Email Metrics That Actually Matter (and the Ones You Should Ignore)

It's true that there's no better way to engage with your audience and expand it than through email marketing. But to know whether or not you're utilizing email marketing the right way requires assessment of the correct data. Email marketers are inundated with a plethora of tracked metrics and accessible data. However, not all email metrics mean something. Some are imperative to a campaign's success; others are just vanity metrics. Knowing the difference will encourage better, more efficient decisions faster.

Open Rates: Still Useful, but With Caution

Open rates are an email marketing metric that's been around forever. After all, if someone opens an email, one would think that means high engagement. But with the increase in email privacy across platforms (looking at you, Mail Privacy Protection from Apple), tracking open rates is more complicated. In addition, when people say they've opened an email, it's Apple (or another email client) opening it in the background without the sender knowing. Tools to check your email templates can help assess how your emails render across different devices and platforms, allowing you to better understand visibility even when open tracking becomes unreliable.

But even if open rates are not a concrete number to depend upon, they still provide insight comparatively. For example, one can see how effective subject lines are through A/B testing based on open rates. One can also see increases or decreases over time. But one should never assume an open rate based on a snapshot to guide strategy. Open rates as a singular entity are directional but not necessarily definitive.

Click-Through Rates: A Strong Indicator of Engagement

One of the most important email marketing metrics is click-through rate (CTR), since it shows real engagement. If someone clicks on a link in an email, they're not just passively scrolling through you have their eyeballs and they are taking action. CTR will inform you as to whether you've done your job with compelling content and whether your calls to action get people moving in the next step direction.

CTR is also a great metric for following followers down the funnel and determining conversion rates. For example, if your open rate is stellar but your CTR is low, it's clear your content is not living up to the premise of the subject line. At the same time, should you see clicks coming in consistently on the same type of links, you can profile those users for interest for a more targeted, more successful campaign down the line.

Conversion Rates: The Ultimate Performance Measure

Conversion rate is the final word in whether you've succeeded because it's better than engagement. Whereas opens and clicks indicate interest and engagement, conversion rate indicates results. It's the percentage of those who completed the action you wanted once they clicked purchased, signed up for a webinar, downloaded a guide for anything you wanted to achieve through emailing. This metric is most important to evaluate because it's tied directly to revenue generation.

Conversion rate gives you perspective on everything else achieved during your performance. If you have a good email open rate and click-through rate, but the conversion rate is low, you didn't make sales, and that's a failed campaign. Conversely, if your rates are average, but the conversion rate is high, you've done great, even with natural imperfections. To ensure you're calculating this properly, your tracking should align with website analytics and CRM. Knowing your ROI helps you adjust for future campaigns with a measurable goal in mind.

Bounce Rates: Vital for List Health

Hard and soft bounce rates are key performance indicators of email list quality. A hard bounce indicates that an email address does not exist or is inactive; a soft bounce indicates a temporary problem, such as a full mailbox or a busy server. Yet when these rates are too high and sustained, they endanger sender reputation and jeopardize future deliverability.

Thus, monitoring bounce rates over time is an effective way to maintain a clean and working email list. Hard bounces should be removed; soft bounces should be corrected. Failing to do so has ISPs consider your legitimate email marketing endeavors as spam. This is not merely for cosmetic purposes it ensures the long-term effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.

Unsubscribe Rate: A Subtle but Telling Signal

No email marketer wants a high unsubscribe rate, but this metric serves more good than meets the eye. Unsubscribes are not necessarily a sign of failure; ironically, low, consistent unsubscribes show that the email list is well-targeted. These people opened and engaged with your email enough to realize it wasn't meant for them and chose to opt out instead of reporting you as spam or completely ignoring your outreach.

An unsubscribe is an authentic transaction of your ask. It's transparent and clear that someone does not want to receive what you're putting out into the world anymore. While it stings for a moment, it's better than people blindly deleting your email without an open or flagging it as spam. In the meantime, those who aren't interested can skew your overall engagement when they fail to respond to your call-to-action (CTA). In the long run, this can hurt deliverability rates, sender scores, and other metrics leading to your demise. So it's better to let them go for good.
But when unsubscribe rates spike, that's a red flag.

If a campaign generates an unsubscribe rate much higher than your typical tolerance rate, investigate. Something went wrong; maybe it was off-topic from normal engagement. Maybe it was poorly worded, overstuffed with promotions without legitimate reader value. Sometimes, you can see an influx in unsubscribes from an otherwise random increase in sends or a dramatic change in design flow for many emails; if it doesn't match up with the aesthetic the subscriber is accustomed to, they'll leave.

Use unsubscribes to your advantage; don't take them personally. Assess where, when, and why different email campaigns get unsubscribed versus not if they're very revealing. Are there some campaigns that get unsubscribed across the board while others do not? Do certain subject lines get a poor response consistently? Which lists seem more susceptible to good content and good messaging? Finding the answers to these inquiries can assist you in more precise targeting and more effectively engaging with relevant content. Additionally, consider how your unsubscribe process works. When people can leave your list on their terms, they will appreciate your brand more (albeit as they're leaving). A preference center, for instance, gives subscribers the chance to adjust how often they hear from you versus an outright unsubscribe. It maintains the relationship and, in some cases, lowers avoidable unsubscribes by providing people with more power.

Ultimately, unsubscribes should not be feared; they should be honored. Yes, the goal is always to grow your list, but growing the right list is so much more impactful. Five thousand subscribers who are engaged mean so much more than fifty thousand who don't even open your emails. By letting these people go, you're fostering a positive atmosphere for your email marketing campaign and you're doing so in a way that portrays your brand as trustworthy. Unsubscribes (the right way) allow you to master your deliverability and trust of your brand.

Ignore Vanity Metrics That Don’t Drive Strategy

Vanity metrics are numbers worthy of print but fail to translate into action. For example, total emails sent, total subscribers, total opens (absent percentage contrast) are all vanity metrics. While they assess where a brand stands amongst competition in the industry, they rarely assess value determinations for decision-making that would make campaigns better.

Having an extensive email list means nothing if no one actively engages with your brand. Conversely, having sent a million emails doesn't mean you're doing your job successfully in terms of reaching people. It means you have a million emails that people don't want to engage with. It's not about how many ears you have; it's about how well people react to what you have to offer. Don't aim for printed covers of Vanity Fair. Value what metrics mean something.

Engagement Over Time: The Long-Term View

Possibly one of the most overlooked, yet potent, email marketing metrics is engagement over time. People are so focused on how a particular campaign performed, how many opened, clicked, converted, etc. that it's hard to understand what those metrics mean in a vacuum. But over time weeks, months, quarters they can give a better overall picture of how subscribers behave and what's possible regarding engagement.

For example, you can see if people are engaging with emails in the welcome series immediately and extending that interest beyond the series or if people drop off after the first few. You can see if educational content gets the same engagement every month or if a quarterly promotion performs well only in December. You can even see if Tuesdays have better engagement rates than Fridays. These insights inform your editorial calendar and your send cadence so that you aren't operating from a place of post-facto action but rather, educated awareness.

Additionally, long-term measurement allows you to determine subscriber lifecycle milestones. For example, if you notice new subscribers engaging heavily in month one but falling off shortly after, you can use this information to create specific re-engagement workflows to try and win them back before they churn. The same goes for those who engage steadily; you can identify those as your champion brand advocates and give them something for their troubles.

Focusing on the long-term and adding in segmentation can be even more effective. Different populations engage over time differently. One group might engage like crazy when you have a big winter sale, while another group might engage like crazy consistently for your evergreen learnings. All of these insights help further personalize your efforts and use email marketing efforts more effectively.

The other benefit of measuring engagement over time is that it contextualizes outliers. One email may have an exceptional CTR, and you think it's enough, but if that subsequent week is abysmal in engagement for the following few weeks, it speaks to efforts that are not sustainable or that provide unrealistic promises. Yet one campaign that may not do well in week one might contribute to subscriber retention in month four something that someone watching long term will understand.

Engagement over time aids in email list hygiene. Instead of taking the opportunity to remove inactive users who haven't opened three emails, you can better gauge engagement spans. This means you're less likely to gamble and remove someone who might re-engage too quickly, but you're also ensuring that those who are inactive are filtered out in a timely fashion to avoid continued deliverability issues and sender reputation problems.

Ultimately, long-term performance trumps short-term success. While a huge spike today may be impressive on the leaderboard, sustained engagement results in sustainable growth, revenue, and brand equity. Additionally, when you track engagement over time, you're not only judging what's working you're establishing a campaign continuity that improves upon itself.