After rolling out an email marketing campaign, a time will come when you need to analyze its performance and present your findings to others. When that happens, you’ll need to create an email marketing report that presents all your data and web analytics information in one place.
Once you begin preparing your report, you may wonder, “What should go into it?” What data points and metrics should be the report’s focus? This article aims to clarify the matter. We reveal nine key email marketing metrics to consider when creating an email marketing report.
But first;
What is an email marketing report?
An email marketing report is a document that contains email campaign performance and (occasionally) Google Analytics data. It presents key metrics decision-makers can use to draw actionable insights from the campaign’s performance and is sometimes presented as a monthly summary.
The data in email marketing reports can reveal insights such as:
- The percentage of people who opened the campaign’s email (open rates)
- The percentage of people who clicked on links in the email body (campaign click-through rates)
- How many subscribers made purchases based on the campaign (conversion data)
- How many people unsubscribed from your email list during a given period (unsubscribe rates)
Naturally, the email performance data included in an email marketing report can shape existing and future email campaigns. In addition to giving marketers an insight into customer engagement, it helps them adjust marketing content and adapt their marketing strategies.
Meanwhile, decision-makers can use the insights to make decisions on marketing budgets, lead-generation tactics, and so on.
Why you should track email marketing metrics
Here are a couple of reasons why it makes sense to grab an email marketing report template and start tracking your campaigns’ key metrics.
- Measure effectiveness: Tracking email marketing metrics gives you key data that provides insights into your campaign’s effectiveness. In just a few clicks, you can understand how your campaign is performing, identify trends (e.g., engagement trends), and make effective decisions on where to focus your efforts. You’ll have information like engagement growth, return on investment, and more at your fingertips.
- Improve deliverability: A key foundational component determining a campaign’s success is the number of emails that reach the audience’s inboxes. The data in an email marketing reporting template can provide insights into the campaign’s deliverability rate. You can glean the percentage of emails that never reach subscribers, understand why, and make the necessary deliverability improvements.
- Boost ROI: Some email marketing metrics tell you how much revenue you earn for every email sent. Others tell you how your audience is engaging with your content. In both cases, having this knowledge can help you make decisions that boost your return on investment and turn around an underperforming campaign.
- Test and refine your strategy: Email marketing metrics can help you decide which direction to take your campaigns. When combined with A/B testing, you can deploy two versions of the same campaign, collect data, and go with the better-performing one.
Additionally, these metrics are excellent for refining existing campaigns. A detailed analysis can uncover areas in your campaigns that could use refinement.
The above reasons should provide more than enough incentive to track email marketing metrics.
Key metrics to track for your email marketing report
When analyzing your Google Analytics email data, pay close attention to the following email marketing metrics:
1. Open rate
If your subscribers or prospects don’t open your email marketing campaigns, you won’t be able to nurture them, let alone convert them. For this reason, email open rates are among the key metrics to track when determining the success (or failure) of an email campaign.
As its name suggests, an email open rate accounts for the number of subscribers that open an email. It’s typically expressed as a percentage figure and is one of the most important metrics due to its close link to an email’s subject line.
Tracking email open rates can be extremely valuable. The activity tells you how effective your subject lines are and reveals the outsized role they play in moving your email marketing campaigns forward.
If your email open rates are low, there’s a high chance that your subject lines need adjusting. Research reveals that as high as 33% of email client users base their decision to open an email on its subject line.
You can calculate your open rates by using the following formula:
For example, if you send out 100 emails to 100 recipients and 10 of these emails get opened, you’ll have an open rate of 10% (10 /100 x 100 = 10%).
Our research reveals that the average global email open rate is 19.66%. However, email open rates should not be considered in isolation because they might not be very reliable. Instead, they should be analyzed alongside other metrics like CTR.
In summary, email open rates are integral to your email campaigns and should feature in any email marketing report you generate. Check out our in-depth guide if you want to learn how to write compelling subject lines.
2. Click-through rate (CTR)
When you send emails, you’ll likely include at least one link. This link could be the email’s main call-to-action or one that leads to your website, blog, or other web properties.
Click-through rate is the metric you use to track the number of clicks your links generate. It’s expressed as a percentage of the subscribers who clicked on the link, and you can calculate it using the formula below:
Regarding what a good click-through rate is, our research reveals that the average CTR for newsletters is 3.84%, while trigger emails stand at 5.02%.
Click-through rates must feature in the reports generated by your automated reporting tool because they help you gauge engagement. Link click-throughs give you an idea of how many engaged subscribers your email marketing campaigns generate.
As with email opens, high CTRs are desirable because they show you’re doing something right. The opposite is true for low click-throughs, which indicate that your marketing copy isn’t convincing enough to make your subscribers take action.
For the best results, let your marketing team use A/B testing when analyzing clicks. The team can create two versions of the same email campaigns and see which one generates the most clicks.
This campaign performance data will not only make their email marketing reporting more accurate but also aid the development of future email campaigns.
3. Conversion rate
When rolling out campaigns, one of your goals should be that your email marketing efforts result in your subscribers taking a specified action. The action could be anything from signing up for your app, purchasing one of your products, or responding to a survey.
When your subscribers take the action you want, the campaign is said to have successfully converted them. Your campaign’s conversion rate measures how many of these subscribers you were able to convert.
As key performance indicators go, conversion rates are incredibly vital to measuring campaign effectiveness. They tell you how many subscribers answered your calls to action and are an excellent indication of effective marketing tactics.
Here’s how to calculate your conversion rate for inclusion in your email marketing reports—divide the number of subscribers who took action by the number of delivered emails and multiply the result by 100, as below:
Naturally, you should aim for higher conversion rates, whatever a conversion means for your campaign. They’re the most tangible proof that you’re making the right email marketing moves.
4. Bounce rate
In content marketing, bounce rate measures how much traffic lands on a site only to bounce away a few seconds later. In email marketing, it refers to the percentage of sent emails that “bounce” or fail to reach a target email address. You can calculate it by dividing the number of emails that bounce by the number of emails you’ve sent and multiplying the result by 100.
As to why your emails may bounce, the main culprits are either invalid email addresses or a low sender’s reputation. That said, an email performance report should account for two types of email bounces: a hard or soft bounce.
Soft bounce rates measure the number of emails that fail to deliver due to a temporary issue with a recipient’s email client. An example of an issue that can cause a soft bounce could be a lack of sufficient space for the email in a full inbox (memory-wise). Keeping track of soft bounces is important because they reveal the email addresses to which you may need to resend your emails.
In contrast, hard bounce rates reveal the number of email addresses to which you should not resend emails or send future campaigns.
Sending or resending emails to these addresses will be a waste of time and resources. The issue responsible for your emails bouncing is fundamental and unfixable (e.g., a misspelled email address). Tracking hard bounces can help you keep your subscriber list clean.
It’s worth noting that external factors like invalid emails and packed inboxes may not be solely responsible for your campaigns experiencing high bounce rates. This metric may also be indicative of a faulty or spammy subject line. Whatever the cause, an email marketing platform like GetResponse can provide detailed analytics to help you make data-driven decisions.
5. Unsubscribe rate
Unsubscribe rates measure how many subscribers leave your mailing list in a given period. This metric is tied to audience engagement and indicates whether or not your audience finds your content engaging.
You calculate it by dividing the number of people who’ve unsubscribed by the number of emails sent before multiplying the result by 100.
Campaigns that experience high unsubscribe rates require content adjustments.
The unengaged subscribers who opt out of your list do so having decided that the content you send them is irrelevant to their interests or needs.
Conversely, a low unsubscribe rate points to engaged subscribers who appreciate your content.
Keeping track of this metric will help you fine-tune your content strategy and keep your active subscribers engaged and happy. For these reasons alone, no email marketing report is complete without it.
6. Spam complaint rate
The spam complaint rate is a metric that reveals the number of people who’ve reported your emails as “spam.” It also indicates how these people and the email service providers they use view your emails as originating from an untrustworthy source.
To arrive at this metric, you’ll need to divide the number of spam complaints you’ve received by the number of emails you’ve sent. Once done, you multiply the figure you get by 100.
Like bounce rates and open rates, this metric can make or break your future data-collection efforts and determine whether your campaign advances at all. If your emails never reach your recipients, you won’t be able to measure metrics like click-through rate or conversion rate. Not to mention the damage you’ll sustain to your sender’s reputation.
You’re more likely to grapple with high spam complaint rates when you purchase email lists or engage in cold emailing. Also, you may get reported as a source of spam if you send too many emails to people who legitimately joined your list.
Measures you can take to lower your spam complaint rate include:
- Avoid buying email lists and sending email blasts
- Send emails at an evenly-paced frequency (a handful each month)
Remember, your spam complaint rate determines whether you can advance your email marketing strategy. Include it in your email reporting to ensure that your future campaigns reach potential customers’ inboxes.
7. Revenue per email
Revenue per email is another essential email marketing campaign metric you must consider when you sit down to create email marketing reports. Also called revenue per email sent, this metric helps marketing teams:
- put a Dollar figure to email campaign performance, and
- determine how effectively they’re utilizing the budget powering their marketing emails.
The metric tells you how much revenue each of your delivered emails generates, so it must be included in an email campaign performance report.
To calculate it, divide the total revenue your campaign has earned by the number of delivered emails.
Let’s say you send 200 emails, 180 of which arrive in your subscribers’ inboxes. Your campaign generates $500 in sales. Based on the above formula, your revenue per email will be as follows:
500/200 = $2.5
Since email marketing campaign budgets vary, there isn’t a specific figure you could hold up as the standard revenue per email to strive for. That said, the amount you spend shouldn’t exceed the revenue you generate.
8. Engagement rate
Email engagement rate is a metric that measures the amount of engagement your email campaigns generate. By engagement, we mean actions a subscriber performs to show interest in an email’s contents. It offers valuable insights into how well your campaign’s message resonates with your target audience and can guide your planning for future content strategies.
This metric is quite unique because it encompasses other email metrics. Open rates, click-through rates, and conversions all represent actions your subscribers can take to show their engagement.
Additionally, it’s an essential metric to track because it’s typically a precursor for benefits like deeper customer loyalty and sales increases. When engagement leads to sales, it shows the strong link between a campaign’s engagement rate and its conversion rate.
The formula for calculating your campaign’s engagement rate is as follows:
Regarding what a good engagement rate is, use the average click-through rates and open rates discussed earlier as benchmarks.
If your engagement rate is too low, there are a few measures you can take to improve it. For example, you can implement email segmentation to divide your audience into groups based on demographic and psychographic factors. Then, create unique content targeting each segment.
9. Deliverability rate
As email marketing data metrics like spam complaint rates and bounce rates reveal, pressing “send” won’t guarantee that your emails reach your recipients. Your email deliverability rate is the antithesis of the two metrics.
A measure of email deliverability tells you the percentage of emails that reached your recipients’ mailboxes, hence why it should feature in your email campaign reports.
Use the formula below to calculate this metric:
A high deliverability rate indicates that:
- your recipients’ email clients are working as intended (and not causing soft bounces)
- your recipients’ email clients aren’t sending your emails to their spam folders; and
- you have few or no invalid email addresses on your list.
In contrast, a low deliverability rate indicates that you must improve your sender’s reputation or the contents of your email campaigns.
One thing worth mentioning is that you mustn’t confuse your deliverability rate with your delivery rate. Your deliverability rate tracks the percentage of emails that land in your subscribers’ inboxes, whereas delivery tracks the percentage of all emails delivered, irrespective of where they end up.
In closing
Tracking email marketing metrics is non-negotiable if you want your campaigns to perform well. Not only can it help you measure your campaign’s effectiveness, but you can also use the data to make improvements to email deliverability. That’s not mentioning the ROI boost you could get or the testing and refinements it helps you make.
A good report will also help you defend continued spending on email marketing campaigns to your superiors.
The key metrics to include in your email marketing reports are open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, spam complaint rate, revenue per email, engagement rate, and deliverability rate.
Track these metrics, and your campaigns will be on course to perform better than before.