How to Measure Email #1.

Open Rate How to Measure Email

Marketing Campaign Marketing Campaign
Performance Performance
An email’s open rate is the percentage of people
who clicked on the email with the intent to read its MARKETING TIPS | MARCH
contents. This is generally considered as one of 15, 2019
the most important metrics to watch out for. If your https://www.omnisend.com/blo
email is left unopened, your message won’t get g/how-to-measure-email-
seen. marketing-campaign-
To boost your chances of having your email performance/
opened, there are two factors you need to
consider:(1) the subject line and (2) the preview
text. For best results, keep it short, simple, and
straightforward yet creative. Also, make sure your
email is personalized to your target audience’s
interests.

Formula: No. of emails opened / no. of emails

successfully delivered x 100

#2. Click Rate

The click rate or clickthrough rate (CTR) is the

percentage of those who clicked on any of the links
in your email. There are two kinds: unique clicks
and total clicks.

Unique clicks are those coming from different IP

addresses while total clicks include the overall
clicks including those from the same devices.

Your CTR will show you how effective your email

message is and how compelling your call to action
or link is. So, if you’re getting lots of opens but not
as many CTRs, it’s a telling sign that you need to
tweak your email’s message or CTA button.

Formula: Total no. of unique clicks / no. of emails

sent x 100

#3. Bounce Rate

You will need to track your bounce rate and

classify each of them if it’s ‘soft’ or ‘hard.’ A soft
bounce happens when a problem is due to a
recipient’s inbox or email exchange server, in
which case the email you sent gets stuck in server
limbo (usually temporary).
Hard bounces are what you should avoid, since
they mean you’ve contacted an invalid, inactive, or
non-existent email addresses with zero chances of
getting delivered. To make matters worse, your
ISP can track all these hard bounces and reduce
your sender score, which can affect email
deliverability in the future.

Formula: No. of bounced emails / no. of emails

sent x 100

#4. Conversion Rate

The ultimate goal of your email marketing

campaign is to get your target audience to convert.
This happens when someone clicks on your email
and takes the action you want them to take (such
as downloading an eBook, signing up for a
newsletter, or any other action listed in your
conversion goal).

Knowing your conversion rate will allow you to

determine if your email marketing campaign is
effective, from your subject line down to your CTA
and landing page.

Formula: No. of people who performed the desired

action (e.g. sign up or purchase) / no. of emails
delivered x 100

#5. Unsubscribe Rate

This is the rate of people who have unsubscribed

from your mailing list, which isn’t good for your
campaign. Although, it’s worth noting that the
unsubscribe rate doesn’t paint a reliable picture of
the health of your mailing list since many
subscribers who may have grown tired of receiving
emails from your brand won’t even bother going
through the formal unsubscribe process. They’ll
just stop opening your emails altogether.

The smarter approach to measure subscriber

engagement is through CTR and conversion rates.
From there, you can observe those who are
unengaged and eventually take them out of the
equation for a more accurate measurement of your
email marketing campaign.

Formula: No. of unsubscribes / no. of messages

delivered x 100

#6. List Growth Rate

Your list growth rate is simply the rate at which

your email list is growing. This is a good metric to
keep tabs on aside from your CTR and conversion
rates. Your goal here is to keep it at a healthy size
so you can continue to expand your audience
reach and position your brand as a thought leader
in the industry.

Formula: ([(No. of new subscribers) – (no. of

unsubscribes + email or spam complaints)] / total
number of email addresses on your list]) x 100

#6. ROI (Return on Investment)

Despite not having a set formula in calculating the

ROI of your email marketing campaign, you could
generally measure this by dividing the return you
made by the cost you incurred throughout your
entire email campaign.

The best way to boost your ROI is to focus your

efforts on lead generation. You should be tracking
how many leads convert so you can measure the
revenue you’ve generated.

Formula: Additional revenue/value generated by

the campaign / total campaign costs

The Bottom Line

Metrics will always be essential when measuring

your performance, particularly in your email
marketing campaigns. With these telling figures,
you’ll be able to analyze your strategies and make
adjustments when necessary.
 Email marketing may be simple and direct in
concept, but you should know how to customize
your emails to target your audience more
effectively. Armed with the right knowledge to drive
conversions, you can up your email marketing
game in no time!

SEO 1. SEO Traffic

Organic traffic is what you earn from appearing on

the search engine result pages (SERPs). You want
your website to rank for keywords relevant to your
niche. It’s essential to track your organic traffic so
that you can see how many more people are visiting
your website as a result of your SEO efforts.

a) Measuring Landing Page

Organic traffic comes from your overall website.

Nonetheless, you should also track traffic by landing
pages. Why? Simply because that’s how you can
determine where to improvise. If you experience
some of your pages ranking on page 1 and others
are on page 4, you know that you need to improvise
those pages that are ranking poorly. Also, if you’re
using different strategies, you’ll get an idea of which
strategies are working best and which aren’t.

b) Measuring Geographical Location

It’s also essential to keep a track of where your

organic traffic is coming from. This comes in handy
when your SEO efforts are meant to target particular
geographic locations. Additionally, it also helps if
you’re planning to expand your business into new
markets.

If people from certain countries like your products

better than the people from where heavy traffic is
coming from, you can divert more marketing
resources into those countries and increase sales.
That’s why it’s good practice to measure organic
traffic by geographical locations.

2. Keyword Ranking

Take note of which keywords you want to rank your

website on. Once you’re aware of the keywords that
your website is ranking for, there are numerous
ways you can use that data to improve your SEO
strategy.
It’s good practice to capitalize on your existing
success. If your website ranks in the top 10 for high-
converting keywords, continue using them in your
blogs and campaigns and ensure your position is
not at risk. Your top-ranking keywords bring you the
most traffic. Make sure your keywords that associate
such landing pages are on the spot. It will allow you
to keep your bounce rate low.

3. Unique Domains (link building)

Simply put, link building is the process of getting

other websites to link back to your own website. It
drives referral traffic and increases domain authority.

Google’s algorithms are complex. They are always

evolving. However, backlinks remain an important
factor for search engines to determine which
websites rank for which keywords.

Links play a vital role in SEO strategy. They are a

signal to Google that your website is a quality
resource and is worthy of citation. Thence, websites
with more backlink3. Unique Domains (link building)

Simply put, link building is the process of getting

other websites to link back to your own website. It
drives referral traffic and increases domain authority.

Google’s algorithms are complex. They are always

evolving. However, backlinks remain an important
factor for search engines to determine which
websites rank for which keywords.

Links play a vital role in SEO strategy. They are a

signal to Google that your website is a quality
resource and is worthy of citation. Thence, websites
with more backlinks tend to earn higher rankings on
SERPs.

s tend to earn higher rankings on SERPs.

3. Unique Domains (link building)

Simply put, link building is the process of getting

other websites to link back to your own website. It
drives referral traffic and increases domain authority.

Google’s algorithms are complex. They are always

evolving. However, backlinks remain an important
factor for search engines to determine which
websites rank for which keywords.

Links play a vital role in SEO strategy. They are a

 signal to Google that your website is a quality
resource and is worthy of citation. Thence, websites
with more backlinks tend to earn higher rankings on
SERPs.

4. Mobile Traffic

Do remember that almost 60% of all online searches

comes from mobile phones, therefore, tracking your
traffic coming from mobile devices can indicate the
following:

 Mobile-friendliness: Google prefers
mobile-friendly websites. If the traffic
coming in from mobile remains constant
even if your overall traffic is increasing,
you have a problem with mobile-
friendliness. Optimize your website as
soon as possible.
 Usage patterns: If you are experiencing a
higher traffic coming in from mobile, it may
indicate shifting of usage patterns from
your target audience. This tells you
whether you should invest further in
mobile development or not.
 Mobile-only search terms: Searches from
mobile devices are different from desktop
searches. Nearly 20% of mobile searches
are in the form of voice only. Mobile users
also tend to use fewer keywords than
desktop users. Tracking mobile traffic
allows you to measure whether you’re
ranking for mobile-only searches or not.

5. Source/Medium/Channels (Traffic)

Nothing good comes out of “total numbers.” The

golden rule here is to never view, analyze, or assess
your website by considering the total number of
visits, unique sessions, or page views. Nothing good
comes out of it. Break it down into segments to
extract accurate data in order to improve your SEO
efforts accordingly.

The compilation of your total visitors should be

diverse. Both in how they discovered your website
and what do they know about your brand. They may
have found you via your online marketing or offline
marketing efforts, even via the word of mouth. They
may as well be a lead that has persisted in your
funnel for a good few months. To understand and to
take real action, you need to classify your traffic.

Content Marketing 1. Retention Rate (New vs Old users)

Metrics

2. Average Session Duration

refers to how much time visitors are spending on

your website. It’s helpful for analyzing patterns and
trends. In terms of content, you can see what blogs
people are spending most of their time on. What
case studies people find most interesting. What job
openings are getting the most views. This
information can help you shape your content
strategy effectively.

The bounce rate refers to how many visitors stop

engaging with your website after one interaction.
That interaction can be a page view or a social
media share. RocketFuel says the average bounce
rate for any website ranges from 41% – 55%. Your
bounce rate may not seem a noteworthy metric to
you, but it’s essential to understand that none of
these metrics exist in a vacuum.

Calculating your website’s bounce rate can be tricky

at times. Industry professionals are still constantly
debating over the definition of bounce rate.
Essentially, as long as you use your common sense
when looking at Google Analytics, pay attention to
changing rates over time, you should be okay.

4. Organic backlinks

It compares the total number of referring domains to

your website’s external links. The best way to
measure this metric is by looking at the ratios.

Google “spies” are on a lookout for the ratios of high

backlinks and low referring domains. Why? Because
it suggests that you are in charge of the referrals.
Many have a few other websites set up just so that
they can provide some link love to their main
website.

A good ratio would be 500 incoming links from 300

referring domains. This suggests that everything is
legit. Additionally, it’s not just the number of referring
domains you need to keep an eye on. You should
also monitor the types of domains. If content from
domains is irrelevant to your own website, your
rankings may fluctuate.

Also, measure the total number of backlinks. If the

number of your total backlinks drops, it suggests
Google that your website is not worth crawling
 anymore.

Furthermore, you should also make sure the number

of referring IPs is as high as possible. If they’re not,
then you may find yourself in hot waters with
Google.

Google prefers backlinks to be as organic and as

natural as possible. Thence, monitor your organic
backlinks carefully.

5. Lead Generation / ROI

When it comes to measuring your content’s ROI,

you basically need to measure how much revenue
you’re earning from your content in contrast to what
you’re spending on creating and distributing it.

To calculate the ROI of content marketing. we prefer

to use the simple formula by Convince and Convert.
“Return minus investment, divided by investment,
expressed as a percentage”.

For instance, if you’re spending $1000 on creating

content and get leads worth $3000 in return, then
your ROI is 200%.

 $3000-$1000 = $2000
 $2000/$1000 = 2
 2 x 100% = 200%

The bottom line here is that if you spend less on

creating content and earn more in sales, then it’s all
worth it!

Social Media Marketing 1. Engagement Rate

Metrics
Engagement rate defines the level of interaction a
piece of content typically receives. Simply put, it is
the percentage of the audience that responds to
your content. Here are some examples of what is
considered as social media engagements:

 Post Likes or Reactions

 Shares
 Views
 Comments

Engagement rate helps in determining which type of

content you should work based on how it performs
across different social media platforms. It indicates
how responsive your audience is to your content.

To tell you the truth, engagement is MORE

important than reach. Why? Let’s say you decide to
run a campaign and prepare a brief for a range of
influencers. An influencer with 300,000 followers
may charge you USD$3,000 per post. This
influencer has an engagement rate of 1.5%. This
means you will receive approximately 4,500
interactions per post at a cost of $0.67 per
engagement.

Whereas, an influencer with only 100,000 followers

may charge you USD$1000 per post but has a high
level of engagement at 15%. This means you should
expect to receive approximately 15,000 interactions
at an average cost of only $0.07 per engagement.

2. Followers/Fans Growth

Unless you have a super-hero memory, you’ll

probably need some insights on how the number of
your followers is changing over time.

You can keep track of the numbers in two ways.

One, you can manually fetch those numbers every
day, week or month. Prepare a spreadsheet and
keep updating it regularly and watch the numbers
grow. Or you can use different tools that keep track
of followers for you.

Measuring the number of your followers is essential.

It will allow you to scale your business. Take note of
where most of your followers are from, what kind of
content they engage with the most, what time of the
day they are most active etc.

2. Followers/Fans Growth

Unless you have a super-hero memory, you’ll

probably need some insights on how the number of
your followers is changing over time.

You can keep track of the numbers in two ways.

One, you can manually fetch those numbers every
day, week or month. Prepare a spreadsheet and
keep updating it regularly and watch the numbers
grow. Or you can use different tools that keep track
of followers for you.

Measuring the number of your followers is essential.

It will allow you to scale your business. Take note of
where most of your followers are from, what kind of
content they engage with the most, what time of the
day they are most active etc.

2. Followers/Fans Growth

Unless you have a super-hero memory, you’ll

probably need some insights on how the number of
your followers is changing over time.

You can keep track of the numbers in two ways.

One, you can manually fetch those numbers every
day, week or month. Prepare a spreadsheet and
keep updating it regularly and watch the numbers
grow. Or you can use different tools that keep track
of followers for you.

Measuring the number of your followers is essential.

It will allow you to scale your business. Take note of
where most of your followers are from, what kind of
content they engage with the most, what time of the
day they are most active etc.

3. Social Media Brand Mentions

Your reviews, customer feedback and any type of

post referring to you on social can be counted as
your social media brand mention.

Start building a list of anybody who writes about you,

and also the publication it appears in. When you
write interesting pieces of content, you have an
opportunity of letting others become aware of you.

For instance, if you have a huge event coming up or

a big promotion, you can begin that promotion a few
days in advance. Publications then release your
content the day that your promotion goes live. It
gives them a scoop on the story and provides you
significant exposure.

Don’t forget about your competitors. Keep an eye on

where they’re being mentioned. If any website
mentions them, they are likely to open to mention
you as well.

4. Post Reach

This is the total number of unique people who saw

your posts. This could be fans, friends or even
family. If they see your post multiple times, it will
only be counted as one. For Facebook, analyze all
the posts or view at least five recent ones for reach
and engagement. If you click the link for the post,
you can get your hands on fine-tuned details as well
as negative feedback. For example, if somebody
 decided to hide your posts. Furthermore, monitor
any post which people mark as spam closely.

For Twitter, you can expand your tweet details and

get an on-spot graph alongside specific
measurements. Monitor the monthly impressions to
figure out your monthly reach. Also, analyze your
top tweets and compare it with other tweets in order
to see who replies and engages.

5. Likes vs Unlikes

Your Facebook “Likes” tab allows you to measure

detailed metrics of your net likes. It combines the
following metrics:

 Unlikes: People who unliked your page.

 Organic Likes: People who liked your
page, not as a result of your Facebook Ad
campaigns.
 Paid Likes: People who liked your page as
a result of your Facebook Ad campaigns.
 Net Likes: The total number of new likes
minus the number of unlikes from your
page.

Email 1. Open Rate

In simple words, open rate means how many people

actually opened your email. If the open rates of your
email campaigns during the last quarter were 20%,
and they’re 30% now, you’re doing just fine. Look
back over the emails that you’ve sent in the last
quarter. Which of those emails had the highest open
rates? Practice those methodologies more often.

The most common question about open rates is

“What’s a good open rate?” The answer depends on
your industry. But generally, an open rate of 20% to
30% or more is good. Don’t panic if your open rates
are below 20%. For some niches that’s average.

2. Click Through Rate (CTR)

If anybody clicks on one of the links in your email,

you’ve got a click. The click-through rate refers to
how many people out of hundred clicked
somewhere on your email. If 40 out of 100 people
clicked, you’ll have a 40% click-through rate.

So what’s a good click-through rate? Once again it

depends on your industry. But anything over a 10%
click-through rate is decent enough. If you clear 20
percent, you should be proud.

You can improve your click-through rates in a

number of ways. The most obvious one is to make
your email messages mobile responsive. Don’t kill
your click-through rates by generating emails that
are unclickable. Another way to increase click-
through rates is by making the buttons or links
visually larger.

There is a variation on open rates and click-through

rates. It is fairly common and is quite helpful. It’s
called the “click-to-open rate.” It refers to how many
people who opened your email also clicked on it. If
you’ve got a weak open rate, but a strong click-to-
open rate, it suggests your email’s subject line
should have been stronger.

3. Unsubscribe Rate

How many people out of 100 unsubscribed from

your email subscriptions? Keep in check, each email
has its own unsubscribe rate. Unsubscribe rates are
best kept at 0.2%. Although marketers who email
frequently may see unsubscribe rates reaching up to
0.5%. When you look at a spike in unsubscribers,
it’s clear that you sent an email that your readers
didn’t like.

4. Email Bounce Management

An email bounce means the non-delivery of your

email to the recipient. When this course takes
action, the emailer receives an automatic notification
of the delivery failure which originates from the
recipient’s mail server.

Take a look at the following two different types of

email bounces.

a) Soft Bounce / Block

It means that the email address was valid. Also, the

email message did reach the recipient. Yet it
bounced back because either:

 The recipient’s mailbox was full

 The recipient’s server was down or
 Your email message was too large for the
recipient’s inbox

b) Hard bounce
 Hard bounces occur when the email message has
permanently been rejected because either:

 The email address is invalid or

 The email address doesn’t exist

Consider your soft bounces as blocks that are

nothing but a short-term issue. You don’t have to
permanently remove these email addresses off from
your list. But, hard bounces signifies invalidity or
non-existent email addresses and should be
removed then and there.

5. Complaint / Spam Rate

In order to maintain the best deliverability rate and

ensure email marketing best practices are being
used, you need to make sure your email account
maintains a low complaint/spam rate. If it is high and
you’re unable to lower it, your account may shut
down in order to prevent further unwanted emails
from being sent.

At any given point, your marketing campaign’s email

complaints rate should be below 0.1%. The email
message deliverability is greatly dependent on the
sender’s reputation. If your email complaint rate is
high for a period of time, it may affect not only the
deliverability of your own email messages but also
those of the service you use to send them.

Paid Marketing Metrics 1. Cost Per Click (CPC)

Owais Khan
CPC measures how much an advertiser has paid
exactly. To measure CPC, divide the total cost of 30 Digital Marketing Metrics
your campaign by the number of times your ad was and KPIs You Should Always
clicked. To manually check the cost of your Measure
campaign, you can multiply CPC by the number of
clicks your campaign received.

2. Conversion Rate

 Ow
It is the number of conversions your ad receives
divided by the number of clicks your ad receives.
The conversion rate of your ads lets you know the
relevancy of your offer. It helps you to know whether
your customers are in the right stage of their buyer ais Khan 
journey. Generally, the higher your conversion is for
the visitor’s stage in the buyer journey, the higher
your conversion rate will be.  
3. Quality Score – Adwords September 14, 2018 

Google offers a Quality Score to your keywords. It’s

visible in the AdWords interface. A keyword’s https://www.cloudways.com/bl
Quality Score is based on a scale of 1 to 10. Your og/important-digital-marketing-
keywords’ performance on Google calculates the metrics/#seo-metrics
score unless they achieve a significant number of
impressions. That’s called impression threshold.

With enough impressions, the Quality Score of your

keyword will begin to reflect on how it has
performed. This is important if you use a lot of
keywords with low impressions. The keywords will
not be evaluated on their own unless they reach the
impression threshold.

At the time of reviewing keywords you are able to

see:

 Quality Score – How relevant your

keywords, ads or landing pages are to the
viewers of your ad.
 Ad Relevance – How related are your
keywords to ad copies.
 Landing page experience – How useful is
the landing page for users who are
viewing your page.
 Expected CTR – Based on previous
performances, the chances your ad will be
clicked when displayed.

4. Click Through Rate (CTR)

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is the number of clicks

your ad receives divided by the number of
impressions. The CTR of your ad tells you the
relevancy of your ad in terms of what viewers want
and when they want it. Usually, the more relevant
your ad the higher will be the CTR.

CTRs vary greatly between industries, channels

(Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email), and types of
offers. Some successful campaigns may have a
CTR of 0.2% while other unsuccessful campaigns
may have a CTR of 5% or even higher.

5. Wasted Spend

Not all those who will click your ad are going to buy
your offer so that hurts your ROI, hence you must be
sure about who are your ideal customers.

In Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing click costs are

going to get huge if you are targeting a wide range
of audience. The wasted spend report tells you if
 you are wasting your budget on irrelevant
campaigns.

If any of your campaigns cross your defined ‘Budget

Limit’, then it’s urgent for you to get rid of those
under-performing campaigns.

Email Michael is Digital Content

Manager at Emarsys. The
1) Deliverability Rate Ultimate Guide to Measuring
Email Marketing Success: 12
Key Metrics
Accepted rate shows the amount of emails delivered
vs. those actually sent, as a percentage. This metric
Oct 12, 2017
measures overall deliverability, and is a good
General, How to
indication of list quality.
https://emarsys.com/learn/blog
/ultimate-guide-measuring-
email-marketing-success/
2) Bounce Rate

If you’re like me, you’ve heard the term “bounce”

thrown around often when talking about email
marketing. But what does it actually mean?

As is industry standard when sending email, an

email is assumed to be delivered unless the receiver
of that email (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, or some
other email inbox provider) rejects the email and
returns a bounce back to the sender. In Emarsys,
those bounces are recorded and reported to end
users of our platform.

3) Device Usage

Are you able to see how many users opened your

email on their smartphones, vs. on a tablet or
laptop? Device usage data is easy to understand
and immediately impactful. If you see that 85% of
your opens for a particular campaign came from a
smartphone, you suddenly have a good idea of how
mobile users are engaging with that campaign, and
can focus your appeal, design, and content for
follow-up, mobile-first emails. You can also easily
see conversions by device type, too, allowing you to
see if trends exist among different devices.

On average, 50-60% of emails are opened on

mobile. All of your email templates must be
responsively designed.

Response and engagement

4. Open Rate

Open rates are often misleading but are nonetheless

a widely popular (albeit sometimes “vanity”) metric
which deserves inclusion on this list, and should be
at least considered when evaluating overall success.
Open rates generally indicate how captivating and
promising your subject lines are. However, be
cautious when looking at open rates, and drawing
conclusions.

Open rates are most useful when measured over

time, developing a benchmark to gauge general
appeal and long-term trust. You can segment opens,
too, by any variable (device, region, demographic,
etc).

The industry average ranges between 20-30%.

Adam Q. Holden-Bache, email marketing expert,

told me that, in addition to open rate,
he recommends delving deeper and looking at:

Unique Confirmed Opens: number of

unique recipients that have opened an email
Total Confirmed Opens: total number of
opens per recipient
Open-to-Conversion Rate: calculated as a
percentage of opens that also converted. As an
example, if you had 400 opens, and 25 conversions
from your campaign, your open-to-conversion rate
would be 6.25%. Measure this over time for a
clearer benchmark.

5. Click-Through Rate

The email click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage

of recipients that click on a link contained within your
email. Typically, tracking codes are automatically
attached to email links by your marketing
automation platform. You can determine your CTR
by dividing the number of unique clicks by the
number of emails delivered, then multiply by 100.
6. Click-to-Open Rate

This is the portion of recipients (openers) who click

on at least one link within the body of the email. It’s
a good measure of user intent/interest.

You can figure out click-to-open rat with this formula:

unique clicks/unique opens x 100.

Many email experts will agree it’s more indicative of

engagement than just CTR.

7. Subscribers

It’s vital that B2C and eecommerce brands build

their subscriber base in order to cultivate an opted-in
audience whom they can communicate with.

Opt-in subscribers have willingly exchanged their

valuable personal data with an expectation of some
promise you have enticed them with, whether
promotional deals, a loyalty program, an e-
newsletter, or a combination of these.

This metric — monitoring the number of contacts

who opt in (and opt out) to receiving emails from
your brand — will help you understand how strong,
enticing, and authentic the overall value
proposition that you’re offering truly is.

Subscriber growth is most meaningful when

measured over the long haul (every couple of
months or so).

8. Unsubscribe Rate

Unsubscribe rate is a decent indication of relevance,

appeal, and overall value of your message. It’s
measured as a percentage of total users who
unsubscribe with each delivery. But be sure you
have perspective on what “unsubscribe” really
means.

Action, purchase, and ROI

9. Conversions, Downloads, Registrations, &

Contacts (In-Email)

Many email marketing teams are starting to reduce

friction and steps required by customers to complete
a desired action. To do so, they’re embedding
forms, sign-up CTAs, and even purchase buttons
directly within dynamic emails.

As a result, conversions can happen “in-email”

based on fields or forms marketers have included in
the body of the email. These often include:

Downloads: May include a button to grab

a recipe, an eBook, or other digital asset.
Registrations: Could include form fields to
sign up for an event, course, or separate update.
Contact/Form Submissions: May include
the number of contacts who filled out a ‘Contact Us’
form or submitted feedback.

10. Value of an Email Address

How much is an email address worth to your

organization? The value of earning an email address
is one of the most beneficial metrics to understand
for your organization.

Kath Pay offers an equation to help you calculate

this valuable metric. Multiply the lifespan of an
address by the quotient of your annual email
revenue and your average list size:
For instance, if the lifespan of an address was 3
years, yearly revenue $800K, and list size 90,000,
the calculation would be: 3 years x $800K/90,000 =
about $27 per email address.

You can now use this to determine how much

money you’re willing to spend on acquiring a
customer.

11. Revenue/Leads Per Email

In B2C, transaction-oriented campaigns, at the end
of the day, it all comes down to ROI. Revenue
generated from email campaigns, then, is one of the
most crucial metrics you want to be sure to get right.
Over time, this metric will help you understand not
only how different kinds of campaigns perform, but
also how much you can expect, on average, from
each recipient.

You can determine this figure by dividing total

revenue earned from a campaign by the number of
emails delivered (or opened).

12. Open/Click Reach

This unique metric will help you understand the

unique engagement of your emails.

According to Kath Pay:

Open Reach is the total number of unique

opens divided by the total number on your
subscriber list or segment
Click Reach is the total number of unique
clicks divided by the total number of subscribers in
the list or segment

These metrics can help you identify the behavior

change that a subscriber has. Once you can start to
draw causal relationships between these metrics
and conversions/revenue, you’ll be able to prove the
impact of a subscriber. These metrics are most
useful when measured over a year to 18 months at
the minimum, and reported on consistently, over
time.

Final Thoughts

As many e-commerce marketers know, successful

email marketing doesn’t happen overnight. These
metrics are most meaningful when applied to
understand how engaging, enticing, informative,
appealing, and value-oriented your email program
really is, over an extended period of time.

And, as is evident, there’s not necessarily a single

most important metric as it depends on your goals.
“The most important metric is the one that matters
most to your objectives,” Pay told me. “That’s
probably not what you were hoping for. You wanted
us to say ‘open rate’ or ‘click-through rate’ or
‘conversion rate’. Picking one metric as the Holy
Grail of email marketing is simple, but it misses the
point.”

There are dozens and dozens of high-level and

more granular metrics that you can and probably
ought to explore. But if you’re looking to narrow it
down to a core few, start with a few that are most
relevant for your program, and consistently report on
them.

Over time, you’ll be able to find trends and,

ultimately, draw some conclusions about what
works, what doesn’t, and then divulge opportunities
to improve. ◾

Editor’s note: huge thanks to both Adam Q. Holden-

Bache for helping me gain clarity around most
valuable metrics and for offering recommended
categorization; and Kath Pay for sharing this
comprehensive email marketing guide she created
in conjunction with Econsultancy and allowing me to
share miscellaneous insights from it.

Many email teams prefer to select their own email

metrics, and use a centralized, high-level summary
dashboard that collects and displays all these
numbers in a single place. This can help when
comparing specific data points, then tweaking
certain initiatives that aren’t working well. Click
here if you’re interested in learning more about what
this looks like within Emarsys’ dashboard, or here to
learn about how our email marketing tools can help
you personalize your customer interactions via the
most effective digital channel in the world.

Handpicked Related Content

Take Omnichannel Marketing to the Next

Level with Email Marketing
Owning Email Success in a Mobile-First
World
 Michael Becker is the Digital
Content Manager at Emarsys where he manages
the enterprise editorial strategy and content
marketing program. Michael has developed thriving
content programs with three SaaS companies in
Indianapolis and is a published author on Forbes,
Elite Daily, Jeff Bullas’ blog, and more. He is a
proud alumni of Butler University.

Connect with Michael: LinkedIn • @mjbecker_

Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, 61) define social media as “a group of

Internet based applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web 2.0, and allow the creation and
exchange of user generated content.” Sinclaire and Vogus (2011, 294)
cite O’Reilly’s (2005) definition: “social media is a broad term
that describes software tools that create user generated content that
can be shared.”Paquette, Holly, "Social Media as a Marketing Tool: A
Literature Review" (2013). Major Papers by Master of Science
Students. Paper 2. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/tmd_major_papers/