7 essential KPIs for starting and measuring an effective email campaign

Creating a robust marketing strategy and deploying effective, influential campaigns are essential to increasing revenues and driving overall business growth. On the other hand, no matter how well you optimize the content of your marketing campaigns, without the ability to analyze data or certainty as to which KPIs to monitor, evaluating the performance of marketing efforts becomes impossible. Using KPIs is therefore an excellent way to measure the impact of each marketing action on the organization, in order to understand customers as well as achieve business objectives.

Indeed, while more than half of Americans rely on their intuition to decide what to believe, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, data analysis enables a hypothesis to be confirmed or disproved in an objective and well-founded way. And according to a PwC study, organizations that adopt a strong data-driven approach are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making, compared to those that rely less on data.

While opening and click-through rates are the most important, there is a lot more data to be analyzed, and it needs to be adapted according to the objectives defined in advance. This article looks at the most important KPIs and how to calculate them.

What is a marketing KPI?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics used to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing actions in relation to predefined objectives. KPIs can be used to track the performance of each business unit: marketing, sales, HR, etc.

As far as email marketing is concerned, KPIs are designed to guide campaigns towards maximum success by tracking one or more KPIs. They are therefore crucial for monitoring marketing campaigns, as they provide an objective basis for evaluating the performance and effectiveness of the strategies deployed.

By providing an overview of what's working and what's not, KPIs enable informed decisions to be made to adjust and optimize campaigns in real time. Without KPIs, companies risk navigating blindly, investing resources in ineffective tactics without understanding their real impact.

How do you know which KPIs to track?

It's possible to know what's working and what's not, and therefore to identify problems to be solved or tactics to be continued through the use of KPIs. And while the majority of marketers focus on the most common KPIs such as open rate or conversion rate, it's necessary to go a step further and tailor metrics to each campaign's objectives. This will require several iterations to find the KPIs best suited to each objective.

The 7 Key KPIs to Optimize Your Email Campaigns

Open rate

The open rate of an emailing campaign corresponds to the number of emails opened in relation to the total number of emails delivered.

The open rate is a good indicator for measuring campaign performance. A high open rate indicates that the content is generating interest among recipients, and allows us to assess the relevance of the email campaign.

Conversely, a low open rate may indicate an uninviting subject line or the wrong target audience. To improve it, you need to test different subject lines, optimize sending times or target your contacts precisely.

Opening time

The average person receives over 120 emails a day. Sending emails at a time when many other emails are being received by a recipient risks the message fading into the background. Tracking the opening time is therefore a way of increasing the open rate, as it is possible to adapt the moment when the email is received by the recipient to a time when he or she is most likely to consult it.

It's a good idea to test and compare different time slots to understand when recipients are most likely to open an email.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that have not been delivered to recipients. Bounce rates can be soft, i.e. temporary (inbox full, the receiving internet service provider is having connectivity problems...) or hard, i.e. the emails will never be delivered (invalid email address, your recipient's mail server doesn't exist...).

Bounce rates are a very important KPI for mailing campaigns, as they are a guarantee of the sender's reputation. A high bounce rate will make the sender look like a spammer and impact future e-mail deliverability. It is therefore important to keep a clean mailing list.

Click-through-rates

The click-through rate indicates the percentage of recipients who click on the links, image or CTA contained in the email. CTRs allow us to estimate the recipient's engagement with the email content. In order to define a relevant CTR target, it's crucial to analyze industry benchmarks, historical data and specific campaign objectives. If the CTR is lower than that of the industry, it's possible that the email has targeted the wrong people, or that there's a problem with the text, email structure or CTAs.

Unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate indicates the percentage of recipients who wish to unsubscribe from a mailing list after receiving an email. A high unsubscribe rate may indicate problems with sending frequency, content relevance or the quality of audience segments. Sending personalized emails, for example, could help reduce turnover.

List Growth Rate

The list growth rate measures the speed at which your email list is growing. This KPI takes into account all new sign-ups as well as unsubscribes and deletions of invalid emails. Using optimized sign-up forms or attractive incentives helps to encourage sign-ups.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of recipients who carry out the desired action after clicking on the links in the email. This could be a purchase, filling out a form or downloading a brochure. This indicator is essential for quantifying the achievement of the campaign's final objectives.

Personalizing emails allows us to respond more precisely to the specific needs of each recipient, thus increasing the conversion rate. What's more, improving CTAs by making them clear, engaging and easily accessible can also increase conversion.

Use Mailtrack for Gmail to track these metrics

While many solutions exist for tracking KPIs, Mailtrack for Gmail is currently positioned as one of the best solutions on the market. Mailtrack for Gmail is a powerful tool that makes it easy to track essential email campaign metrics. Free of charge, it lets you know exactly how many times and when an e-mail has been opened in real time. Integrated directly into Gmail, it makes it easy to monitor open rates, click-through rates and other key metrics directly from the inbox.

To start tracking your emailing KPIs with ease, download the Mailtrack for Gmail extension now and access real-time visibility of your emails directly from your inbox.