
3. Unsubscribe Rate
The last thing you want to see is unsubscribes. However, tracking this metric is critical for identifying serious email strategy issues. A high unsubscribe rate may indicate poor lead quality or irrelevant email content.
4. Subscribe Rate
Your email list will naturally shrink if you don’t add new subscribers regularly. So keep an eye on your email subscription rate. If it’s low, you need to work harder on building your list via content marketing, social media, or paid advertising. The higher your subscription rate, the larger your lead pool.
5. Email Conversion Rate
Your email’s conversion rate tells you how well it converts leads. You can compare conversion rates of different email campaigns, landing pages, CTAs, content types, and more to see which emails convert well and which do not.
6. Email Viewing Time
This email marketing metric is only useful if you want to engage your subscribers. If your emails are only a few sentences long, your subscribers won’t spend much time on them. It’s useful to know how long subscribers view longer articles. Your email’s content must be relevant and engaging if they are spending time on it. If they don’t, it isn’t.
7. Opening Time
Opening time shows when your subscribers open your emails. The majority of subscribers open emails in the evenings, so you can adjust your strategy to send emails closer to when your audience opens them. As a result, you can reach more subscribers at the right time.
8. Active Audience
The active audience metric shows how many of your list’s subscribers are active. Inactive subscribers haven’t opened your emails in months. Every three months or so, remove inactive subscribers from your email list. If you leave them on, they will negatively impact all of your other metrics, making analysis difficult.