You’ve hit ‘send’ on your email. Congratulations! But wait… your work isn’t done quite yet.

Just because your email is out in the world doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax. Email marketing won’t work when it’s in a vacuum. You need to know if it’s doing its job. Otherwise, you could be wasting valuable time and money. This makes sending your email only step one.

Step two is checking to see if that email has achieved the goal you set for it because every email you send should have a single goal – whether that’s driving traffic to a blog post, increasing sales, or simply updating your subscribers on your latest news.

This check-in comes in the form of email marketing metrics. A topic that may seem confusing and pointless to some, especially if you don’t understand all of those statistics on your dashboard and what they really mean for your small business.

And that’s where I hope this post can help.

When to Track Email Marketing Metrics

Before we dig into ‘what’ you should be tracking, let’s briefly discuss the ‘when’ of email metrics. 

First, you should track these metrics for every email you send your subscribers. This includes any promotional campaigns, broadcast emails, or newsletters you send to your list.

Second, you should check your metrics – at minimum – 24 hours after your email has hit inboxes, as most of your list will have interacted (or not) with your email within the first 24 hours of its lifespan. If your readers take a little longer to bite into your emails, or you send emails over the weekend, consider tracking your metrics on the 3-4 day mark. Whichever you decide, be consistent with your recording time so you’ll have an accurate, timely record of what’s happening and when.

And as a best practice, consider building time into your email creation process to review the metrics for your last few emails when you start working on your next email campaign so you can determine if you need to be making any changes.

What Email Metrics to Track

Now, let’s dig into the actual metrics you should be keeping an eye on.

When it comes to email marketing, there are only seven metrics you need to track when monitoring the health of your email program. And we can break them down into three categories:

• Deliverability. How well you get emails into inboxes.
• Engagement. How well subscribers interact with your emails.
• Disengagement. How often subscribers show disinterest in your emails.

Let’s take a look at each category and the metrics you should track.

Deliverability Metrics

Success in email marketing starts with getting your emails into your subscriber’s inboxes. And that success goes beyond having one sender emailer and one recipient email. Because email marketing only looks like a “one-to-one” communication. In reality, it’s a “one-to-many.”

To ensure your emails reach “the many,” you must be aware of two deliverability metrics: deliverability rate and bounce rate.

Delivery Rate

Email deliverability, or your delivery rate, lets you know if your emails reach people’s inboxes.

Your deliverability rate is calculated by dividing the number of delivered emails by the number of sent emails. For example, if your email list has 1,000 subscribers, but only 900 receive your email, you have a delivery rate of 90%.

(Delivered Emails / Sent Emails) x 100 = Delivery Rate

Bounce Rate

In the example above, 100 subscribers didn’t receive your email. The most common reason for this is that your email bounced, meaning the email provider kicked it back. This kickback comes in one of two forms: soft bounces and hard bounces.

Soft Bounce

A soft bounce is a temporary delivery issue that usually happens when a subscriber’s email inbox is full or temporarily unavailable. Usually, your email service provider or ESP (i.e., ConvertKit or MailerLite) will attempt to deliver your next email. However, if emails to this address continue to bounce, then your ESP will automatically reclassify them as hard bounces.

Hard Bounce

Hard bounces are permanent bounces, most often associated with email addresses that no longer exist or contain typos. In this instance, your ESP will segment hard bounces out from your list and won’t send future emails to them.

With both types of bounces, subscribers remain subscribed to your list but as inactive subscribers. Whether you’re charged for having them on your list will depend on your ESP’s policies.

Industry-wide, the average bounce rate sits between 1-2%. (I recommend staying close to or under 1%.) Anything higher than 2% puts you at risk of having your ESP suspending your account for violating Anti-Spam policies. So the fewer bounces you have, the better your deliverability rate (and overall engagement) will be.

Engagement Metrics

Once your emails reach your subscriber’s inbox, the next hurdle is getting them to engage with your email. And there are three types of interaction subscribers can do that indicate their level of engagement: open an email, click on a link in an email, and share/forward an email.

Open Rate

Email engagement starts with the first mouse click when your subscriber decides to either trash an email or open it. Of course, we want them to do the latter. And the key to open rates is an enticing subject line and preview text.

Subject Lines. Your subject line should offer value and encourage readers to open the email so they can find out more. Let your readers know, in as few words as possible, what’s inside the email in a way that will encourage them to take action.

The best way to think of your subject line is as the tagline for a book or movie. Its sole purpose is to pique your interest and encourage you to read the book or watch the movie.

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” – Star Wars: A New Hope

“Winning will make you famous. Losing means certain death. – The Hunger Games

Obviously, you wouldn’t use these as your actual subject line. But they give you an idea of how a short sentence can entice and spur further action.

Consider these options (courtesy of MailerLite):

• This is not another boring email, {subscriber’s name}! It’s good news!
• Welcome, {subscriber’s name}! I have exciting news inside.
• Life happens. And so do giveaways.
• A special coupon just for you!
• Following up on today’s webinar

Preview Text. Also known as preheader text, the preview text is the line of text that appears directly beneath the subject line in your inbox. It offers a short summary of the email and is a second opportunity to entice your subscriber to open your email.

By default, email clients (like Gmail) will automatically display the first line of your email’s content in this area. But you have no control over how much is shown or how it looks, which means you could get something like this: Hi Joe, You aren’t going to believe what – and then suddenly it cuts off.

No one likes it when someone stops talking mid-sentence. It’s frustrating and, frankly, a little rude.

Try this alternative instead – customize your preview text with a message that helps encourage more email opens.

Sadly, this is something few marketers are taking advantage of. In fact, according to MailerLite, 90% of email campaigns don’t use custom preview text.

Remember, your preview text should reinforce the value in your subject line and share another nugget of enticing information.

Here are a few examples using some of the subject line examples above:

Subject Line: Following up on today’s webinar

Preview Text: Don’t forget to enter to win a free one-on-one consultation with me.

Subject Line: This is not another boring email, {subscriber’s name}! It’s good news!

Preview Text: My newest book, {book title}, is available for pre-order! Reserve your copy.

The secret to successful open rates lies in the exciting and enticing one-two punch of subject lines and preview text. Together, they can help you stand out in an overcrowded inbox and get more eyeballs on your actual emails.

Industry-wide, the average open rate sits around 37.65% (MailerLite), but depending on your industry could range from 15%-46% depending on who compiles the statistics. So a good email open rate to target is between 17-28%.

If you’re interested in taking a closer look at the benchmark for your industry, check out one of these benchmarking resources from MailChimp or MailerLite.

Keep in mind that in September of 2021, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) went into effect. The goal of MPP is to protect end-user privacy, and it works by masking users’ IP addresses and preventing senders (meaning you) from knowing whether a subscriber has opened your email or not. With approximately 53% of all Apple clients using accounts that employ MPP, the above benchmarks can appear higher than they actually are.

So the best way to monitor open rate is internally. Keep track of the open rate for each email campaign you send out, then compare those numbers against each other. If you typically average 25% and then get an email with only 12%, you’ll know that something is off. You’ll know your emails are performing optimally if you consistently hit that 25% open rate.

Click Rate

Congratulations! If you’re now looking at click metrics, you’ve successfully gotten your subscribers to open your emails. Now you need to know whether they’re reading your email and finding it compelling enough to interact with it.

And in our consumer privacy-driven world (looking at you, Apple MPP), this makes click rate, by far, the most accurate metric to monitor when tracking overall engagement.

What classifies as a click?

Registered clicks can come from any text, button, or image with an embedded hyperlink that takes readers to a website, social media profile, embedded social media posts, downloadable files, surveys/quizzes, or a sharing platform (such as an email client).

The successful click steams from a strong call-to-action (CTA) that’s relevant to your email’s content and compels your reader to act.

Click rates industry-wide average around 3.36 % (MailerLite) but can range between 1%-6% depending on your specific industry.

Share/Forward Rate

Technically, the share/forward rate falls under the umbrella of click rate. But it’s a different kind of click, one you should track separately.

If a subscriber forwards your email to a friend or shares it on social media, that counts as a click. But most email service providers will track this number separately so you can see if your content is being shared. If they do, consider tracking this separately from your regular clicks.

Disengagement Rate Metrics

There’s nothing worse in email marketing than an unengaged list. And keeping subscribers engaged comes down to carefully balancing three things: sending the right content, to the right person, at the right time. If just one of these is off, it can turn away a subscriber who may actually be your ideal customer.

When it comes to disengagement metrics, there are two you should be looking at: spam complaints and unsubscribes.

Spam Complaints

Spam isn’t just about trigger words in subject lines that get you dumped into a junk folder. It’s tied more to how you use your emails to communicate with your customers. And this is where a strong email marketing strategy comes into play, as it can elevate and even prevent many spam-related issues.

But spam complaints are inevitable and not something you should fear. There will always be someone out there who won’t be happy with your emails. Your goal is to keep this number to as few as possible, below 0.1% if possible.

Unsubscribes

Unsubscribes are subscribers who, for whatever reason, have decided they don’t want to receive your emails anymore. And that’s fine. People’s interests and needs change. The solution to the problem they were trying to solve when they first subscribed may no longer be a solution you offer. They may not even have that problem anymore.

Wish them well and let them go. After all, an unsubscribe is better than a spam complaint. So gracefully follow their wishes and bid them adieu. They can always come back later if they change their mind. And their departure will help keep your list clean and your overall engagement numbers up. Remember, and I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating – a small but engaged list is better than a large and inactive one.

But what does it mean if someone unsubscribes when your content is still relevant to them? It means there could be problems with your overall list health, acquisition practices (how they get on your list), permission settings and segmentation, or content plan. By monitoring your unsubscribe rate and why people are leaving, you can keep tabs on the overall health of your email list.

A healthy unsubscribe rate to aim for should be less than 1-2%.

Start Tracking Your Email Marketing Metrics Today

Now that you (hopefully) have a better understanding of email metrics and their meaning, it’s time to start tracking whether or not all the hard work you’re putting into writing those emails is paying off.

To help with that, I’ve created an Email Marketing Metric Tracker that you can download to easily keep track of your findings. Not only does it have a fillable tracker. It also includes the metric definitions, so you’ll always have a guide to what each metric means close at hand.

Overall List Performance Metrics

The metrics outlined above are used for tracking the performance of individual emails. But its also helpful to track the health of your entire subscriber list.

The overall performance of your list is something you should look at monthly and consists of three categories (which should look pretty familiar at this point):

• Growth
• Engagement
• Disengagement

Growth is the only new category here, but it’s pretty self-explanatory. How well is your list growing? And there are two new metrics for monitoring growth: total subscribers and new subscribers.

Total Subscribers

Total subscribers are the total number of subscribers who have signed up for your list. Depending on your email service provider, this could include only active subscribers or both active and inactive subscribers.

New Subscribers

New subscribers are the number of new people joining your list in a set period of time, typically tracked daily or in 7- to 30-day increments depending on your email service provider. I recommend a minimum of monthly, but if you send a lot of emails (we’re taking multiple emails a week), you may consider tracking this number more often.

And there you have it!

That’s everything you need to get started monitoring the performance of your email marketing efforts and figuring out what’s working and what’s not.

Ready to improve your email marketing metrics? Discover the steps you can take to improve your deliverability, engagement, and disengagement metrics.