Email marketing still rules the digital advertising world. However, the success of email campaigns has a lot to do with your skills in analysing and optimising certain metrics such as open and click rates.
Understanding these metrics is crucial for devising effective email marketing strategies. Enhance your conversions by improving the average email open rate of your email campaigns and help achieve your marketing goals.
Key email marketing metrics
Knowing these key email marketing metrics is incredibly useful when analysing the performance of your campaign. Some of the most important metrics are:
- Open rate: The rate at which your emails are opened by email recipients.
- Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of subscribers who clicked on one or more links.
- Click-to-open rate (CTOR): Clicks divided by opens — how interesting your email content is.
- Unsubscribe rate: The speed at which subscribers unsubscribe.
- Bounce rate: Rate of undeliverable emails.
These core email marketing analytics metrics assist email marketers in recognising good email marketing strategies – knowing what keeps subscribers engaged and improving the effectiveness of future campaigns.
How to calculate the key email metrics
Here are the formulas to calculate some of the most crucial email metrics in email marketing:
- Email open rates = (Emails opened / Emails sent) x 100
- CTR = (Clicks / Emails sent) x 100
- CTOR = (Clicks / Opens) x 100
- Unsubscribe rate = (Unsubscribes / Emails delivered) x 100.
These provide key indicators of how your audience engages with your campaigns. Keep a close eye on these as it allows you to measure campaign performance and make data and performance-driven improvements in future emails.
Email targets vary by industry
Different industries can experience lower click-through rates because of differences in the customer journey and audience behaviour. For example:
- Real estate: Often gets high open rates because people are interested in the property updates being delivered.
- Products (e-commerce etc): May have lower CTRs but better conversion metrics due to strong visual content.
- Advertising & marketing: Sees click rates go up with tailored, educational email content.
Knowing the average rate for your industry will also help set realistic goals and craft efficient email marketing techniques.
Email performance (industry benchmarks)
| Industry | Open rate | CTR | CTOR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real estate | 26% | 2.9% | 11.2% |
| Advertising & marketing | 21% | 2.1% | 10% |
| B2C retail | 20% | 2.5% | 12.5% |
| B2B sector | 23% | 3.1% | 13.5% |
| Averages | 22% | 2.3% | 10.5% |
Tactics for increasing open and click rates
- Craft strong subject lines: Try to use a subject line generator or test multiple subject line versions. The subject line plays a direct role in determining open rate.
- Segment your email list: Audience segmentation enables you to reach the correct audience with relevant content. Split testing also helps fine-tune your approach to your email marketing efforts.
- Leverage personalised content: Your email body should be relevant to what your ideal customer is interested in. The more targeted your email marketing is, the better the conversions. Try including the recipient’s name, for example
- Enhance visual elements: Try to incorporate GIFs or other visuals into your emails. Emails that contain images are far more effective than plain-text emails.
- Call to action (CTA) optimisation: Strong CTA’s in email marketing are significant factors in increasing CTR and conversion rates.
- Clean your email list: Purge the deadwood to stop ruining your stats and harming deliverability – remove inactive subscribers at regular intervals.
- Email Marketing Best Practices
Impact of online privacy on email statistics
Quite often, mailboxes have started preloading emails for increased privacy & security, inflating open rates significantly. That makes CTOR and CTR better signals of genuine email engagement.
Tips:
- Track engagement according to CTR and CTOR rather than just the open rate.
- Monitor behaviour post-click with use of analytics tools and make improvements to your website (or other destination) if necessary.
- Adapt your email marketing to focus on meaningful engagement, over an increase in email open rates alone.
Optimal timing for emails
Timing your emails to be sent when they’ll have the most impact can increase engagement.
The best email frequency and timing depends on the industry type and your audience segment, but studies suggest:
- Tuesday to Thursday mornings tend to be the optimal time for the highest open rates.
- A/B test send times and see when your specific audience is most engaged because it may be different!
Challenges in email marketing that can result in poor statistics
- Unengaged subscribers: This drives low engagement and increases in unsubscribe rates.
- Cluttered email inboxes: Tougher to be noticed.
- Wrong audience targeting: Drives down the relevancy of your messages.
- Design problems: Bad formatting, slow load times, or poor email builders can hurt performance.
Surpassing these obstacles involves constant improvement of your email game and understanding the intent of your subscribers.
Email content essentials to improve performance
Successful emails have:
- Compelling content: Provide some kind of value, like product news, educational content or special discounts/offers etc.
- Visual appeal: Utilise product shots, dedicated image blocks and format images with appropriate text.
- Good email design: Clean layout, quick load times & strong CTAs.
- Use brief messaging: Honour the average attention span of the person reading the email by keeping it short and brief whenever the email format is used.
Testing and optimisation
Effective testing is key to continuous improvement.
Use A/B testing to optimise:
- Subject lines
- CTA placement
- Email card design
- Email on desktop vs mobile
Monitor CTOR, unsubscribe rates, and email click rates to continuously refine your email marketing strategy.
Conclusion
The success of email marketing is based on data. Understanding your metrics, trying different email tactics and refining content and design can unlock a more comprehensive view of your audience and better results for your campaigns.
TL;DR (too long; didn’t read)
Email metrics are important as they help gauge the performance of e-mail marketing campaigns.
- Open and click rates tell you how engaged your audience is.
- Industry-specific averages can be quite different; knowing your industry’s average email stats is important.
- Common elements of email marketing like subject lines, personalised content, email design and CTAs really matter when it comes to email marketing results.
- Target audience and email frequency are big factors in how your campaigns perform.
- CTR is important, but the effectiveness of your emails can be measured more accurately by tracking your CTOR.
FAQs
- What’s the average email open rate? Open rates vary by industry; 20–25% is a pretty solid average.
- What is the CTR vs CTOR? CTR measures clicks as a ratio of delivered emails, while CTOR measures clicks as a ratio of opened emails.
- How frequently should I email? It depends on who you are writing for. Try and test your email frequency, but between one and four emails per month is a good range to start with.
- How can I increase my click-through rate? Leverage engaging content, well-placed CTAs, segmented lists and use relevant images to capture reader interest.
- Is it a good idea to have images in emails? Yes. High-quality, relevant images and dedicated image blocks are recommended in your email marketing. Just keep an eye on those load times and make sure you have alt-text for accessibility!
- What is a sales funnel and how do they work? https://darwenonline.co.uk/web/what-is-a-sales-funnel-and-how-do-they-work/
