Michael Epps Utley 
Tracking email performance not only helps you understand whether you’re meeting your marketing objectives, it also allows you to:
Better understand your consumer base
Identify issues
Optimize what’s working
Eliminate what isn’t
Make your email program the best it can be
When developing email campaigns, you must incorporate ways to measure, evaluate, and analyze metrics to make it more likely that you’ll reach your goals.
This guide explains how to monitor your email marketing campaigns and use the data to gain insights to optimize them.
Develop a Measurement Plan
Here are the three steps to create a plan to monitor email effectiveness.
Determine timing. You must regularly track email results. Before setting benchmarks, it’s wise to develop a tracking schedule. Weekly and monthly cadences are the most common—anything longer could put your email program at risk because minor issues could become big problems or cause you to miss timely opportunities.
Document goals and objectives. Performance tracking must align with what campaigns are trying to achieve. It’s critical to come up with clear goals and objectives. Ensure they are measurable and figure out how to measure them.
Conduct analysis. Data analysis can help you figure out what’s working and what’s not. It can also show you the type of content people engage with, seeing which links or other elements drive the most click activity. When you analyze your audience’s behavior, you learn more about them, including what interests them or turns them off.
Select the Right Email Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators are metrics that help you understand how your email campaigns perform. Popular email marketing platforms allow you to see how many of your emails are received, opened, clicked on, and more. This data can be compiled in reports that show how your emails perform over time, in comparison to each other, and against industry email performance benchmarks.
What’s critical is to monitor the email KPIs that matter for your campaigns. Here are some common ones:
Open rate compares the number of emails opened against the total delivered. This metric is critical for determining the types of email subjects people prefer and the offers they respond to.
Click rate reflects the percent of the recipients who clicked on any tracked link in an email. It can help you identify the content and messages readers prefer and the offers consumers are more likely to respond to.
Bounces are registered when an email server rejects an email. Monitoring bounce rates is necessary to determine the freshness and quality of your email lists. Too many bounces could reflect that it’s getting stale.
Unsubscribes reflect those who have chosen to no longer receive emails from you. High unsubscribes for a single email indicate that people dislike a piece of content or offer. An increasing unsubscribe rate over time could mean recipients are dissatisfied with your overall email marketing efforts.
Device statistics reveal the types of equipment people use to read your emails. The data is useful because different devices display content differently. Knowing whether recipients interact with emails on a small phone or large laptop screen will help you optimize formatting.
Spam score reflects the rate at which specialized software categorizes your emails as spam. A high spam score indicates the software registers the content as disreputable, which can negatively impact your sender reputation, lowering deliverability rates.
Determine Email Effectiveness
Moving beyond email KPIs and tracking common marketing ones can help you better understand email effectiveness. Here are a few to consider.
Conversion rate measures the percentage of your email recipients who take the action you want. For instance, if the goal of your email is to get people to download a white paper, the conversion rate measures the number of people who do so as a percentage of those who received the email. A high conversion rate indicates a successful email solicitation.
Return on investment (ROI) measures how cost-effective an email campaign is. The mathematical formula is (profit minus cost)/cost. A low ROI means you spent too much to bring in too little revenue.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the amount spent to acquire a new customer. The formula is total campaign cost/conversions (paying customers). Spending too much to acquire a customer means your email marketing needs work.
Turning Email Marketing Metrics into Action
Of course, monitoring email performance data is useless if the insights it provides aren’t used to improve and optimize your marketing efforts. The real value is when you derive fresh ideas from the metrics and act on them.
For instance, earning a high click rate on desktops and a poor one on smartphones may demonstrate that emails aren’t formatted effectively for smaller screens. The next step should be to test new formatting optimized for phones.
Monitoring email marketing metrics and acting on the insights they provide is critical to ultimate email marketing success.
