5 Key Email Metrics You Need to Start Tracking

Email Marketing-

1. Open Rate

Open rate is an indication of how many people in your target audience thinks your email is worth their attention. Simply put, it is the number of people who opened your email.

When seen in comparison to past email campaigns, this metric is a great way to understand what subject lines, email topics, days of the mail, time of the email are working well with your audience.

 2. Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is an important measure of your target audience engagement – it answers the question ‘Can your email nudge your target audience to take action?’

CTR = Number of Unique Users who click on links in your email / Total Number of Users who viewed your email

CTR depends on many parameters including the subject line, calls to action, attractive copy, link positioning, time of day, email length etc. B2C newsletters tend to have lower CTR, around 2-3%, while for B2B it is around 5%. Transactional emails have higher click-through rates than non-transactional ones – 9.2% and 3.2%, respectively.

3. Email Conversion Rate (ECR)

ECR measures the percentage of your target audience who clicked on your link and completed a desired action, such as filling out a form, downloading a report or buying a product. The success of this metric is directly linked to the call-to-action in your email, which in turn is linked to the overall goals of your email. Hence, this becomes a measure of the extent to which your marketing goal is being achieved.

4. Bounce Rate:

It is the percentage of your total emails that could not be delivered successfully. They are of 2 types: Soft bounces (mail undelivered because of a temporary problem such as full inbox or problems in the recipient’s server) & Hard bounces (mail undelivered due to invalid ids). Ideally, the bounce rate should be kept below 10%. A high bounce rate could lead to you getting blacklisted by your email provider.

5. List Growth Rate:

This is the rate at which your email subscriber / recipient list is growing. Growing your list is crucial to increase reach and expand the target audience. Research shows that there is a natural decay of your email marketing list, and it expires by about 22.5% every year – which makes it more important than ever to pay attention to growing your subscriber list and keeping it at a healthy size.

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Written by:

Ramya Rajaraman – Ramya is a Project Director at IBS, in-charge of managing some of our key client accounts. She also spearheads IBS’ marketing & communications initiatives

Shruti Sundararaman – Shruti works as a project manager at Inception driving marketing campaigns for clients across various sectors.