Key Performance Indicators are the guideposts by which you design and alter your email marketing efforts, and putting an email marketing campaign into practice without developing KPIs significantly decreases your ability to achieve email marketing success. From development to evaluation and subsequent alteration, I have gathered together the ins and outs of key performance indicators for your email content, and identify which indicators you are likely to be best served by.

Before we jump right in, however, I want to impress upon you the immense value of tracking KPIs in your email marketing campaigns. KPIs can quickly and easily demonstrate which portions of your email content are effective, and which may be negatively impacting email deliverability, click-through rates, and more. 

Key Performance Indicators help optimize campaigns and improve your return on investment (ROI), because they help illustrate what changes need to be made to your email content to effectively market to your audience. KPIs can also help improve your unsubscribe rates, present soft bounces, and reduce the likelihood of immediately being sent to audience spam folders. 

To begin measuring the success of your campaigns as an email marketer, take a close look at the 15 KPIs I use to measure my own email marketing efforts. These email marketing metrics include your delivery, bounce, and open rates,  click-through and conversion rates, sharing, forwarding, and spam complaint rates, and rates of growth and revenue. I will go into greater detail on each below, and how to make sure you are measuring these rates in a way that will actively bolster your email marketing efforts and inform your email marketing strategies. 

Per Email Marketing KPIs (in Logical Order)

Each of these KPIs will be measured on a per-email basis, rather than looking at a larger picture. The purpose of separating KPIs into per-email and general groupings is to determine which email campaigns, specifically are performing well and which aren’t, and what general email behaviors and practices you are employing that are proving effective in your marketing emails. 

As you develop your email campaigns, take a close look at the following KPIs for those individual emails. 

1. Delivery Rate

The delivery rate of an email demonstrates how frequently emails are actually reaching your audience’s servers. Issues with delivery rates vary; they can be attributed to your email service providers or theirs, or they can be attributed to emails being entered incorrectly (by either your audience member or you). If your delivery rates are consistently low, it is likely time to go over your email service provider, content quality, or even mailing list to ensure that you possess the ability to reach inboxes. 

2. Bounce Rate

Whether a soft bounce rate or hard, knowing your bounce rate is important, as it helps you determine the percentage of email recipients who actually receive your emails to their inbox. There are two types of bounces: a soft bounce is commonly attributed to temporary issues (temporary blocks or temporary lulls in server availability), while hard bounce rates are typically attributed to IP address reputation (a history of spamming), or poor email list management. 

3. Open Rate

The open rate of emails describes the percentage of recipients who actually click on and open the emails they receive in their inboxes. Email metrics frequently rely heavily upon open rates to determine overall email performance; however, open rate really only measures your audience’s trust in your ability to deliver relevant content, and the compelling (or not compelling) nature of your subject line. It is valuable, but it is one in a series of KPIs that paint a full picture. 

Further Reading: What is a Good Average Open Rate for Email Marketing?

4. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Email click-through rates measure the rate of audience members clicking on a link in an email, whether that link is an embedded link, an image, or a call to action. The rate is expressed in the percentage of emails being sent out versus the number of links being clicked on. CTR is an important measure, because it indicates the level of interest, or the level of efficacy an email marketer is achieving when writing copy. 

5. Click-to-Open Rate

Although CTR and click to open rate (CTOR) are similar, they are not interchangeable; one measures the number of links clicked on after an email is opened, while the other more effectively measures intent, or whether or not an individual opened the email to click on a link versus opening to learn or explore. These two KPIs for email marketing are valuable, because paired together, they help demonstrate how to frame future campaigns and how to encourage clicking through. 

6. Conversion Rate

Conversion rates measure how many audience members click through on a call-to-action. CTAs are measured uniquely in this KPI, rather than CTRs, because a CTA is the designed goal of the email in question, while a CTR can be a simple reference for a statistic or example given in an email. Conversion rates effectively measure how many people are moved by your call to action, and actually take the steps mentioned in the body of the email. 

Further Reading: Email Marketing Conversion Rate: What It Is and 10 Ways to Improve It

7. Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate

This one is fairly self-explanatory, like email bounce rate, but it is an important KPI to measure, because it demonstrates the level of value your email subscribers find in your campaigns. KPIs for email marketing are about far more than crunching numbers; instead, they are used to identify where you are going right and where you need to make changes. Social shares and email forwards indicate that your content was valuable or interesting enough to warrant sharing with others–and has the potential to further illustrate your ability to grow. 

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8. Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate is another valuable metric, if not an enjoyable one, because it helps illustrate how frequently your subscribers are moving away from your emails. Knowing your unsubscribe rate can help illustrate how useful your email strategy actually is; when unsubscribes are low, you can rest easy in knowing that your email marketing performance is decent enough. When unsubscribes are high, you can take a close look at your email marketing goals and strategy, and adjust as needed to make sure fewer email addresses are hitting that “unsubscribe” button. 

9. Spam complaint Rate

Remember that email marketing differs from other marketing efforts, in that it is somewhat desire-based. What does that mean? Email marketers send out emails after those emails are shared with them. From clear-cut email subscribe lists to email addresses gathered via coupon campaigns and other marketing techniques, the goal is to send out emails only or primarily to those who are actually interested in receiving those emails. 

Your spam complaint rate is valuable, because it can help you determine whether or not your funnels or other email marketing tools are effectively gathering emails. If your subscriber list is largely made up of people who subsequently report your emails to span and then click that “unsubscribe” link, you can quickly determine that your email gathering methods are not as effective or clear-cut as you may have initially thought. 

Time-Bound Email Marketing KPIs

Email KPIs are not all based on a single email; instead, different KPIs must be measured according to different time frames. These KPIs take a measure within a specific time period in order to make a generalization or supposition about your email lists and email clients. These KPIs are best used as windows into the percentage of recipients who are signing up and eventually leaving your email list, or to measure your list growth rate. 

Further Reading: The 9 Email Marketing KPIs You Need to Track for Success

10. List growth rate

Your list growth rate indicates the rate at which your list is growing. List growth rate, like many other measurements here, are not supposed to provide an end-all, be-all upon which to base your strategy. Instead, list growth rate can help inform your funnel strategy, and determine how effectively you are building your email list. A low-growing list growth rate could indicate steady growth, versus viral growth, while a stale growth rate could indicate the need to improve your funnels and marketing channels. 

Further Reading: How to Grow Your Email List: 13 Best Practices to Follow

11. Subscriber churn rate

Subscriber churn rate shows how frequently the people on your subscriber list are moving away from your emails after a given period of time. These are usually unengaged subscribers who, over time, no longer are interested in receiving your emails and hit the “email unsubscribe” button. Subscriber churn rate can be viewed as your retention rate, as this particular email campaign metric identifies who frequently you are losing subscribers over a given time period. 

Each of the following email marketing KPIs will reveal the efficacy of your email program ROI, or return on investment. Although how frequently your unsubscribe links are being used, and your spam email frequency are valuable, they do not directly measure how different types of emails perform in terms of monetary gains and losses. ROI-related KPIs can help determine whether your calls to action are actually resulting in any meaningful bumps to engagement metrics, and whether your email marketing platform and strategies are performing well. 

12. Revenue per click

Your revenue per click looks into the clicks made by your subscriber list, and whether those clicks actually result in a sale or another source of revenue. Evaluating your revenue per subscriber can help you determine how well your emails are being received, and how effectively your email list is actually performing to bring in revenue. Note that this measure does not take into account deliverability rate, including the presence of invalid email addresses; instead, it focuses entirely on the amount of revenue per subscriber, and how those numbers compare to your overall email list. 

13. Revenue per email

Although similar to revenue per click, revenue per email is a different measure, because it measures campaign cost and the fulfillment of campaign goals differently. Revenue per click or revenue per subscriber differs from revenue per email (RPE) because one hones in on specific subscribers, while RPE looks at the overall rate of revenue being brought in according to the number of emails being sent out. Think of it this way: rather than identifying the percentage of people individually opening up and purchasing from an email, RPE measures how much of your revenue is being brought in by the total number of emails being sent out. 

Further Reading: 9 Killer Ecommerce Email Marketing Strategies for Maximizing ROI

14. Overall Email ROI

Your email ROI is one of the most important measures to take into account when making data-driven decisions. If you are spending a significant sum of your marketing budget on email marketing, but your engagement rates remain low or the percentage of people who ultimately unsubscribe remains high, then these key metrics will illustrate the need for a change (or multiple changes) to achieve a successful campaign. 

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Overall email ROI will take many different things into account. Having a lot of inactive subscribers, for instance, will actually hurt your email analytics, because most email servers and campaign platforms charge according to the size of your email list. If the percentage of recipients who receive your emails but do not engage is high, you can almost certainly determine that your email marketing ROI is not as high as it should be. A clean email list with a single unused email address, if possible, is one of the best ways to help your email marketing analytics remain positive. 

15. Subscriber lifetime value (LTV)

Your subscriber list will eventually yield a subscriber lifetime value, or LTV. This measurement takes into account the number of subscribers and the average revenue generated from your email marketing efforts. This also provides valuable insight, because it breaks down your email marketing effectiveness, as it relates to budget and funds being brought in. Although it does not target specific email subscribers or specific email addresses, this is considered one of the key email marketing KPIs currently being used, because it clearly identifies how well email newsletters and marketing campaigns are performing. 

Conclusion

Engagement levels, deliverability issues, and conversion goals can all be crucial indicators as to whether your email marketing efforts are moving in the direction your business requires. Although you can certainly make decisions regarding your marketing email messages without paying close attention to KPIs, by looking into those metrics, you can make informed decisions to get ahead of issues with future emails, increase your level of engagement, and more effectively pursue your business goals. 

Email list KPIs can help you determine if a piece of content is working well for you, and can help ensure that you see campaign success more often than not and see strong email marketing returns. By regularly evaluating your emails using key performance indicators, and making adjustments according to campaign performance, you can move one step closer to securing engaged subscribers, creating compelling content that resonates with subscribers, and ensuring that email marketing costs are fulfilling their role and result in an effective email campaign. 

Do you use these KPIs to measure your email marketing program? Do you have any additional measurements you use to evaluate effective email marketing? Let me know in the comments!