Email marketing can be a powerful tool for all businesses, but by offering so many related metrics, it can sometimes be challenging to know which ones are the most important. Tracking and monitoring the performance of your email marketing campaign is a powerful way to identify what resonates with your audience, and what does not, and how to make your strategy as effective as possible.
You will need to figure out what metrics you want to track in order to see progress on your email sign-ups. This article will guide you through the essential email marketing metrics you should be tracking to increase your email sign-ups. You will be informed on how to use these metrics, and how they can be helpful for business.
11 Metrics You Should Track to Increase Your Email Signup Rates
Email Conversion to Sign-up
The email conversion to sign-up is a great way to know how many website visitors are converted to customers through email sign-ups. The aim of this metric is to acquire leads and build relationships with your potential customers. This metric can help you track customer engagement as well as brand loyalty, and measure the success of your campaigns, which will impact growth in your customer base and increase sales.
Email Conversion to Sign-up = (Number of converted customers through email sign-up / Total number of leads to website) x 100
To maximize email conversion to sign-up, you must ensure that your web pages are optimized for conversions. This includes creating persuasive copy, attractive visuals, and a simple sign-up process. You should also employ strategies such as A/B testing and personalization to improve your email conversion. By employing these strategies, your business can effectively increase the number of people signing up for your emails.
Email Conversion Rate
The percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link within an email while also completing the desired action that you want them to take e.g. clicking the signup button to subscribe to your newsletter.
Email Conversion Rate = (Number of people who completed the desired action / Number of total emails delivered) x 100
Conversion is one of the top metrics to track because it can reveal how well you’re meeting your goals and the overall success of your email marketing activities. If you’re looking at generating leads, the email conversion rate shows you how successful your newsletters are at doing so.
To measure the email conversion rate for your campaigns, you will need to integrate your email marketing platform with your web analytics tool. This can be accomplished by setting up unique click-tracking URLs for links in your messages that identify their source as coming from a specific campaign.
Email Click-through Rate
The email click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on the links you included in your email. It’s definitely important to track your click-through rates - that way, you know how many people on your list are engaging with your content. A high CTR means they’re interested in what you offer and want to continue learning more about your brand. According to Mailchimp, the average click-through rate across all industries is 2.91%.
Email CTR = (Number of unique clicks / Total number of delivered emails) x100
Click-through rate is the first metric that email marketers often keep an eye on. It can tell you a lot about how your email campaign is performing in one quick glance. CTR is also often used in A/B testing, as they are designed to test new ways of getting more clicks and response rates. It’s also helpful to track: which contacts click on a link, the number of clicks per link, the number of clicks for each unique open, the number of times someone clicked a link, and the most-clicked link in your campaign.
Email Bounce Rate
The email bounce rate is the percentage of your total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. There are two kinds of bounces to track: “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces. A hard bounce occurs when an email is sent to an invalid email address, and a soft bounce happens when an email is delivered to a valid email but returned by the server.
Email Bounce Rate = (Number of emails bounced / Number of emails sent) x 100
This data is useful for keeping your contacts organized and it also reflects your deliverability. A low email bounce rate contributes to a good sender reputation. A high email bounce rate on your content means that it is either slotted as spam or going undelivered and unseen, which will lower your sender’s reputation. You want to aim for an email bounce rate of 2% or less (or a delivered rate of 98% or more).
Despite the email bounce rate not being a direct measure of business goals, it can be a good indicator of email success. It’s worth checking to ensure your email gets delivered without any issues and you don’t accidentally have too many hard bounces.
Email Open Rate
Open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open an individual email. Email open rates are affected by the sender’s reputation, subject line, and time spent. A good average open rate is between 20-30%. Experimenting with different subject lines in your emails can provide useful insights into what drives your subscribers to read them or not.
Email Open Rate = (Number of emails opened / Number of emails delivered) x 100
You can get some insights from comparing open rates. For example, if you compare this week’s email opens to last week’s email opens (to the same lists) you might see any changes that occurred.
Email Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribe from your list after reading your email. Be aware of the unsubscribe rate in your email marketing. If it is high, it could indicate that the audience you are trying to reach is not interested in receiving your emails. Generally, you want to aim for an email unsubscribe rate of less than 1% for most industries.
Email Unsubscribe Rate = (Number of unsubscribes / Number of emails delivered) x 100
While there are people who will choose to unsubscribe, looking at your unsubscribe rate can help you determine whether the content you’re sending is valuable to your audience. People unsubscribe from emails for many different reasons, one reason can be that your email lists receive irrelevant emails too frequently or because the email quality is low.
A sudden rise in those numbers could signal an issue that needs urgent addressing. The unsubscribe rate is also important to measure when tracking your deliverability.
Email List Growth Rate
Email list growth is how much your list is growing, as opposed to the loss or churn of subscribers. You need an email list to be able to send emails to your subscribers. Without the growth of your email list, the success of your email campaign becomes limited. Having a high email list growth rate is a good sign because it means the business is reaching more customers.
Email List Growth Rate = ((Monthly new subscribers – Monthly churned subscribers) / Email list size) x 100
Alternatively, you could look at the Churn Rate, which measures how many people have been removed from your email list including unsubscribes, bounces, manual removals, or even disengaged subscribers. It’s good to have this number so you know how much you need to grow your list to have a positive growth rate. Monitoring the churn rate can also help you identify how much you need to grow your email list to have a positive growth rate.
Churn Rate = (Monthly churned subscribers / Email list size at the beginning of the month) x 100
One of the benefits of a high email list growth rate is that it allows you to reach a larger audience. This means you can send your message to more people and potentially convert more leads into customers.
Email Forwarding Rate
The email forwarding rate refers to the number of times an email is shared or forwarded by its recipients. A forwarded email occurs when people click the forward/share button in their email service after they open your email. If you want to create share-worthy content, then you should be tracking the results of the email forwarding rate.
Email Forwarding Rate = (Number of emails forwarded / Number of emails opened) x 100
Keeping tabs on how much your email gets forwarded is a brilliant way to audit how well your email marketing is doing. This will give you some insights into what your subscribers are responding to, which will let you adjust your strategy to be more effective.
Overall Return on Investment
The overall return on investment (ROI) measures how much revenue your email marketing campaigns offer compared to the costs involved. ROI measures the cost-effectiveness of your email campaign. You must effectively manage your email marketing budget before measuring your email marketing cost.
Overall Return on Investment = (Email revenue – Email marketing cost) / Email marketing cost
To succeed in business, you need to differentiate the strategies that are profitable and those that aren’t. Knowing which email marketing campaign was the most profitable is a great example of this. You can only do this if you calculate the ROI beforehand.
Email Subscriber Lifetime Value
The lifetime value (LTV) of an email subscriber is how much revenue you can expect to gain from a single email subscriber throughout their lifetime on your list. This metric can help you segment your email lists and target subscribers who are more likely to be valuable customers. It can also help you determine the ROI of your email marketing campaigns and identify areas for improvement.
Email Subscriber Lifetime Value = (Average revenue per subscriber x Average lifetime of a subscriber) – Subscriber maintenance cost
Email subscriber lifetime value data can help you create more personalized and relevant email newsletters likely to resonate with subscribers. Your email marketing department can use this data to optimize its campaign for conversions by focusing on the activities that are most likely to generate more sales.
The lifetime value of an email subscriber is an important metric because as the cost of acquiring new subscribers increases, you want to ascertain the LTV of each new subscriber is higher to make sure it’s worth the acquisition cost. You can calculate the LTV of your email subscribers per acquisition channel to see what’s working and not working.
Email Subscriber Acquisition Cost
The email subscriber acquisition cost is how much it costs on average to get one new subscriber to your email list. This is not to be confused with Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Email subscriber acquisition cost is one of the fundamental metrics for any successful email marketing campaign. If you don’t know what it costs (on average) to acquire a new customer, then there is no way you can maximize your ROI.
Email Subscriber Acquisition Cost = Paid ads or Marketing cost / Number of new subscribers
A good email subscriber acquisition cost is one that is lower than your subscriber value. A lower acquisition cost will be a good place to start, but that may come with the risk of having lower-quality subscribers. Use the lifetime value of your subscribers to determine how much you’re willing to spend on a reliable, high-quality email subscriber list.
Other metrics you could consider tracking
Spam Score Rate
The spam score rate measures the percentage at which your email subscribers report or mark your email as spam. A high spam score indicates that your audience doesn’t find the content you send them to be valuable. It doesn’t necessarily mean your emails are automatically considered spam. This percentage is a variety of signals that can contribute towards a high spam score including low author reputation, poor sender domain reputation, and content concerns, which negatively affect deliverability.
Spam Score Rate = (Number of spam reports or complaints / Number of emails delivered) x 100
According to MailChimp, the average spam score for commercial email is about 3.5%. This means that your company’s emails have a 3.5% chance of being marked as spam by recipients. If subscribers in your email list are not familiar with your brand or cannot find a way to unsubscribe from you, there will be many spam reports. It’s important to make sure that people can unsubscribe with as little difficulty as possible.
Implementing strong anti-spam filters is a good way to lower your spam score. Before sending emails, make sure that your recipients have explicitly given you permission to do so. Another way to lower your email spam score is to send relevant content that is valuable to your subscribers. Lastly, ensure to regularly monitor your spam score and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Email Signup by Top Pages
Knowing which pages of your website are driving the most email sign-ups is an important metric for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns. With the right tracking tools, you can easily measure how many people have signed up to receive emails from your website and which of your top pages are driving the most sign-ups.
The email sign-up by top pages measures the performance of top pages in your website in terms of generating leads. This metric helps to track the effectiveness of the email campaigns and determine which of the top pages visitors are most likely to sign up for emails from. It measures the number of visitors who have signed up for an email list from the top pages of the website. By understanding which pages are performing the best, businesses can make sure that they are targeting their audience in the right way and getting more people to sign up for their emails.
Email Signup by Device Type
The device statistics by type gives you an idea of what devices your subscribers are using to read the emails that you send. It is vital that your content is displayed in the best way possible for the most used device type. It is worth taking into account how your content will be displayed on various types of devices when designing it. For example, by assigning certain devices to certain segments, your subscribers in each segment can better engage with the content they receive.
Knowing this data will help you determine where to spend your development and QA efforts. This can also help you troubleshoot delivery issues by isolating the problem from a single sender, recipient, or service provider.
Email Sign-up by Offer
The email Sign-up Offer is a great way to build relationships with your customers and increase the chances of their return. By offering an incentive, such as a discount or freebie, you can encourage customers to sign up for your email list. It helps you track the effectiveness of your offers, so you can make improvements and maximize your potential customer base. This also helps you to track customer behavior, offer personalized content and promotions, as well as measure the success of your campaigns.
By tracking the email sign-up by offer metric, you can optimize your email campaigns, and easily track how many people are signing up for your emails and how effective each offer is in increasing the number of subscribers. This will lead to more conversions and ultimately, higher profits.
Print Rate
Prints tell you how many recipients printed your email after they opened your email. It’s a good measure of how many individuals took the action you wanted them to (i.e use the print function) after they read your email.
Print Rate = (Number of emails printed / Number of emails opened) x 100
This print rate is necessary for any kind of coupon that needs to be printed as well as emails that require printing invitations, directions, tickets, or confirmations.
Conclusion
Your email marketing platform will automatically gather reports on important metrics for you, but it’s important to have a good understanding of what these reports contain. The resulting data from measuring these metrics should be used to make necessary changes to your marketing campaign where applicable. If your campaign seems to be losing engagement, make sure you take a look at the relevant data and compare it to any context that may be relevant in order to pin out the problem. Then try using a creative approach to get your campaign working again.
Working with a CRO agency can help your email marketing efforts increase sign-ups and drive more ROI. At this point, you should schedule a free CRO discovery call to figure out the best strategies you should implement to drive more conversions through emails.