With so many different email analytics to consider, it can be tough to know which numbers really matter. To simplify reporting, we’ve gathered the important metrics every email marketer needs to track.
Open Rate
The first metric to evaluate is your open rate. In your email marketing dashboard, find your open rate statistics. This metric measures how many recipients click to open your email. Keep in mind that your open rate isn’t the best metric for evaluating campaign performance as it’s difficult to accurately measure. An open rate of 29% or higher is widely considered a healthy number. Open rate is tracked in two ways:
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By an image loading in the recipient’s email client
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By the recipient clicking a tracking link within the email
Even with its inaccuracies, when the open rate increases, it indicates that your message is likely being read. That’s the first step to a successful email campaign.
Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate can affect your overall deliverability. For example, if the email address doesn’t exist, it’s a hard bounce. Generally, after three hard bounces for one email address, the address status is changed to undeliverable, so make sure these are removed from your database. A healthy bounce rate is 2% or lower. There are a number of other reasons an email may bounce:
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If it’s a temporary condition, such as a full inbox, it may be marked as a soft bounce.
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Your email marketing platform may have up to 20 types of bounces.
To reduce the frequency of bounced emails, use a clean email address list. A clean list only has legitimate email addresses that opted into receiving your messages. Cleaning your list reduces its size, but improves your metrics with more accurate data.
Click-Through Rate
The primary goal of email marketing is to entice your audience to click a link in your email campaign. Your CTR measures the number of unique clicks in an email, divided by the number of emails successfully delivered. Generally, the more relevant your message is to your audience, the higher your CTR. Some marketers see high open rates but low click-through rates. This likely indicates the message sparks interest, but the internal content fell flat. A healthy CTR is 5%. That being said, you want this metric to be as high as possible.
Use your email metrics to learn what valuable information your audience wants to receive from you. When you act on what you’ve learned from your email marketing analytics, you can improve your metrics and grow your audience’s loyalty.
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