Email marketing plays a very significant role in any digital marketing scheme. It gives organizations the opportunity to build relationships with the customers and prospects, market their products and services. Nonetheless, email analytics and strategy is very crucial to the success of an email campaign. With email analytics, you get the necessary information and knowledge to learn the behavior of your audience, improve your campaigns, and enhance performance. This guide will discuss what email analytics is about, which metrics and KPIs are most important, and how you can transform email data into actionable information.

‍

What is Email Analytics?

Any data gathered in your email campaigns, measured and analyzed to find out the performance trends and optimization opportunities, can be used to perform email analytics. With open, click-through, conversion rates, and other engagement metrics, email marketing analytics tools provide you with insight into what is performing and what should be improved.

With email analytics, you can answer critical questions like:

• How many subscribers opened or clicked on my emails?
• Which content resonates best with my readers?
• When is the optimal time to reach my audience?
• Who are my most engaged subscribers?

Equipped with these behavioral insights, you have the power to optimize your email strategy in order to maximize the deliverability of your emails, better engage the audience, and convert more. Email analytics converts your subscriber data into strategic decision-making information.

5 Key Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs

These are five most critical email performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that any email marketer needs to keep track of:

Email Delivery Rate 

The email delivery rate refers to the percentage of emails from your campaign that successfully reached subscribers’ inboxes. For email campaigns to be effective, they need to reliably arrive in subscribers’ inboxes, which makes using tools like the email HTML builder essential for optimizing formatting and deliverability.

Delivery rate is calculated as:

(Number of emails delivered / Number of emails sent) x 100

High delivery rate means your emails are landing in subscribers’ inboxes instead of getting blocked by spam filters or bounced.

Open Rates

The open rate represents the percentage of email subscribers who opened your email. It's a key gauge of how compelling your subject lines and pretext are to your audience.

The formula is:

(Number of opens / Number of delivered emails) x 100

If your open rates dip below industry benchmarks, that’s a red flag to rework your subject lines, preview text, and more.

Click-Through Rates 

Click-through rate (CTR) indicates how many recipients went on to click links inside the email to drive traffic to your site, product pages, blog, etc.

CTR is calculated as:

(Number of clicks / Number of delivered emails) x 100

Click-throughs demonstrate that your content piqued the reader's interest enough to click for more information. Monitoring CTRs helps you determine which content and email design is most effective.

Bounce Rates 

Bounce rate is the percentage of sent emails that could not be delivered. This mostly occurs due to invalid, closed, or mistyped email addresses in your list.

The formula is:

(Number of bounces / Number of emails sent) x 100

Keeping bounce rates low ensures you aren’t wasting campaign resources emailing addresses that don’t exist. It also helps your sender reputation.

Unsubscribe Rates 

The unsubscribe rate tells you the percentage of email recipients who opted out of your email list by clicking the unsubscribe link. A sudden rise could mean your content is no longer relevant to some subscribers.

Unsubscribe rate is:

(Number of unsubscribes / Number of delivered emails) x 100

Keeping an eye on unsubscribe trends lets you assess whether your recipients still want to hear from you or if you need to refresh your approach.

Leveraging Email Analytics for Better Performance

Simply looking at email metrics isn’t enough. To maximize value, you need to be able to interpret performance data, draw insights about subscriber behavior patterns, and take action.

Here are some examples of how to turn email analytics into opportunities for optimization:

• Segment contacts by engagement level. Separate highly engaged subscribers from inactive contacts so you can better personalize content.
• Identify the best email send times. See if open and click rates are higher on certain weekdays or times. Adjust your email cadence accordingly.
• Find subject line formulas that work. A/B test different subject line lengths, content, emojis, urgency cues, and more. Apply learnings to boost open rates.
• Reduce list decay. Monitor bounce rates and remove invalid email addresses. Trim your list to only quality leads interested in hearing from you.
• Create more relevant content. See which email content has the highest click-throughs. Then make more of that content that subscribers love.

As you can see, properly leveraging email analytics can significantly impact performance. You gain priceless subscriber intelligence to craft campaigns that resonate better.

Email Marketing Benchmarks

To put your email marketing success metrics into perspective, compare program performance against email marketing benchmarks. Benchmarks are industry averages across key metrics for email marketing like open rates, CTRs, and more, based on aggregate data.

Comparing your KPIs against benchmarks reveals where your strategy exceeds, matches, or falls short of peers. You can then set realistic goals and growth targets.

Here are the latest email marketing benchmarks to gauge your performance:

• Average email open rate: 21.33%
• Average click-through rate: 2.9%
• Average email delivery rate: 90%+
• Average bounce rate: 5% or lower
• Average unsubscribe rate: 0.1%

Bear in mind, benchmarks vary significantly across industries, so find relevant figures. For example, financial services open rates average 15-18%, while arts and design enjoy 35%+ open rates.

Tools like UniOne and SendinBlue provide great email benchmarking data across sectors.

‍

Getting Started with Email Analytics

Now that you know what metrics to track and how to turn data into insights, here’s a quick overview of how to start monitoring campaign analytics:

• Choose a dedicated email marketing platform like Mailchimp, UniOne, Constant Contact, or similar. Leading tools come equipped with built-in analytics dashboards for easy reporting.
• Integrate analytics for email marketing tracking pixels with your email service provider platform. This enables you to capture opens, clicks, location data, and more.
• Import email lists into your email tool and set up campaigns. Embed relevant tracking parameters to monitor performance.
• Send out test emails to capture baseline analytics. Then officially launch campaigns and monitor metrics in real-time via dashboard reporting.
• Schedule monthly performance reviews. Analyze the latest monthly data and compare it to previous periods. Mine the data for optimization opportunities, then apply learnings.

When your needs change, you may want to consider investing in a more sophisticated tool such as UniOne. Deep, granular data and custom reporting are available in UniOne, making it easy to derive subscriber intelligence.

Conclusion

The success of email marketing lies in making sure that the experience of subscribers is consistently getting better and that customers are engaged positively. The analysis of email performance separates excellent email programs and poor ones.

Through monitoring of open rates, click-throughs, conversions, and much more, you have an opportunity to build a priceless feedback mechanism to iterate on content, segmentation, email targeting, and so on. Spend some time in the beginning to identify the appropriate metrics and KPIs that fit your business. Next, use email analytics to increase subscriber bliss and ROI.