While the content in your email campaigns is a vital component of email marketing, it’s also important that you’re monitoring the performance of those campaigns after you hit the send button. How does an email marketing team measure their email metrics?
Although many marketing tools now break the process down step-by-step for you, knowing how to do it manually is a good idea.
Source: Campaign Monitor
What are email metrics?
Email metrics are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that tell you how many people are looking at your emails, opening them, and clicking through them. These KPIs can also show you how often your emails are being bounced back, delivered to their intended inboxes, and blocked or marked as spam.
Deliverability rate
Your email deliverability rate is the overall rate at which your emails are being delivered to their intended inboxes.
Bounce rate
Bounced emails are emails that are blocked and returned to the sender for a variety of reasons. They can fall under two categories:
- Soft Bounce – These are emails that are returned due to delivery issues, such as a file size that’s too large or a receiver’s inbox being too full.
- Hard Bounce – These are emails that are returned due to a permanent reason, such as an invalid address or the email client blocking you as a sender. These bounces can have adverse effects on your overall deliverability rate.
Open rate
Your email open rate is the percentage of emails that are actually being opened by your readers.
Click-through rate
The click-through rate is the measurement of how many readers are clicking on a hyperlink, image, or call to action (CTA) within a delivered email. These links generally lead them to a landing page on your website for more information or for a purchase or download.
Click-to-open rate
Similar to the click-through rate, the email click-to-open rate is the percentage of people who click somewhere in your message out of the total number of opens.
It will be a higher percentage than your click-through rate since it measures the people who click out of a smaller population of subscribers (i.e. only those that opened the email).
Unsubscribe rate
The email unsubscribe rate is just what it sounds like—the rate at which people are unsubscribing from your list because they no longer wish to receive your marketing content.
How to measure your email metrics
Measuring your email metrics isn’t as difficult as it may sound. All it takes is some basic math, and we’ve included the formulas for you below.
Deliverability rate
The deliverability rate is found by taking the number of delivered emails and dividing it by the total number of emails sent. You’ll then multiply that number by 100 to get your percentage.
Deliverability Rate = (Delivered Emails / Total Sent) x 100
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is easily calculated by taking the total number of bounced emails and dividing that by the total number of emails sent. You then multiply by 100 to get your percentage.
Bounce Rate = (Bounced Emails / Sent Emails) x 100
Open rate
Calculating your email open rate simply involves taking your overall emails sent and subtracting any that bounced. You then take that number and divide it by the number of sent emails. Multiply by 100 to get your percentage
Open Rate = (Opened Emails / [Sent Emails – Bounced Emails]) x 100
Click-through rate
Your click-through rate is calculated by taking the overall number of clicks your email link, CTA, or image received and dividing it by the number of total emails sent. You then take that number and multiply by 100 to get the actual percentage.
Click-Through Rate = Email Clicks / [Sent Emails – Bounced Emails]) x 100
Click-to-open rate
CTOR can show you how successful your email is by taking the number of unique clicks and dividing it by the number of unique opens, then multiplying it by 100.
CTOR = (Unique clicks / Unique opens) x 100
Unsubscribe rate
This metric is found by taking the total number of unsubscribes and divide by the total number of emails that were actually delivered. You then take that number and multiply by 100.
Unsubscribe Rate = (Unsubscribes / Delivered Emails) x 100
Sharing rate
Sharing rate tracks how often your content is shared through social channels.
Sharing rate = Number of shares on social media / Total emails delivered) x 100
ROI (Return on Investment)
ROI measures the financial return generated from your email marketing efforts, showing how cost-effective your campaigns are.
ROI = (Revenue from email campaigns – Campaign costs) / Campaign costs x 100
Does knowing how to measure your email metrics really matter?
Knowing how to measure your email metrics is essential for a variety of reasons, but ultimately, it comes down to understanding your campaigns and knowing what works with your audience and what doesn’t.
Knowing how to measure your metrics manually will give you the confidence you need to double-check any data given to you so you can truly understand what’s going on with your campaigns.
What now?
Now that you know how to measure your email metrics, you may be asking yourself which marketing tools are best used to simplify the process. There are a wide variety of marketing tools available, and we encourage you to check out some of our suggestions for free email marketing tools.
