Do you know how well your email marketing campaigns are performing?

Email marketing has been and remains an essential part of campaigns for most of the successful marketers and business owners.

The great shift, in the last decade, from stationary digital devices to mobile ones has also come to mean that people are able to access their emails anytime and anywhere, making the relevance of an effective email campaign all the more important to businesses.

Here is a statistic to give you a perspective on this: according to a report by The Radicati Group, in 2017, the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day is forecasted to grow to over 347 billion by the end of 2023.

Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you take some pains to ensure that you have an impactful email campaign strategy (read about some of the best strategies for email marketing campaigns).

If, however, you are already running email marketing campaigns, you will also need a way to measure how successful they are because only then you can take measures to make them better. That is what we will help you with in this article.

Before beginning to learn about the email campaign success metrics, it is also important to understand that different businesses have different expectations from their marketing efforts.

Moreover, in addition to a consistent overarching marketing goal, various individual campaigns may also have their own independent objectives. The metrics you will use to measure the email marketing success rate will depend upon these objectives.

1. Different goals, different metrics

It is important that you have clarity on exactly what you want to achieve with your campaign before you start sending out mailers to your customers.

Let us look at some of the common goals an email marketing campaign can have, and let us also look at the metrics can which can help you whether the goals are being met or not and to what extent.

2. Subscriber list growth

When your goal is to increase the mass of your subscribers, your emails will have CTAs such as ‘Subscribe Now’ or ‘Register Today’ for blogs, or newsletters, or regular updates.

This goal will help you typically in growing the top of your marketing funnel. To measure the success of your email marketing in helping you with this, you will find the Subscriber List Growth Rate to be the most important metric.

3. Lead generation

Instead of gaining new subscribers, the goal of your campaign can be to generate leads and in that case, your emails will need to persuade your customers to fill a lead-capture form.

Depending further on exactly how you want to use these captured leads, you may want to take into account all of them or only those that are new to your database. The metric to help you with this will be the Number of (new or total) Leads Generated.

4. Conversions

If the focus of your email marketing campaign is to drive conversions, that is to focus on the bottom of your marketing funnel, your emails would prompt the users to ‘Explore the Collection’ or ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Get a Demo’.

The metric for you is the Conversion Rate and you can determine the success of your next email campaigns by the tracking changes in your lead-to-customer conversion rate.

Now, let us look at a few more common metrics that are used to evaluate the success of email campaigns.

5. ClickThrough Rate

ClickThrough Rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in a given email. It is calculated as (Total clicks OR unique clicks ÷ Number of delivered emails) * 100.

CTR is the most common metric used by marketers to understand the kind of engagement that the emails are getting from customers.

For using A/B testing to determine which of the email-content from a set of alternatives is performing the best, CTR is the metric usually looked at.

6. Conversion Rate

The percentage of email recipients who click on a link in an email and complete the desired action, such as filling out a lead generation form or purchasing a product.

It is calculated as (Number of people who completed the desired action ÷ Number of total emails delivered) * 100

Simply getting a user to engage with your email may not always be conducive to your business goals, and in such cases, you will need to measure the Conversion Rate to understand what part is an email campaign playing in getting your actual conversions.

You will also need to integrate your email platform and your web analytics so that you can identify the source of the click as coming from a specific email campaign.

7. Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of your total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered to the recipient's inbox. It is calculated as (Total number of bounced emails ÷ Number of emails sent) * 100

8. Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate

This is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a “share this” button to post email content to a social network, and/or who clicked on a “forward to a friend” button.

It is calculated as (Number of clicks on a share and/or forward button ÷ Number of total delivered emails) * 100.

This metric is a good indicator of how impressed your customers are with your emails and your brand.

Sharing an email to social media or forwarding it to friends is not the most common behavior with respect to a business mail, and a good result on the metric tells you that you are ticking most of the right boxes with your email campaign.

9. Overall ROI

It is the overall return on investment for your email campaigns, i.e. the total revenue divided by total spend. It is calculated as [($ in additional sales made minus $ invested in the campaign) ÷ $ invested in the campaign] * 100.

Overall ROI gives you the big picture to understand how your email campaign is doing and whether it is being profitable for your business.

Even if the other metrics are favorable, but the overall ROI is indicating that the money being used to run the email campaign is not bring the returns as per your expectations, you might want to make some major changes in your strategy.

Keeping in mind the nature of your business, and thus the goals that you expect your email campaigns to fulfill for you, different metrics can be chosen to measure the success of your email marketing efforts.

However, it important that you get started with figuring this out as soon as possible because every day spent in between is a day spent shooting arrows in the dark, your carefully crafted emails being the proverbial arrows.