Tracking and evaluating your email marketing performance is the ultimate way to get to know an audience, build upon what works, eliminate what doesn’t, and make a strategy the best it can be.
Plans to measure, evaluate, and analyze should be woven into a campaign from the very beginning. And at every stage, marketers need to think about measurability.
The first step? Learn which email marketing metrics which will be most useful as key performance indicators (KPIs), how to draw the best insights from measurements, and how to evaluate ongoing performance.
Create a measurement plan for your email campaigns in 3 steps
Knowing which email marketing metrics to track is part of a comprehensive email marketing strategy. Without a plan, you're flying blind, missing out on valuable insights that could transform your campaigns.
A good email marketing metrics measurement plan helps you understand what resonates with your audience and what falls flat. Here's how to build one that works for your business:
1. Choose your timing.
You should track email performance on an ongoing basis. But before setting email marketing metrics, it’s a good idea to establish a tracking schedule—whether that’s weekly, monthly, or campaign by campaign.
At any rate, you can check progress against benchmarks and previous performance, which makes it easy to spot patterns of improvement or decline.
These can then be marked against a specific type of email campaign, a particular customer segment, product type, or external factors that could be impacting the campaign’s performance.
2. Outline your goals and objectives
Performance tracking has to be relevant to the campaign goals and objectives. At a very early stage of strategizing, it’s important to establish clear goals and objectives. When defining these, think hard about how measurable they are and how that measuring can be done.
3. See what’s working (and what’s not)
Analysis can also shed light on the type of content that is engaging your subscribers by analyzing the links or imagery that have driven the most clicks.
By analyzing your audience’s behavior, you’re able to learn more about them, like what interests them or which content isn’t effective in driving any action or engagement.
Find the right email marketing metrics for your business
Email KPIs are metrics that help you understand how your campaigns perform.
When you use a marketing platform to send emails, it tracks the rate at which your emails are received, opened, clicked, and more. This data is summarized in reports that show how your marketing emails perform over time, in comparison to each other, and against industry email marketing statistics.
To get the most out of your reports and create a measurement plan, it’s important to know what each KPI means and which KPIs are most meaningful for your business.
Open rate
Open rate compares the number of emails opened by recipients against the total number of emails delivered. (Take note if your platform counts re-opens as initial opens. If so, the true open rate is likely to be slightly lower than the data indicates.)
A/B testing different subject lines can provide you with more insight into what compels your subscribers to open your emails and what doesn’t.
Similar data—like how many times the campaign was opened by recipients who were forwarded the campaign, when the email was last opened, and which subscribed contacts opened the campaign the most—can also help you assess engagement.
The open rate is significantly influenced by subject lines, so investing time in crafting compelling, relevant subject lines that speak to your audience's pain points or interests can make a real difference in your campaign performance.
Click-through rate and click-to-open rate
Click rate provides the percentage of total email recipients who clicked any tracked link in the campaign, ultimately measuring subscriber engagement with our email. When a contact clicks on a link, it indicates that they are interested in the content, so it’s a useful metric for measuring engagement, as well as to optimize with A/B testing.
The click-to-open rate is slightly different. It measures the percentage of recipients who opened the email and clicked a link without taking into account how many emails were sent out.
These email marketing metrics work together to give you a fuller picture of your email performance. While click-through rate shows overall engagement across your entire audience, click-to-open rate tells you how compelling your content is once people actually read it.
Both are valuable for understanding different aspects of your campaign's effectiveness.
Bounce rate
Bounces occur when an email is rejected by an email server. This data is useful for keeping your audience organized and for tracking deliverability. A low bounce rate contributes to a good sender reputation.
A high bounce rate means that content is going undelivered (and unseen), which lowers your sender reputation. There are 2 types of bounces—a hard bounce or a soft bounce.
A hard bounce means the email couldn’t be delivered for a permanent reason, like the email address doesn’t exist. A soft bounce indicates a temporary reason, like an inbox that’s full.
Email deliverability/delivery rate
Deliverability rate measures the percentage of emails that actually reach your recipients' inboxes rather than being filtered into spam folders or blocked entirely.
This metric goes beyond just whether an email bounced — it tells you if your emails are actually making it to where people can see them. A good deliverability rate typically falls between 95-98%, and anything lower suggests you need to work on your sender reputation, email authentication, or list hygiene.
Unsubscribe rate
Unsubscribes indicate the people who have opted out of your audience. Although there will always be people who choose to unsubscribe, assessing data gives you a sense of whether or not you’re sending content that’s valuable to your target audience.
People unsubscribe from marketing emails for lots of different reasons, but peaks in unsubscribe rates could indicate issues which need to be addressed. This is also an important metric to measure when monitoring your deliverability.
New subscribers
New subscriber rate tracks how many people are joining your email list over a specific period. This metric helps you understand if your lead generation efforts are working and whether your list is growing at a healthy pace.
It's not just about the numbers, though — you want to pay attention to the quality of these new subscribers and how engaged they are with your content. A steady flow of new subscribers helps offset natural list churn and keeps your audience fresh and engaged.
Device statistics
Device statistics tell you which devices your audience uses to read your marketing emails, and that data is very useful. Different devices display email content in different ways, so it’s important to optimize for the most likely device when designing content.
If certain devices can be broadly matched to certain segments, this could potentially make a huge difference to the way in which these segments experience the content they’re sent.
For example, if younger demographics are more likely to open emails on a smartphone, content for this segment should be designed with smartphones in mind.
Spam score
Spam score, also known as spam complaints or spam complaint rate, measures the rate at which contacts mark your emails as spam.
A high spam score shows that your audience doesn’t find value in what you send them. This sends a signal to the internet service providers (ISPs) that they are not interested in hearing from your brand anymore.
This can start to impact your sender reputation, which impacts deliverability. Here are some tips to build an email list that will help you avoid being marked as spam.
See how your email campaign performance impacts your business overall
Understanding the impact of email campaigns on your marketing KPIs involves more data, but it's important to measure. Sure, it's great to know that people are opening and clicking your emails, but what really matters is how those actions translate into real business results.
Are your emails actually driving sales? Are they bringing in new customers or keeping existing ones engaged?
The truth is that email shouldn't exist in a vacuum. It needs to connect to your bigger business goals, whether that's increasing revenue, growing your customer base, or boosting customer loyalty.
When you start tracking how your email campaigns influence these broader objectives, you get a much clearer picture of their true value.
There are a few go-to marketing KPIs that can show how your emails contribute to your overall objectives. These email marketing metrics include:
Conversion rate
Conversion rate measures the percentage of your audience that takes the action you want them to.
For example, if the goal of your email is to get people to sign up for an event online, the conversion rate measures the number of people who do so as a percentage of those who received your email.
Establishing a clear conversion rate is an important metric for evaluating the overall success of your email marketing activities.
ROI
Return on investment (ROI) measures how cost-effective an email campaign is. The mathematical formula is: (profit minus cost) / cost. If you made $10,000 from a $1,000 effort, your return on investment (ROI) would be 0.9, or 90%.
On average, email is the digital marketing channel with the highest ROI at £42 for every £1 spent in 2019. If profit is part of a campaign’s aim, calculating ROI is highly relevant.
CLV
Customer lifetime value (CLV) indicates how much money a customer is predicted to spend with your business for the duration of your relationship with that individual.
The calculation is based on their average purchase value, the average frequency that they purchase from you, their average customer value, and your business’s customer lifespan. This is a very important metric that acknowledges the worth of retaining contacts in your audience.
CPA
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is how much you spend to gain a new customer. For email marketing campaigns, you can find this number with this formula: total campaign cost / conversions (paying customers) = CPA. This also indicates how successful your campaign was.
Keep in mind that other aspects of email performance aren't just about the emails themselves. Your email marketing efforts don't end when someone clicks through to your website.
What happens next is just as crucial for measuring true campaign success. The journey from email to conversion often depends on how well your landing pages align with your email content and fulfill the promises made in your message.
Tracking performance beyond the inbox gives you valuable data points about the complete customer experience.
Are people bouncing immediately after clicking through? Are they spending time engaging with your content? Are your calls to action compelling enough to drive the desired behavior?
These insights help you understand whether your emails are attracting your target audience and whether your follow-up experience is optimized for conversion.
This holistic view is particularly important for subscriber acquisition campaigns, where the goal isn't just getting clicks but actually converting visitors into customers or leads.
By monitoring the entire funnel from email open to final conversion, you can identify exactly where you're losing potential customers and make targeted improvements to boost your overall campaign effectiveness.
Turning measurements into action
Of course, the most accurate email marketing metrics in the world are useless if they’re not used to guide change. Successful email marketing relies on your ability to draw insights from the data and applying them in valuable ways.
For example, a high click rate on smartphones but not on desktops may demonstrate that emails aren’t as well optimized as they could be for desktop users. That’s easy to rectify, but it requires some human understanding to make the initial intuitive leap.
A good email marketing platform will gather and report important email metrics. But the real trick is to apply the human touch to those graphs and figures. When the measurements show a dip in engagement, look at the relevant data, compare them with any relevant context, and figure out what’s causing the problem. Then use creative tactics to steer the campaign back on track.
The more you can measure your success, the better their campaigns will be both on a short and long-term basis.
Written by Jenna Tiffany for Mailchimp. Jenna is an expert in digital marketing strategies.
Key Takeaways
- Create a structured measurement plan with clear timing, goals, and analysis methods to turn data into actionable insights.
- Monitor key email metrics like open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and deliverability to understand audience engagement.
- Track business impact through conversion rates, ROI, customer lifetime value, and cost per acquisition.
- Use email marketing metrics to identify what's working and make strategic adjustments for better campaign performance.