l metrics beyond clicks and opens: 7 important email metrics to monitor

What email metrics do your team and you track to evaluate the performance of your email program?

Litmus’ 2021 Report on Email Analytics revealed that the top five metrics used by marketers to measure success – opens, clicks and unsubscribes, as well as click to open, bounces, are all activity based.

All of these metrics have their own uses, mostly as trend indicators. The open rate was already a unreliable success indicator, but it has become more so after Apple introduced its Privacy Protection for Mail feature in 2021.

A few lesser-known metrics can shed light on the health of your email program. Depending on the reporting features of your ESP, you may be able to track these metrics right from your dashboard.

Other reports will need some calculations and integration with your company’s databases, or you can use a third party reporting tool. The extra effort is worth it because you will understand what’s happening.

1. Conversion Rate

Depending on the ESP you use, this metric may be displayed in your dashboard. Even if it is available in your dashboard, you should still take the time to calculate this metric yourself.

Why it is important to track your device

This metric helps you determine the success of each email campaign when reviewing your metrics in a holistic manner. It can be used to compare success rates between email campaigns targeting different priced items.

Calculate it

Divide the number by the total number (not the total number) of emails sent.

Say you sent 100 emails and 100 of them were delivered. If 50 subscribers visit your website and 25 convert, you have a conversion rate of 25%.

What you need to Know

It is important to consider how you calculate your conversion rate. Google Analytics calculates conversions using landing page sessions. Email marketers must isolate email-related activities to determine the conversion rate. This involves a greater number of metrics, before customers reach the landing page for the campaign on your website.

If we calculated the conversion rate on the basis of sessions, we would get 50%. This might seem more impressive but does not track back to the email. The same number of conversions are spread over a smaller area.

The conversion is only one aspect of the overall email journey. You’ll miss out on engagement in other aspects of the customer journey, where email is a key component. This could lead to incorrect optimization or negating the impact of email messages.

The tool below shows the results of conversions based on which calculations you make.

2. Email addresses are valuable.

It represents the value of every email address within your database, based on email revenue. This is a business-level metric and not a measurement of a specific campaign.

Why it is important to track your device

The value of an email can be used to make business and strategic decisions, as well as plan campaigns.

Calculate it

Divide the annual revenue by the list size. If, for example, the average list life is three years and you have an annual email revenue of $700,000. Your list size is also 95,000. The equation is: 3 X $700.000 / 95000 = $22.

What you need to Know

This metric shows why it is so important to expand your email database. You can gain two important insights from this:

A reliable success metric

Suppose you want to increase the frequency of your emails to increase revenue, but you are worried that this could lead to more unsubscribes and spam complaints.

While unsubs, spam complaints, and frequency are all factors to consider, a higher frequency of purchases can increase revenue by converting more subscribers. The value of your email addresses can tell you whether or not subscribers are willing to pay for it.

Evaluate acquisition expenses

The value of your email address can help you decide how much money to spend on subscriber acquisition. The more valuable your email address, the higher you can spend to get higher quality subscribers. You could waste your budget if you don’t understand the value of your subscribers.

Note: This formula works better for B2C emails, particularly retail and ecommerce. The classic lead nurturing process for B2B brands can make it difficult to calculate the value.

3. Customer behavior after campaigns

This long-tail measurement involves tracking metrics at the campaign level beyond the time frame of a campaign. This helps you track every penny of revenue generated by email, and is beneficial to your program over the long-term.

Why it is important to track your device

Many marketers close each campaign by submitting a static report, without revisiting the campaign a week later or even longer. This is a mistake, because you will likely see some activity. You could be tracking your campaigns for months before you no longer see any activity.

Tracking it

Regularly check your campaign’s activity until there is no activity. If you can, automate this process via your reporting dashboard or send a reminder.

What you need to Know

Most campaign reporting concludes way too early. We know, however, that many customers retain emails and take action on them days or even weeks after the campaign has ended. This is the long tail in action. Customers click on links even after a campaign has ended.

This long-tail effect is explained by the “nudge” effect of email. Your subscribers may not be in the market at the time your email campaign arrives. Your email might be kept in their inbox until the time is right if they are engaged with your brand. Your email may be all they need to encourage them to click through and convert.

DMA UK 2021 Consumer Email tracking found that up to 19% of consumers save emails to use later for a sale, discount or special offer. This number, although it has declined in recent years indicates that email is still a source of revenue.

You could under-report revenue from emails if you stop tracking too early. When my client extended its reporting period to three months, it found that it had under-reported email revenue by 128%.

Remember that the more revenue your email campaigns can generate, the higher the budget you can justify and request to support your program.

4. The following are some of the ways to improve your ROI.

The return on investment is a measure of the success and value of an email campaign. You can gain more budgets and resources. It can help you gain more budgets and resources.

Why it is important to track your device

Email marketers are historically overworked, and they lack resources. We are partly to blame. We do not provide detailed reports, which include many of the metrics that I have presented here, nor do we sing our praises enough. Email’s ROI is one of its greatest benefits, and we should measure it, report on it, and let financial decision makers in our company know.

Calculate it

Subtract the total revenue from the campaign cost. Divide costs by 100 and multiply.

What you need to Know

You’re probably familiar with benchmark ROI figures, which can range anywhere from $28 per $1 spent up to $44 or even more. It’s important to know your ROI, not just the benchmark numbers.

Your C-suite executives will likely understand this metric. It can be used to create business cases that justify additional spending in order to increase revenue, engagement, or other positive effects on your goals.

If you increase spending, your executives may not see the benefit. You can then use ROI to identify missed opportunities which require budget funding.

5. Open-reach (click-reach), conversion-reach and open-reach

These metrics will help you measure the level of engagement between campaigns.

Why it is important to track your device

These metrics show how many subscribers opened, clicked on or converted your email campaign at least one time in a given period. These metrics are essential for measuring your email program’s overall engagement.

Calculate it

Measure how many unique subscribers clicked on (for click-reach), or opened, (for open-reach), at least one email each month, quarter, or year. You calculate conversion-reach by calculating how many unique subscribers have converted during the selected period.

What you need to Know

This metric will allow you to determine the total reach for your campaign during that quarter. These engagement metrics must be correlated to revenue and conversions in order to be useful.

When you track trends, each of these metrics (even the open rates) has value. By adding reach to the equation, you can get more information than from these activity-based metrics alone.

You can spend a few minutes using a calculator, or, better yet, you can use the dashboard of your email marketing software to see good data visualizations (a girl could wish!) You can use a calculator to pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses, or, ideally, good data visualizations displayed right in your email marketing platform’s dashboard (a girl can wish!)

6. Customer lifetime value (CLTV)

This business metric will help you to focus on customer retention (CR) and customer experience.

Why it is important to track your device

This number can be used as a benchmark to compare with other marketing channels. This number is useful as a benchmark metric — does it trend up, down or stable? And how does it compare to other marketing channels’ lifetime values?

Calculate it

Multiply the average number years that your customers have been active by the average amount of money they spend each year. Calculate it by comparing different segments or life stages, like the average customer and loyal customers.

What you need to Know

CLTV is an important business metric for the long term. It represents value that goes beyond the average order value of a campaign or revenue per email. Customers don’t buy from you just once.

You can use it to track over time whether your customers are spending more money with your brand. But its greatest value comes from the business cases that show email’s contribution towards company revenue, or as a basis for requesting additional funding to acquire, automate your emails to make them more effective, or drive more sales.

7. List growth

This metric shows how much your list has grown over a certain period of time.

Why it is important to track your device

You might look at the total number of recipients when you are ready to send out a promotional campaign. It’s right there on your dashboard: Sending campaign to 500,000 recipients.”

You can also look at the number of people who have received your message. How long have you been analyzing whether your list has grown or shrunk?

Calculate it

Count the number opt-ins for a given month, quarter, or year, as well as the number addresses that have been removed due to unsubscribes (or spam complaints), bounces, and inactivity.

If you have a list with 100,000 addresses at the beginning of Month A and 110,000 addresses in Month B, you may assume that your list has grown by 10% or 10,000 addresses. If you remove 5,000 addresses from your list for the reasons listed above, then it actually grows by 15,000 or 15.8%.

What you need to Know

I’ve found that most people don’t track list growth, or they only look at the total size of their list occasionally. You need to know your exact growth rate so that you can see how your acquisition efforts work or if you are losing more subscribers than you gain. You will also be able to see how many subscribers your list loses in a given year. This is crucial if you want to reach a growth goal.

Imagine, for instance, that you want to increase your email list by 20% this year. You might think that if you have 100,000 email addresses you only need to add 20,000 more. You’ll need to add more if your list is losing 5% every month due to churn. The chart below shows the impact of churn on list acquisition.

Understanding how the growth of your list fluctuates each month can help you understand how decisions such as frequency (how frequently you send messages) or cadence affect frequency. The bottom line may obscure finer details about churn or acquisition.

Go beyond your ESP’s dashboard

Even though many ESPs offer more detailed metrics now, they still tend to focus on email activities like opens, unsubscribes, and clicks. You can slice your data more effectively with a robust reporting tool integrated across databases. This information can be used to determine where you can improve, or where you can increase revenue with advanced services.

These reporting tools give you an additional advantage: immediate access to data. Even if you have a great analytics team on your side, they may be competing with other departments or marketing channels for their attention.

You may not have time to wait for customized reports, especially if you are preparing holiday campaigns, or if you need to develop a strategy and goals for the year.

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