What Are the 4 Main KPIs for Email Marketing?

Tracking KPIs is an excellent way to make your email marketing efforts successful. If you’re wondering what KPIs are or which ones you should be tracking, this article will give you all the details. Keep reading to learn more about email engagement. 

What Is a KPI?

KPI is an acronym for “key performance indicator.” A KPI in marketing is used to track performance based on specific benchmarks. Commonly, KPI benchmarks can be found that measure industry standards for performance that help businesses understand what areas of their marketing strategy are performing well and which could use improvement. 

KPIs are often used in email marketing to track how subscribers engage with email content and how much revenue emails can generate. If you’re looking for help measuring KPIs for email marketing, AudiencePoint’s email insight software can help you track and make sense of each metric that is important to your company’s success. 

Operational Metrics vs. KPI

Operational metrics measure daily processes within different departments of a business to ensure they are hitting goals for efficiency and quality standards. On the other hand, KPIs measure progress toward a company’s overarching goals, such as increasing revenue. Often, operational metrics will directly impact a company’s progress toward meeting target KPIs. 

In email marketing, companies can measure both operational metrics and KPIs. Typical operational metrics in email marketing would be things that contribute to the accuracy, timeliness, and creation of email content, like email production time and email mistakes or error rates. Typical KPIs for email include conversion rate, return on investment (ROI), or click-through rates. 

What Are the Different Types of KPIs for Email Marketing?

There are many types of KPIs in email marketing that may be important to a business. Typically, they can be broken down into a few main categories. The main types of KPIs are:

• Revenue: KPIs related to revenue are common in every business and important to overall email marketing success. These are metrics like conversion rate, direct revenue from emails, revenue per subscriber, and ROI. 
• Consumer engagement: Making sure subscribers are engaged is important for email marketing and may even be why businesses implement email marketing into their strategy. Engagement metrics for email are open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, email shares/forwards, and email read time. 
• Growth rates: Growth is essential to email marketing to ensure you are making progress toward company objectives. Typical growth metrics for email are list growth rate, number of new subscribers, and unsubscribes. 
• Consumer experience: An important part of email marketing is ensuring subscribers have a good experience when they sign up for your email list. KPIs that measure consumer experience are spam complaints or consumer satisfaction scores. 

Businesses will likely keep track of KPIs for each of these categories, as they all lead to overarching success from email marketing. However, if you are new to email marketing or looking for some basic indication of success, there are some key metrics that every business can benefit from tracking. 

What Are the 4 Main KPIs for Email Marketing?

Typically, tracking four main KPIs for email marketing can give you a good baseline of how your content is performing. The four main KPIs for email are:

• Click-through rate: Email click-throughs are important because they measure the percentage of recipients that click a link within the email’s content. If someone clicks a link in an email, it is a great indicator that they were engaged with the content and your call to action was successful. 
• Conversion rate: Email conversions are a metric every business wants to know. Conversion rate tracks the percentage of recipients that take a targeted action after reading an email, such as making a purchase, signing up for a consultation, or starting a free trial. 
• Open rate: Email opens indicate success since they measure consumer receptiveness to email content. Open rate is the percentage of recipients that open your email. However, Apple’s mail privacy protection (MPP) has impacted how this metric is tracked. AudiencePoint solves this issue by isolating Apple MPP opens from reporting. 
• Bounce rate: Bounce rate is important to keep track of for email marketing, since you want every email you send to be delivered to a subscriber’s inbox. Bounce rate tracks the percentage of emails that bounce (aren’t accepted by inbox providers) from the total emails sent. Ensuring you maintain high engagement can help reduce bounce rates. 

Measuring these main KPIs will give you a great start to knowing what areas of your email content could use improvement. 

What Are Some Quality KPI Examples?

Along with the main KPIs, quality KPIs for email can also be tracked. Quality KPIs typically measure customer service efforts and consumer experience. Some examples of quality KPIs are:

• Consumer satisfaction score: Measures consumer satisfaction after receiving help from the customer service team or may also measure the customer’s experience with email content or the buying process. 
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): The NPS measures the average consumer experience of your brand and is a metric that can be used to steer your customer experience management process.
• Time to respond: The time it takes to respond to an email requesting customer service support is essential. Every company should aim to respond to consumer inquiries as quickly as possible to ensure consumer satisfaction remains high. 
• Time to solve issues: The time it takes to solve a customer service inquiry through email is also important. If you can solve issues or answer questions quickly, consumers will be highly satisfied. 

If you increase your efforts in these areas, your company will stand out to consumers by providing an excellent experience. 

How AudiencePoint Can Help You Tackle Your Email Marketing

AudiencePoint’s email insight software can be an asset to your email marketing strategy by helping you track subscriber inbox activity, optimize send times, and segment your email list. This helps you increase your KPIs like open rate, click through rate, and conversion rate.

To get more information about how AudiencePoint can help, contact us today.