The 5 Metrics to Measure the Effectiveness of an Email Marketing Campaign

What are the metrics that determine the success of an email marketing campaign?

In email marketing there are some metrics that help you understand the effectiveness of a campaign and, if analyzed correctly, could improve its results.
The top 5 metrics that email marketers should know, monitor and compare are:

- Delivery rate
- Bounce Rate
- Open rate
- Click-through Rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate

The first three metrics are also called "on-mail metrics", because they are related to the interaction between users and email and are available in almost every email marketing platforms. Conversion rate, on the other hand, is defined as "off-mail metrics" as it is connected to the post-sending phase and is generally not part of the information available in an email marketing software.

Each time you send an email you must imagine it as a funnel process where at the beginning there are the emails sent and at the end the number of recipients who have completed the desired action. Between these two extremes there are a series of steps on which the success of email marketing activities depends.

Delivery Rate

The Delivery Rate is the delivery rate of the message, that is the percentage of people who have received the email correctly.

How to Calculate the Delivery Rate?
Delivery Rate = (Number of emails sent - number of bounces) / number of emails sent * 100%.
The delivery rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of emails delivered and is calculated by dividing the number of emails sent minus bounces by the number of emails sent.

The number of emails sent, as you will see in your campaigns, almost never correspond to the number of emails delivered; there are in fact some emails that are not delivered, because they can be bounced back.

Bounce Rate

Bounce is the percentage of email messages that could not be delivered to the recipient because they returned an error. Bounces are generally divided into two types:
- Hard Bounces when, for example, the recipient's email address is invalid (it could be simply wrong) or the email domain does not exist or when our message is rejected by the recipient's server because it is considered SPAM;
- Soft Bounce when there are temporary problems such as the recipient's mailbox is full, the email is too big, or the server is inactive.

How to Calculate the Bounce Rate?
Bounce Rate = (Number of Emails Returned / number of emails sent) * 100

How to improve the Delivery Rate and Bounce Rate?
Hard bounce is an important signal used by internet service providers to assess the sender's reputation. Having clean lists, that means contacts with valid and functioning addresses, is the best way to reduce the risks of non-delivery of your messages.
In Mail Marketing you will have the info you need about the delivery rate and the list of recipients for which the hard bounce has occurred, so you can check and, in case, remove invalid contacts.

Open Rate

The second reason why our message does not reach our recipient could be that the user receives the newsletter correctly but decides not to open it.
The open rate indicates how many messages have been opened while sending an email.

How to Calculate the Open Rate?
Open Rate = (Open Email / Sent Email ) * 100
The Open Rate is then calculated by dividing the number of open emails by the total number of emails sent (net of bounces).

How to improve the open rate of campaigns?
There are reasons why a user chooses to open or not open a newsletter. Among these, there are some elements that, if optimized, can certainly help to improve the open rate: the correct segmentation of the target, the choice of an easily recognizable sender name, a catchy subject that invite recipients to open the em-mail.
Mail Marketing has several features designed to improve the open rate, such as dynamic content or the ability to send emails to a group of users based on their engagement.

Click through Rate

The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of users who have received the email and have decided to click the link in this email.
The click-through rate is a key parameter in judging the effectiveness of the email marketing campaign.

How to Calculate the Click-through rate

Click-through rate = (Click Total or Click Unique ÷ Number of newsletters delivered) * 100
The click-through rate is generally calculated on single clicks, i.e. only one click per user is counted. The CTR may vary depending on the sector

How to improve the click-through rate of campaigns?
Once the recipient has decided to open the email we need to convince them to take one more step towards conversion.
At this stage the content of the email is fundamental.
A winning email is the synthesis between a perfect design, attractive images and text and some neuromarketing rules. Structure the email so that your call-to-action (CTA) is clear and clearly visible, use eye-catching images and text and don't forget to include an element (e.g. an offer with deadline) that convinces the user to open the email immediately.

Conversion rate

Conversion is the action we want the user to take on the site once they have clicked on the email. The conversion depends on the website: for example, the main conversion for an ecommerce is selling.
The conversion, being an action that is completed on the site, is tracked by web analytics software such as Google Analytics. To configure a conversion in Google Analytics see the article how to track conversions from your email marketing campaigns.

How to Calculate the Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate = (Number of people who have completed the desired action ÷ Total number of delivered emails) * 100

How to improve conversion rate of an email marketing campaign?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) activities no longer concern the email marketing software and its functionality but the site the user will land on after clicking on the link in our email.
To improve the results of our email marketing campaigns we will need to land users on a dedicated page, the landing page. The landing page must be a "welcoming" page with no "distractions". Information, images, videos, special offers, present in the landing page must be consistent with the information in the newsletter and have only one goal: to guide the user towards the completion of the action: the conversion.