The email metrics your business should be tracking

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how optimised your business’s emails are if you can’t track the results of your efforts.

Before sending an email, businesses should review the purpose of their email marketing and figure out which metrics they will need to track to determine how they’re progressing toward their overall goal.

Since the goals of email marketing campaigns will differ from business to business, here are three basic metrics every business should be paying attention to, regardless of their overall goal:

Click-through rate (CTR)
An email’s click-through rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in an email. To calculate an email’s CTR, businesses need to divide an email’s total clicks by the number of emails delivered e.g. 500 total clicks ÷ 10,000 delivered emails = 5 per cent CTR.

CTR lets businesses quickly calculate the performance of every individual email they send. CTR is an important metric for all businesses engaging in email marketing to track, as it provides a direct insight into how many people on their email list are engaging with the email’s content and are interested in learning more.

Conversion rate
An email’s conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action, such as downloading a newsletter or purchasing a product.

An email’s conversion rate is tied to the email’s call-to-action, and since the email’s call-to-action is linked to the overall goal of the email campaign, the conversion rate can help determine the extent to which a business is achieving its objectives.

Bounce rate
The bounce rate is the percentage sent emails that could not be successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox. There are two types of bounce rates businesses should track; “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces. Soft bounces happen due to problems with valid email addresses, such as an inbox being full or an issue with a recipient’s server.

Hard bounces happen due to invalid, closed, or non-existent email addresses. It is critical that businesses immediately delete hard bounce addresses from their email list as internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates to determine an email sender’s reputation. A sender with a high hard bounce rate will look like a spammer in the eyes of an ISP.