Left on read? Here are the 12 email KPIs to measure your campaigns by

Email campaigns are a key part of any digital marketing strategy. Not only can email outreach help with outbound lead generation, but it’s also a great tool for building a community and engaging an audience with thought leadership content, and exclusive content or offers for subscribing to your mailing list.

That being said, it can be hard to maximise the return on your email marketing efforts. It might feel hard to keep on top of the latest email trends and continue to engage your contact list, let alone lean into the data and ensure you’re optimising your campaigns based on what’s working best.

Being left on read is one of the most frustrating things for email marketers, but there are multiple ways to measure the success of your campaigns. Keeping on top of performance with these KPIs can help you better understand what’s working, and what might need revising.

To help you understand other email KPIs that can quantify your campaigns, we’ve pulled together 12 of the best email KPIs, to help you measure your marketing efforts.

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The 12 essential email key performance indicators

Open rate

Open rate is a percentage of recipients that open your email. It’s the best way to take a snapshot of the initial interest in your campaign. If email open rates are high, it likely means that you have used a captivating subject line that engages the recipient.

To improve your email open rates, the focus should be on your subject lines. Make them clear and concise first and foremost, and you could even create a sense of urgency or trigger curiosity. You may even wish to personalise them, by using the recipient’s name or tailored content that resonates with them. As a bonus, make sure your emails are mobile-friendly, as many recipients are likely to open them on their phone.

When you’re outreaching a campaign you should try A/B testing subject lines to gauge which is more engaging. That way, you can keep improving your outreach and give your emails the best chance of being opened as a starting point.

Email delivery rate

The email delivery rate is essentially the percentage of emails that successfully make it to the intended recipients’ inbox. There are multiple reasons why an email may not be delivered, one being it gets delivered to a recipient’s spam folder. If this is happening, no matter how good your content is, it won’t be seen.

As such, it’s important to regularly monitor your email delivery rate, in case your IP address is being blacklisted often. To avoid being marked as spam when sending your emails, make sure you avoid spammy language or excessive punctuation throughout your content, but also your subject line. Another way to build trust is to authenticate your domain, which can create trust between you and the email server.

From an audience perspective, to improve your email delivery rate, make sure you regularly clean your email list – you can do this by removing inactive, unsubscribed and invalid email addresses. You can also segment your list to target specific audiences, improving engagement rates and deliverability. By having a fresh list, you can ensure the audience data that you have to hand is as reliable as possible.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is an email KPI that is the percentage of emails not successfully delivered to recipients. It is different from the delivery rate as it indicates your sender’s reputation and the overall deliverability of your campaigns. A high bounce rate can be cause for concern and should be investigated, especially as it can indicate issues with the quality of your email list.

The same tips for improving your email delivery rate can be followed for minimising your bounce rate.

Click-through rate (CTR)

The percentage of recipients who click on a link within your email. It shows how compelling your email content is and whether it encourages action.

Email click-through rate, or CTR as it is commonly referred to, monitors whether or not recipients are clicking on a link within your email. It is worked out as a percentage. It’s particularly valuable when trying to understand your audience engagement, helping to refine and improve your email marketing strategy.

To ensure a high CTR, you should make sure that the email is relevant, engaging, and personalised for the recipient – make it compelling, and increase their chances of clicking! This personalisation can be made easier by segmenting your audience, to send targeted emails. You should also use a clear call-to-action (CTA) that encourages the recipient to do something.

It may be worth A/B testing some different wording variations, as well as different CTA button designs and placements, to see which combination encourages the most actions via the email outreach.

Forward rate

Forward rate details the frequency at which recipients are forwarding the content onto their own network, thus organically generating more leads for your campaigns.

Content being shared is a great indicator that the email content is resonating with your target audience. It also shows which email campaigns are the most popular and the strategy can be applied to future campaigns.

To increase the chances of your email being forwarded to a wider network, the emphasis should be on creating shareable content – in other words, content that adds value and that people want to share with others. This could include interesting articles, useful tips, or even exclusive deals/offers. In terms of the structure of your email and making this action easy, you could include a clear ‘forward to a friend button’, as well as options for sharing on social media.

Read time

One email KPI to judge how interesting, or not, your content is is read time. This measures how long email recipients spend reading your emails.

A short read time likely indicates that your content isn’t engaging, or there is simply too much of it. While this KPI isn’t an exact science, it is a good indicator of how well your campaigns are grabbing the reader’s attention.

To improve your email read rate, subject lines are the first thing to consider. Beyond that, your email content should be well-structured, visually appealing, and concise – and this all starts with an interesting introduction. Use storytelling techniques, or share valuable insights with your audience to keep them hooked. It’s also important to avoid sending emails very frequently, as this can put your audience off reading them.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of recipients who complete the desired action as part of your email campaign. That could be them filling out a form, signing up to something, or going all the way through the funnel and making a purchase after clicking through the email. This is one of the most vital KPIs for measuring how successful your email campaigns are.

One of the key ways to encourage users to take action is by offering an incentive (like discount codes) and creating urgency – not only do you want people to take action, but you want to prompt them to do it as soon as possible. Beyond the hook, you want to make sure your emails read well but are also visually appealing. Let the audience buy into you, your brand and whatever it is you have on offer.

Subscription rate

The subscribe rate refers to the percentage of website visitors that sign up to receive email communications from your company. It therefore reflects how well your email opt-in forms, and your campaigns to drive sign-ups, actually work for converting visitors into subscribers. Having a high subscriber count suggests that you’re pushing out relevant and interesting content, so much so your users are invested in it and want to stay connected.

You can improve your subscription rate by adding your email sign-up forms in prominent locations on the website. This may include on the homepage, on a pop-up, on services pages or even within blog posts. Quite often, offering an exclusive or at least some kind of incentive for signing up can really help your subscription rate.

Unsubscribe rate

An unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients that unsubscribe after receiving an email. If you have a high unsubscribe rate, it indicates that your content might not be hitting the mark and resonating with your subscribers, or even that you’re over-communicating with them. Having a high rate can also negatively impact your sender reputation, and of course your overall engagement.

To keep your unsubscribe rate to a minimum, you can focus on providing valuable and relevant content that is tailored to your subscribers. Spending your time segmenting your lists so you can send targeted emails based on user behaviour, demographics and preferences can certainly go a long way.

It’s also worth letting subscribers adjust their preferences. That way, they may choose to receive fewer emails as opposed to completely unsubscribing.

List growth rate

A list growth rate refers to the percentage at which your email list expands over a specific period of time. This metric helps gauge how effective your strategy is for attracting new subscribers and reaching a broader audience. If you have a strong growth rate, this indicates that your efforts are successfully attracting new customers.

To ensure you maintain a healthy email list growth rate, you could offer incentives, free resources, and exclusive content in exchange for a user signing up to receive your email communications. Make your CTAs visual and compelling, and then the sign-up forms are easily accessible and easy-to-use – the last thing you want is a user willing to sign-up, but they bounce off the website because it isn’t easy to navigate!

Email A/B testing results

Email A/B testing is a key part of any email marketing strategy – this involves comparing two variations of an email, with the idea of determining which performs better. When A/B testing, you should test one element at a time, and then you can truly measure the effectiveness of each. This might include testing subject lines, different call-to-action buttons, different layouts, and even sending times.

Then, analyse this data by assessing how each variant can impact key metrics like your open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. You can then identify the most effective ways of engaging your audience and optimising your campaigns in the future. This all ensures that your marketing efforts are tailored to your audience’s preferences, and most importantly are data driven.

Engagement over time

Email engagement over time measures how recipients are interacting with emails over a prolonged period of time. This can include monitoring key metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and open rates across multiple email marketing campaigns. If you have an increasing, or even steady, engagement rate that’s a positive indicator that your emails are relevant and thus engaging to your audience.

A/B testing various elements of your emails and using the data to then improve your campaigns is a great way to maximise engagement over time. Even something as simple as staying consistent with your email design and layout can build credibility and familiarity with your audience, which can boost long-term engagement.

Want to hear more about how to get your campaigns to land?

At Embryo, we understand the importance of effective communication to make your campaigns soar. Why not give us a call to see how we can help your business? We’d be happy to talk!