Open rate is no longer the gold standard. Find out what metrics you should consider instead.
Are you measuring the right metrics for your new email marketing program or pilot?
Newer marketers and small-business leaders in any industry need to be confident about this as they strive to produce quality emails that resonate with customers. If you regularly track the most relevant analytics for your goals, you're able to focus your limited resources on the kinds of emails that actually make an impact.
Below, we'll break down seven important email marketing metrics and how to calculate them. We'll also share insightful recommendations from Gartner[1] along the way to help you home in on what data will be most helpful for your business.
What is email analytics?
Email analytics is the process of tracking email metrics such as open rate, click through rate, and conversion rate to monitor and improve the performance of email marketing activities, whether that’s by building awareness with potential customers, driving traffic to your website, or increasing conversions.
Traditionally, open rate has been seen as the tried and true metric for measuring email performance, but times are changing. In Gartner’s Market Guide for Email Marketing, they recommend reducing reliance on open rates in response[1] to changes like Apple’s MPP (Mail Privacy Protection), which we will touch on later in this article.
Ready to hire an email marketing agency for your business needs? Browse our list of companies in the following areas:
An example of an email campaign analytics dashboard from Customer.io (Source)
Email marketing software is a powerful tool when it comes to collecting and analyzing these metrics, offering features like advanced newsletter functionality, automated triggers, and integrations with other tools in your tech stack.
Another effective way to track performance is to hire a marketing analytics service to help oversee your activities. Interested but not sure where to start? Check out our Marketing Analytics Service Hiring Guide to learn about the benefits, cost, and considerations that go into hiring an agency.
Now let’s examine seven of the most meaningful email marketing metrics to better understand which ones are right for you.
Clickthrough rate
What it is
Click-through rate (CTR) represents the percentage of email recipients who click on one or more of the links or calls to action (CTAs) in your marketing emails.
How to calculate it
(Total link clicks ÷ number of delivered emails) * 100
Example
(60 total clicks ÷ 900 delivered emails) * 100 = 6.6% CTR
Clickthrough rate is an excellent marker of email performance as it relays how often readers are taking action from your delivered messages. This allows you to easily track how much traffic you’re getting by implementing tactics such as urchin tracking module (UTM) links.
These links include unique identifiers that pinpoint what message or campaign a click came from and can help you reduce reliance on more general metrics like open rate as a key metric (more on that later).
An example of A/B testing functionality from Personyze (Source)
CTR can be especially helpful during A/B testing as a way to further segment your email list and customize creative with the goal of increasing conversions.
Ultimately, if increasing website traffic or optimizing your marketing tactics is a goal, CTR is a metric you should be measuring.
Click-to-open rate
What it is
While similar to CTR, Click-to-open rate (or CTOR) deals with the numbers of emails opened vs. the number of emails delivered. Using CTOR allows you to better understand how subject lines affect email performance.
How to calculate it
(Total clicks ÷ number of opened emails) * 100
Example
(250 total clicks ÷ 1,200 opened emails) * 100 = 20.8% CTOR
As mentioned above, CTOR is a great way to determine if the subject lines you’re using are actually effective in getting subscribers to open your emails. Even if you have engaging content within the email, if people aren’t clicking due to a weak or misleading subject line you’re missing out.
Analyzing CTOR in tandem with CTR can be helpful in determining if it’s your subject lines or the content of your emails that needs optimizing. For instance, if you have a higher CTR but a low CTOR, it means that your subject lines are underperforming but the content of your emails is getting people to engage.
Conversely, a low CTR with a higher CTOR indicates that your subject lines are getting people to click into the email but the calls to action are falling short.
If your open rates are good but your conversions are low, examining CTR and CTOR in tandem is especially valuable for seeing where you’re losing customers’ attention.
Conversion rate
What it is
Conversion rate refers to the number of people who clicked on a link in one of your emails then completed a desired action e.g. filling out a form, downloading an asset, or completing a purchase.
How to calculate it
(Number of users who completed the desired action ÷ number of delivered emails) * 100
Example
(75 people who completed the desired action ÷ 1,500 delivered emails) * 100 = 5% conversion rate
One of the holy grails of marketing metrics—and not just for email—is conversion rate. The entire goal of marketing in general is to bring awareness to your brand with the hope that a person will become a customer and ultimately buy your product or service.
Conversion rate is the ultimate marker (no pun intended) of that goal as it directly refers to the number of desired actions taken by a potential or existing customer. For email specifically, it’s all well and good if subscribers are receiving—and even reading—your emails, but true success comes when they interact with your content and convert.
The short answer is yes. If your business sells a product or service or you want people to take some sort of action (donating, signing up for your community newsletter, etc.), conversion rate is of the utmost importance.
Bounce rate
What it is
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails sent that could not be successfully delivered to an intended email recipient’s inbox.
How to calculate it
(Total number of undelivered emails ÷ number of emails sent) * 100
Example
(50 undelivered emails ÷ 2,000 emails sent) * 100 = 2.5% bounce rate
One key aspect of maintaining your email marketing program is monitoring the health of your subscriber list and delivery rate. A high bounce rate can indicate that users have blocked your messages from being received or that a user’s email client (Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, etc.) has deemed your messages undeliverable.
Regularly monitoring the health of your email list by removing inactive accounts can help with this, so avoid the temptation to try and keep the number of subscribers as high as possible. It’s much more effective to have a smaller list of quality contacts than it is to have a larger list of email addresses that you may not actually be reaching.
Bounce rate is particularly helpful for businesses that are aggressively growing their email marketing program, especially from scratch. It can help you determine what tactics trigger bounced emails from email clients and avoid those as you scale.
Open rate
What it is
The percentage of email recipients who open an email.
How to calculate it
(Total number of emails opened ÷ total number of emails received) * 100
Example
(200 emails opened ÷ 1,000 emails received) * 100 = 20% open rate
Traditionally, email open rate has been a hallmark of measuring email marketing performance. According to Capterra’s 2022 Email and Social Media Marketing Survey*, 65% of marketers surveyed agree that open rate is their primary metric. After all, we want people reading our emails, right? While that remains true, now KPIs like email deliverability, click-through rates, and conversions are telling a more accurate and compelling story.
In fact, Gartner’s Market Guide for Email Marketing recommends reducing reliance on open rates in favor of these more reliable metrics[1]. This is in part due to developments like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) that changes the way email clients treat marketing emails.
With more emails being automatically tagged as spam, not only is open rate less valuable as a metric—it can be outright unreliable. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be measuring it, however. Just consider adopting other KPIs as your primary aim and take open rate with a grain of salt.
List growth rate
What it is
The rate at which your subscriber list is growing, taking into account factors like unsubscribes.
How to calculate it
([(Number of new subscribers) - (number of unsubscribes)] ÷ [total number of subscribers]) * 100
Example
([(100 new subscribers) - (5 unsubscribes)] ÷ [2,000 total subscribers]) * 100 = 4.75% list growth rate
Especially as a small to midsize business (SMB) looking to grow its reach, list growth rate is a valuable metric to consider. It takes into account manual unsubscribes, and—used in conjunction with proactive list cleaning—gives a very accurate view into just how many active subscribers your program is reaching.
This is a much better measure of audience size and growth trajectory since it isn’t just a raw number of subscribers (some of which could be inactive or non deliverable due to spam blockers). List growth rate can also function as a marker for when it’s time to take the next step in scaling your email marketing program, or even expanding into other marketing channels.
Once you’ve established a solid growth rate and monitored the health of your list for several months, you can be sure the people you’re reaching are genuinely interested in your content. This is valuable information if you’re trying to decide whether to increase investment in your email program, expand to other channels, or both.
Overall ROI
What it is
The overall return on investment (ROI) in dollars from your email marketing activities.
How to calculate it
[(Dollar amount in additional sales made - dollar amount invested in your email marketing) ÷ dollar amount invested in the campaign] * 100
Example
[($500 in additional sales - $100 invested in email marketing) ÷ $100 invested in email marketing] * 100 = 400% ROI
Last but certainly not least is the overall ROI you get from email marketing. The real gold standard for any marketing initiative is how much it adds to your bottom line, and email is no different.
Where it is different, however, is the relative ease with which you can measure ROI as an email marketing metric. With, say, social media, the results can be nebulous when trying to factor in organic content, paid ads, sponsored content, etc.
With email, you can more easily track click-throughs using UTM links and assign the sales from those unique links to your email marketing efforts. On top of that, the ROI you get from email can be astonishing.
According to the same Email and Social Media Marketing Survey*, we’ve learned that 68% of respondents get at least a 1,000% return on their email marketing investment. Yes, you read that right—with email there’s the potential to earn 10x every dollar you spend.
Yes, yes, and yes. How your marketing activities affect your company’s bottom line is the most important piece of data you can collect no matter what type of business you run.
Capterra tools & tips: software and services to help track your success
Now that you know what to measure, how about how to measure it? Let’s examine two of the most effective options for tracking your email marketing performance.
Email marketing software
If you’re running an email marketing program, you likely already have some form of email marketing software. If you don’t or you’re looking to optimize your current solution, check out our Email Marketing Software Buyer’s Guide for a wealth of info on aspects such as:
The benefits of email marketing platforms
Typical features of email marketing software
The cost of email marketing software
Considerations when purchasing email marketing software
Relevant email marketing software trends
Furthermore, our Capterra Shortlist for email marketing software shows the top options we’ve identified laid out in a matrix based on popularity and ratings from business owners just like you.
Marketing analytics services
Software is without a doubt a great tool, but if you need a little more help than that, hiring a digital marketing agency to lend their expertise can improve results while saving you time and money in the long run.
There are many different types of digital marketing agencies, and if you want to learn more about the benefits and functions they provide in general, check out our primer on the subject here.
One such type of agency is a marketing analytics service. As the name implies, this type of agency specializes in all things marketing analytics. From SEO and predictive analytics to conversion rate and social media optimization, these types of agencies offer both expertise and hands-on help with tasks related to tracking your marketing performance.
I know what to measure! Now what?
After scanning this list, you should know what metrics are most valuable to your email marketing efforts and how to track them. The next step is to start viewing your data through this new lens and applying your learnings to achieve continued success.
For a step-by-step process on how to do that with your email program or your marketing data in general, visit our guide Analyzing Marketing Data: A 5-Step How-To. You can also start with this video preview of the steps right now:
If you’re interested in learning more about the software and services you can use to bolster your efforts or you want more knowledge about small-business marketing in general, visit the Capterra blog for a wealth of resources, including:
Online Marketing for Small Business: Strategy Tips From Successful SMBs
4 Key Considerations to Help You Choose a Digital Marketing Agency
Capterra Value Report: A Price Comparison Guide for Email Marketing Software
Note: The screenshots of applications included in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations.
