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Digital marketing research has shown that business owners find email marketing to be their most effective channel to drive successful results for their businesses today. It is worthwhile to invest the time to ensure you’re engaging your followers effectively.

When you’re sending an email for promotional purposes, make sure you’re tracking these 13 common email marketing metrics to determine the success of your campaign:

Open Rate
How many people open your emails will affect your open rate. A good benchmark is to aim for 20-30%, and 10-20% if you are in consulting or marketing. If you have a strong, engaged list, it may be possible to average 50% on your campaigns. To improve your rate, try adjusting your headline or content value to appeal more to your subscribers. Focus more on education rather than selling to nurture your list effectively.

Click-Through Rate
When people click on links in your email, the number of people who click out of your total list will create the click-through rate for you. Nowadays, a 10-20% rate is successful. To improve click-throughs, make it easy to find your links in the email by adjusting colours and adding buttons. The links should be easy to click on mobile devices. Sometimes the number of links is not as effective as having one clear call-to-action. Test and experiment to see what works for your campaigns.

Bounce Rate (Hard)
When you send an email to an address that is no longer valid, you’ll have a hard bounce rate. Ensure that these emails are removed from your list immediately – some email marketing providers will do this for you already.

Bounce Rate (Soft)
If someone’s inbox is full and they receive your email, you will receive a soft bounce. This metric is not as concerning as the hard bounce rate, but do keep it in mind if the rate goes beyond 3-5%.

Revenue Per Email
When sending out an email, you should track any purchase behaviour that results from your actions. Revenue per email associates your campaign with a transaction to determine if your campaign is profitable. Marketers should be tracking this to determine whether their efforts were a success.

Unsubscribe Rate
When someone decides to leave your list, your unsubscribe rate increases – however, we want to see this number decrease. If your list has been untouched in awhile, you may have a higher rate in your initial campaign. You’ll see this drop with improved sending frequency and relevancy with your emails.

Spam Rate
When someone labels your email as spam, your rate is affected. Address this issue by ensuring your email list is organic and it’s easy to unsubscribe from your list if someone chooses to do so.

Delivery Rate
The percentage of people receiving your email is delivery rate. You should aim for 95% delivery by addressing issues with your bounce rates.

Forward Rate
When people share your email by forwarding it to others, this metric increases. You can add links in the email message to make it easier for forwarding and sharing. Social media share links can also increase the rate depending on provider.

Churn Rate
Churn is calculated by taking into consideration opt-outs, hard bounces, and complaints. This is an important growth metric for email marketers as 25% of people will leave lists yearly, requiring replenishment to keep lists growing.

Growth Rate
Opposite to churn rate, this metric is calculated by considering the number of new subscribers added to your list. You’ll want to be growing at a healthy rate to ensure your campaign is a success.

Inbox Rate
This metric measures whether you made it in someone’s inbox or junk mail folder. Improve this result by increasing your open and click-through rates. Remove inactive emails from your list, especially if there has been no activity in over six months (assuming you’ve been interacting with them on a regular basis!).

Overall Return
Determine the overall ROI on your email marketing campaign by reviewing total campaign sales minus campaign spend. Marketers should aim for a positive ROI every time.

I hope these metrics will help you on your next email campaign. Start tracking one or two of them to improve your marketing success today.

Looking to sell more and grow your following? Take my free email marketing course.

1. Increase page speed.
Use image and HTML compressors to cut down on load times. Also, using a faster server can fix most of the problems with your site’s speed. To see what other issues might be slowing down your site, check out this testing tool by Google.

2. Create a pop-up box to collect emails.
Give away valuable content, whether it be an eBook, course or checklist, in exchange for a prospect’s email. Then you can follow up with a series of automated emails to nurture your prospect to the buying stage. To set up a pop-up through WordPress, check out this plugin that I use.

3. Write content that matters.
Write blog posts for your site on a consistent basis. With regular, quality content, you will increase your organic ranking on Google search results.

4. Create “About” and “Contact” pages to overcome objections.
Describe your story in the About page and include your contact details and a fillable form in the Contact page. The most popular page after your main one is the Contact page. Make sure you optimize it for conversions.

5. Create landing pages that are simple, with a call-to-action at the bottom.
Only have one call-to-action (i.e., sign up, buy, donate) on a sales landing page. Your conversions for that one call-to-action will increase by asking with one specific goal in mind, not several.

6. Optimize your logo (it shouldn’t be blurry or old).
Here are some more logo tips to ensure your brand is professionally portrayed.

7. Include testimonials or case studies for social proof.
A customer testimonial or review of your product / service will do wonders for your credibility. Reach out to your current customer base for a positive testimonial and get permission to add it to your site.

8. Integrate social media accounts.
Show you’re interacting with your fans by having Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages linked on your website. Showing photos of your location will really help with your exposure and give prospects an inside-look at your company, building that trust at the first touchpoint.

9. Fix broken pages!
There is no quicker way to lose an opportunity when your pages are broken. Check all of your links on a broken link checker tool and fix the issues to improve your site’s functionality.

10. Be consistent with your brand message.
Check to make sure your content is on point. Have an editor check for word consistency to ensure you’re not confusing customers by saying different promises on different pages.

11. Show how you’re unique on the main page.
Most web traffic to your site ends up on the main page. Make sure you succinctly explain why you’re better than your competitors. You should be able to explain in one sentence.

Looking to sell more and grow your following? I created a series of free videos on YouTube to help you out with email marketing. Take the course today.