Email Marketing Reporting: What are the essential KPIs to track?

Key data plays a major role in brand performance. But with such a multitude of information at disposal, it's often unclear which metrics can depict the most accurate and comprehensive picture of email marketing campaigns' performance. Today's marketers must constantly strive to achieve an understanding of how influential each chosen Key Performance Indicator is toward an established goal.

In this article, we propose a set of 5 essential email marketing KPIs - ones we consider each marketer to be required to monitor, as these metrics are critical to evaluating efficiency and performance.

1. Email Delivery Rate

When it comes to email marketing performance, one KPI truly stands out.

Email delivery rates are indicative of the volume of email communication that successfully reached contacts’ inboxes. This metric is calculated by dividing the total number of emails sent, minus emails that bounced back, by the number of total emails sent.

It is useful to keep constant track of this performance indicator, while also diving deeper into its analysis. For example, as depicted in the chart below, you can highlight differences in email delivery rates across regions. Similarly, you can quickly draft up charts that will show the email delivery rate evolving over time.

Emails sent from Eloqua are only helpful when they actually make it to the contact’s inbox. As such, a higher delivery rate indicates greater success.

Many aspects factor in here, and there are several strategies aimed at increasing email deliverability that we as marketers must constantly consider.

Best practice!

IP warming is an excellent strategy. As part of Sender Reputation Management, IP Warming is the practice of gradually increasing the volume of emails sent with a dedicated IP address according to a carefully thought out, predetermined schedule and highly engaged contacts.

This process helps establish a good sender reputation with ISPs (inbox providers, such as Gmail, Yahoo, and many others), as a legitimate email sender.

Worth noting, though, is that IP warming-up processes may be rather time-consuming (approximately four to six weeks). During this time, the number of outbound emails should gradually increase, and email delivery rates should be carefully monitored.

Also essential when it comes to email sender reputation management, are feedback loops. Along with email bounces, spam traps, the volume, and consistency of email sends and engagement, and complaints account for incurring damage to the IP reputation.

Truthfully, IP reputation management is a complex topic and for this reason, it deserves its own article. As for this glance at its many nuances, we’ll conclude by saying it is something marketers must constantly monitor, in correlation with email delivery rates.

2. Email Open Rate

Of similar importance, the email open rate highlights marketing automation performance. Open rates are one of the best ways to tell whether our email strategy works.

This number shows us what percentage of the total audience opens the emails we send. If we have a higher open rate, we usually conclude that our subject lines resonate with the target.

We calculate the open email rate for a campaign using the following formula: 

Email Open Rate = Emails Read / (Emails Sent – Bounces) ×100 

For instance, as we see in the chart above, the email open rate can be calculated and then compared across regions or different periods or segments. All these insights can become very valuable when it comes to assessing the performance of multiple campaigns.

3. Email Click-Through Rate

The click-through rate, or email click rate, is another marketing automation KPI that requires special attention and monitoring.

The CTR measures how many people clicked on a hyperlink, CTA, or image within a particular email. This metric is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks an email receives by the total number of delivered messages. Here’s what that equation looks like: 

Email Click Rate = Emails Clicked / (Emails Sent – Bounces) x 100 

And similar to email open rates and email delivery rates, the email click rate can, and should also be compared across regions, campaigns, segments, or periods. Ultimately, we obtain the valuable insights necessary to better understand marketing automation performance.

However, even if we have managed to adopt the right administrative setups to successfully deliver all our emails and we have demonstrated our ability to delight our audiences (looking at open and click-through rates), we marketers know we still face risks.

With each new email sent, we risk the chance of a contact unsubscribing. For this reason, another essential marketing automation KPI we list here is the unsubscribe rate.

4. Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate is a measure that indicates the percentage of users who have opted out from the mailing list after an email campaign. This impacts email deliverability, meaning that a large number of unsubscribes may lead to very negative consequences.

To determine the unsubscribe rate, we need to know two metrics: the number of delivered emails and the number of unsubscribes. The specific formula is: 

Unsubscribe rate = Unsubscribes / (Emails Sent - Bounces) x 100 

It is wise to monitor the unsubscribe rate periodically to ensure that it does not exceed the industry average or your own prior averages. In essence, this metric is highly indicative of the relationship brands have with their contacts. The higher the unsubscribe rate, the more this demonstrates that a disconnect in expectations is present.

5. Lead Qualification Rate

The last KPI of true paramountcy we list in this article regards lead qualification. Marketers know that the end goal of every effort is to ultimately drive more revenue.

While a high number of leads does not necessarily imply that many new customers will be acquired, measuring the total number of leads created through marketing automation campaigns is a start for further lead generation and qualification strategies.

This is without a doubt a team effort, involving both the sales and marketing departments to determine the quality of leads, as well as additional analyses meant to qualify these leads as opportunities and potential clients.

Final thoughts...

We hope these insights can help you confidently pick which email marketing KPIs you should measure to evaluate your marketing automation programs more efficiently. If you are ever interested to learn more about our expertise in constructing more custom Eloqua reporting dashboards, don't hesitate to reach out!