12+ Most Important Email Marketing Metrics for eCommerce Businesses in 2024

Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to engage their customers. However, not all email marketing campaigns are created equal. You must actively track your results in order to decide how to make the most out of your efforts. This requires you to be acquainted with the main email marketing metrics. These metrics are data points that companies can use to better understand how successful they are at meeting their objectives.

Email marketing metrics also shed light on what a company should do to improve its chances of success. When searching for ways to drive sales, it’s especially important to monitor digital and email marketing campaign metrics. Marketing campaigns also consume a significant amount of time and resources for businesses. Monitoring important metrics, you will be able to learn which marketing strategies provide a high return on investment and which are less successful by monitoring marketing KPIs.

Depending on your objectives, determining which metrics to track and calculate will differ. For example, if you are attempting to increase sales of specific products through an email marketing campaign, you can concentrate on email metrics that focus on how often an opened email turns into a sale.

In this article, I will share with you the most important email metrics to track. Let’s jump right into the details!

What are email marketing metrics?

The goal of email marketing metrics is to help direct your campaigns into doing what you need them to do in order for them to be successful.

It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of your campaign using just one, two, or three metrics.

To obtain the best results, you must monitor a collection of measures known as a balanced scorecard.

It is difficult to determine the best email marketing metrics for your business. You will most likely go through multiple iterations before you find the ones that work for you and allow you to evaluate your business’s progress.

Tracking the right email marketing metrics will not only allow you to assess the outcomes of your email marketing campaign but will also allow you to review the success of your email campaigns against your overall goals.

The most important email marketing metrics to monitor

Once you’ve chosen to launch an email marketing campaign for your company, there are a few main metrics to keep an eye on.

Here’s a list of the most important email marketing benchmark metrics that any business owner should know.

Open Rate

Email open rate is one of the most important email marketing metrics to monitor. It basically indicates how many times your email has been opened. You can know a few things from your email open rate.

• Which headline is the best to get your subscribers to open your email?

• Which days do your emails get the most attention?

• What percentage of your email list interacts with your campaign on average?

Click-through Rate

The click-through rate of your email campaign is another email marketing metric that will be even more critical than your open rate.

This number indicates that your customer not only opened the email but also clicked the link in your email to visit your website to see the offer being made.

Businesses create their email list in order to increase the flow of revenue into their company. If your email recipients are not going to your website to check out your offer, your campaign will not be successful.

Read more: How to improve your email click-through rate?

Hard Bounces

Hard bounces are a serious issue, and ignoring them could land you in hot water. It occurs after you have sent an email to an address that no longer exists.

As a result, after each bounce, you can delete people from your list. Some email service providers do this for you, but you can do it yourself rather than sitting back and relaxing.

The penalty for not eliminating bounces is a 10% to 20% decrease in delivery rate, which is not good for your company.

Soft Bounces

Soft bounces happen when an email is sent to an inbox that is full. If the subscriber deletes a few messages from his or her inbox, your message will be sent to him or her.

In contrast to hard bounces, soft bounces are not a major concern. Pay attention, however, if the list consistently generates 2 or 3 percent soft bounces. It’s a hint that it’s time to do some list hygiene.

Read more: What is Bounce Rate?

Spam Score

Any marketer should be aware of their email spam score. Your spam score, also known as your complaint rate, indicates how many people have marked your emails as spam or junk.

This occurs on a regular basis. The higher your spam score, the more likely your email will end up in the spam folder.

Read more: Unlock The Reasons Why Your Emails Go To The Spam Box

Churn Rate

Many marketers are unaware of this metric. The churn rate for email marketing is the rate at which your email list needs to expand after subtracting unsubscriptions, complaints, and hard bounces.

This is an essential metric to know whether or not your email list is growing at a healthy rate. The average churn rate is around 25% per year.

This means that most advertisers would need to add 25% to their list every year just to keep it the same size.

List growth Rate

The list growth rate is the metric used to track how quickly the list is growing. This can be calculated by subtracting the number of new subscribers from the number of unsubscribes, then divide that result by the total number of emails on your list.

You’ll want to have a positive list growth rate to make sure that you’re getting new potential customers to replace the ones that have unsubscribed.

Delivery Rate

When it comes to email marketing, delivery rate (or deliverability) is also an important metric to remember.

Some businesses create a deliverability project and hire a third party to deliver their emails. A bad deliverability rate will be 80 percent or less. Anything more than 95% will be considered outstanding.

The majority of first-tier email service providers offer far more than 95 percent of the emails they send.

It is important to have a high deliverability rate because this is the medium through which you can connect with your potential customers. Low deliverability means that your sent emails are not getting the recipients’ inboxes.

Inbox Placement

This is quite similar to the deliverability score, which was previously listed as an email marketing metric.

Essentially, it determines if your email was sent to the subscriber’s inbox or to his/her bulk email. Inbox placement is essential, and increasing your email open or click-through rates is one of the best ways to increase it.

You can also boost your inbox placement by removing the email addresses of someone who hasn’t opened your email in the last six or twelve months.

Forward Rate

This is regarded as a happy rate. The forward rate is the percentage of your email campaigns that are forwarded by your subscribers when they believe it is worthwhile to share with their friends or family.

It is also known as the “referral rate.” When emails are forwarded, some businesses refer to it as sharing, while others consider social media shares as well.

Email Reply Rate

Email reply rate may not be at the top of the metrics list, but it is steadily gaining significance in recent years.

If you want to know how engaging your emails have been for your audience, the email reply rate will help.

It enables two-way interaction between the customer and the company. You can also learn what your customers expect or want from your company based on their responses to your email.

Email Conversion Rate

The percentage of customers who took the desired action after receiving an email is referred to as the email conversion rate.

The email conversion rate is determined by dividing the total number of converted recipients by the total number of delivered emails.

This metric enables businesses to calculate the percentage of customers who converted from the total number of emails sent.

Examples of which email metrics to track based on your goals

The purpose of your email marketing may differ greatly based on your goal, and it may even change over time.

But, once again, it’s important that you decide precisely what you want to achieve with your email marketing before you start (or continue) sending and measuring emails. Here are some examples of how to match your particular target to key metrics.

Email List Growth Rate

If your emphasis is on increasing the top of your funnel – bringing more traffic to your website, signing up more subscribers from your blog, getting more people to use your free resources – your target would most likely be to increase your subscription list.

Your emails would almost certainly include calls to action like “Subscribe to Our Blog” or “Join Our Weekly Email List.”

The most critical metric to monitor for this target is, of course, the growth rate of your subscription list.

Unengaging Subscribers

Just as you want to monitor and expand your subscribers, you should also keep an eye on your unengaging subscribers – and consider deleting them entirely from your list. Why is this so?

Since sending emails to people who aren’t interested in your emails (known as “graymail”) will reduce your email’s overall deliverability.

Low engagement rates will increase the likelihood of your emails getting thrown directly to your recipients’ “junk” inbox, implying that your emails will be sent but not be seen.

Number of new(or total) leads generated

Instead of concentrating on subscribers, maybe you’d like to concentrate on increasing lead generation.

If this is the case, you can submit emails with lead generation magnets, which allows the viewer to fill out their email in a capture form in order to access it.

If the aim of your email marketing is lead generation, you can keep track of how many leads you capture each day and month.

Depending on your strategy, you may choose to concentrate on all leads created or just new ones added to your database.

Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate

Finally, suppose you want to direct more of your marketing efforts toward the middle/bottom of your marketing funnel in order to turn more of your current leads into customers.

If this is your objective, the emails you send will most likely contain material that is more closely related to your company and its product or service.

“Get a demo,” “Watch a Video of Our Product in Action,” or “Start a Free Trial.” are all examples of calls to action. If this is your objective, you can track data in your lead-to-customer conversion rate.

As simple as this all seems, you’d be shocked how many email marketers set targets and then fail to monitor their progress against them.

Make sure you can monitor how close you are to your target at any point during the month and that you pay close attention to any changes in these metrics month after month.

Tools to Help You Track Your Email Marketing Metrics

Rather than simply throwing a bunch of identical email marketing tools at you and advising you on which one to use, I’ve chosen to cover various aspects of the email marketing process, with some overlap.

You may use the majority of them individually or combine them depending on your needs.

AVADA Email Marketing

AVADA Marketing Automation is one of the best tools on the market when it comes to email marketing.

This tool offers a wide range of features that enable small and large businesses to manage their email marketing from a single platform.

The functionality of AVADA Email Marketing is based on four main factors: a simple campaign builder, efficient email automation features, advanced list segmentation, and robust analytics.

Key Features:

• Allows you to build email campaigns with dozens of beautifully designed templates and a drag-and-drop email editor.

• Allows you to automate every aspect of your campaigns.

• Provides a robust analytics system, which enables you to track tons of email marketing metrics.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $9/month for 1,000 subscribers and unlimited emails.

Learn more here.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics doesn’t provide you with features to set up and run email marketing campaigns, but it does allow you to track a lot of important email marketing metrics.

This is why it should be used alongside an email marketing tool like AVADA Email Marketing.

Key Features:

• Integrates with email tools, websites, and apps.

• Supports tons of relevant email marketing metrics.

• Enables you to set up conversion goals and track them.

Price: Free

Final words

These are just some of the many email marketing metrics that can be tracked, but they are the most critical and goal-oriented metrics for your email marketing campaigns.

Although the other metrics are intriguing and can make you feel good about your email results, they are essentially vanity metrics. I hope this article has provided you with valuable information about email marketing metrics.