Metrics always go in step with business activities. Only by measuring the effectiveness of your actions can you figure out which of them is best to implement and what has to be discontinued. Email marketing can take time to master. It involves keeping best practices in mind for every campaign you create, overcoming common rookie mistakes, and optimizing emails for increased engagement.

Good business owners know data. Smart business owners know how to take data and make business decisions based on it. There’s a lot of it. And when you’re running an eCommerce store, there’s even more data you have to dig through and make sense of — and your email marketing metrics is an important part of that.

eCommerce Email Marketing Metrics You Need To Keep Track Of

1. Open-Rate & Unique Open-Rate

As the name implies, your email open rate refers to the number of times a given email is opened on your recipient’s end, compared to the total number of people the email was sent to.

Open rate is the simplest email marketing KPI and is vital to understanding how well your subscribers are receiving your messages. The open rate tracks how many subscribers opened the email you sent.

However, the open rate can teach us some things about our email campaigns:

• Which headlines do work best for your subscribers?
• Which days are the best in terms of opens?
• What part of your contact list is still engaged with your brand and responsive to your messaging?

While the metric is a piece of cake to understand, achieving a high open rate is less easy.

Most email campaigns average an open rate of a little over 24%. If you manage a campaign with open rates higher than that, you know you are doing something right. These email marketing stats are a great way to guide your next campaign in the right direction if you haven’t been reaching your goals.

2. Click-Through-Rate & Click-To-Open-Rate

CTR is another common metric that can help you determine how well your campaigns are performing. CTR measures how many people clicked on the links in your email. For example, if you included a link to redeem an offer, the CTR would measure what percentage of subscribers clicked on your links.

How is this calculated?

# all opens ÷ # all clicks x 100 = click-through-rate (CTR)

# unique opens ÷ # unique clicks x 100 = click-to-open-rate  (CTOR)

When crafting an email, there are a few ways to increase click-through rates. For instance, include links throughout the email in appropriate places and add an eye-catching and conspicuous call-to-action button that subscribers can click on to redeem your offer.

Plus, all the clicks can be seen in the click map in your campaign report. It counts the unique (unique clicks on the different links) as well as total clicks (all the clicks, including multiple ones). A click map helps a lot when you try to understand what parts of the email are effective and what should be improved.

Click-through rates are typically much lower than open rates. The average click-through rate for most campaigns is slightly over 4%.

3. Spam & Bounce Rate

When sending an email campaign, you also want to track the bounce rate. Bounce rate measures how many subscriber email addresses didn’t receive your email. Soft bounces track temporary problems with email addresses and hard bounces track permanent problems with email addresses.

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your site who navigate away from it after only visiting one page.

In contrast to the above metrics, a high bounce rate essentially means that the content on the specific page in question isn’t very engaging and/or valuable to the individual who landed on it.

This could be due to different reasons:

• a recipient has a full inbox (soft bounce)
• an email address no longer exists (hard bounce)
• the domain (email ending after @) does not exist (hard bounce);
• the server is not accepting emails (hard bounce);
• the address is mistyped (name@example.cam instead of name@example.com, etc.) (hard bounce)

Usually, a high bounce rate is a byproduct of a discrepancy between the expected value of a site (which the visitor gleans from the ad or search result data associated with the site) and the actual value and relevance of the site once they click over to it.

4. Conversion Rate

Email conversion rate refers to the percentage of email recipients who not only clicked-through to your website via an email, but who also completed a specified task while on-site.

Your click-through rate measures how many people clicked your link, while your conversion rate will assess how many people clicked on the link and then completed a specific action. For example, if you included a link in your email for your subscribers to participate in a Black Friday sale, the conversion rate would tell you what percentage of the people who clicked the link made a purchase.

If your conversion rate is low, try to answer the following questions to yourself:

• Is this the right audience for such kind of emails?
• Is this offer good enough?
• Is this offer clear enough?

Conversion rates give you unique insight into your return on investment. When you know how much you have spent and how many subscribers are converting, it’s easier to determine whether or not the money you are putting into your campaign is paying off.

5. Unsubscribe Rate

On the surface, your unsubscription rate gives you an idea of how effective and valuable your newsletters and drip campaigns are to your audience.

How is this calculated?

# emails delivered ÷ # unsubscribes x 100 = unsubscribe rate

However, digging deeper, you might find that those who have unsubscribed did so for a variety of other reasons that don’t necessarily reflect negatively on the value of your content. For example, perhaps they subscribed in order to gain access to a specific piece of content (such as an ebook), but realized your content simply wasn’t for them.

Measuring unsubscribes is very simple. Any email provider will tell you how many people unsubscribed upon receiving an email from you. This email metric can usually be found in your main dashboard or your metrics dashboard.

These are the common reasons for potential underperformance:

• The email contains somewhat (race, gender, beliefs) intolerance.
• The email list is stale itself. People on that list are no longer engaged with your brand.
• Your emails are too frequent.
• Your emails are too aggressive in terms of sales.

A high number of unsubscribes can be discouraging. However, email marketers prioritize this email marketing metric and often view unsubscribes as a good thing because they indicate that you are fine-tuning your subscriber list.A high number of unsubscribes can be discouraging. However, email marketers prioritize this email marketing metric and often view unsubscribes as a good thing because they indicate that you are fine-tuning your subscriber list.

With that in mind, a high unsubscribe rate may be a sign that you need to be more clear on your website in explaining who, exactly, would benefit from signing up for your mailing list.

Additionally, clearly giving subscribers the opportunity to unsubscribe lets them know they have a choice as to what kind of content they will receive from your brand and when, which helps to build trust.

Wrap up

Those are the top 5 email marketing metrics every marketer should track. An email marketing metric should always:

• Provide valuable data to direct email campaigns
• Provide insight into user activity
• Help keep your team focused on the goals of the campaign

As you set up campaign goals, these email metrics will help you measure your overall success as well as help you make necessary adjustments to your strategy.