Using modern marketing concepts to measure your department’s performance can be tricky, and measuring the success of email marketing campaigns is no exception. In general, many companies choose to focus on open and click rates. These metrics are certainly important and can tell you a lot about whether or not your email content resonates with your target audience. However, there are many other metrics that are often overlooked that can give you even deeper insight into the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Here are the most common email metrics you can track, and ways to look at them to gather a more extensive understanding of your campaign’s performance. 

1. Open Rates

Open rates tell you how many people have opened your message. This is important to track because if people aren’t opening your emails, then you’re missing the opportunity to get them to act. Looking at the open rates for different emails helps you determine what subject lines are most effective for your target readers. 

Get more out of this metric with email client data.

The open rate is sometimes skewed because some email clients open emails automatically, while others do not automatically load them. Though it would be nearly impossible to optimize your messages for every email client, you can look at the most common clients your readers use and optimize your emails to improve the accuracy of open rates. 

2. Click-through Rates

Click-through rates refer to when a reader clicks on one of the links in your email content, like a call to action. By comparing past and present click rates, you can get a feel for what types of content are most likely to be opened and enjoyed by your target audience. 

Get more out of this metric with click-to-open rate.

A way to get more helpful information out of the open and click-through rates is to look at the click-to-open rate. This tells you how many people opened the email and also clicked on it. If your open rates are poor, but your click-to-open rate is strong, this may indicate that you aren’t using the most effective subject lines to initially grab the reader’s attention. 

3. Unsubscribe Rates

The unsubscribe rate is another common metric used to determine the success of email marketing campaigns. This measurement is one of the best indicators that your brand message is not resonating with your audience over time. In fact, Jumplead reports that 67% of email users surveyed click the link to unsubscribe when they are no longer interested in a company’s emails. 

Get more out of this metric with contacts lost.

Here’s a modern marketing concept to pay attention to: by combining the unsubscribe rate with the spam rate (emails that have been marked as spam) and hard bounce rate (messages sent that can’t be delivered), you can get a better understanding of your total contacts lost. This helps you determine the overall health of your email lists so that you can increase the success of your campaigns. 

4. Email Conversions

The email conversion rate helps you better understand the bottom line of your email campaigns. By tracking how often an email reader converts into a customer, your company will have a better idea of how much money and time to spend on email marketing. 

Get more out of this metric with time spent viewing.

One way to help increase conversion rates is to monitor the average time readers spend viewing emails. The ideal time spent per email will vary based on the content’s goal, but using this metric allows you to revisit and improve content that isn’t getting enough read time.

Optimize Your Efforts with Insights from Metrics

The measurement of email marketing campaign metrics is just one of many modern marketing concepts that’s hard to agree on. Though there are many different metrics, including the ones on this list, you can track when it comes to performance, one thing is clear: consistently monitoring your email campaigns and gathering deeper insights from metrics helps your company continue to develop email content that increases conversions. If you constantly track your campaign’s performance, you can optimize your efforts to ensure increased effectiveness the next time around.