Top Five Metrics for Email Marketing 

Have you ever wondered whether your email marketing strategy is working? Here are five of the most common metrics used in email marketing.

Open Rate

Open rates are one of the best ways to tell whether your email strategy is working. This number shows what percentage of your audience opens the emails you send them. If you have a higher open rate, it usually means your subject lines resonate with your audience. A low open rate generally indicates one of these things:

• Your subject line is not relevant or interesting enough
• Your audience is composed of a wide variety of subscribers
• You may be sending too many or too few campaigns

Clickthrough Rate(CTR)

Another good way to check how well your emails are working is to take a look at the click rates. The click rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered emails got at least 1 click. This number shows whether or not your audience finds the emails you send relevant enough to click through and check their email for more. Your click rate essentially tells you how many of your subscribers find your campaign content useful. To improve your click rate, you'll need to create content that's useful to more subscribers. Like open rates, you can sometimes accomplish this by targeting specific content to a smaller, segmented audience.

Conversion Rate

Email conversion rate, or email marketing conversion rate, is defined as: the percentage of subscribers who complete a goal action. In many instances, the conversion goal is purchase-related (becoming a customer), while other times it’s not (simply becoming a lead).

Bounce Rate

This refers to the percentage of email addresses in your subscriber list that didn’t receive your message because it was returned by a recipient mail server. There are two categories of email bounces including hard bounce and soft bounce.

A “hard” bounce means an email has bounced back to the sender undelivered without having been accepted by the receiving email server.
A soft bounce is used to describe an e-mail that has bounced back to the sender undelivered after it has already been accepted by the recipient’s mail server.

Forwarding Rate

This metric is particularly interesting, as it reflects a higher-than-average level of enthusiasm for your content. If someone forwards one of your emails, you can be sure they find the relevant content. This helps generate new subscribers to the newsletter. Encourage your subscribers to share your email to a friend or colleague if they think the content is valuable, and start tracking how many new people you can add to your database this way.