The Gist
- Email marketing metrics. Successful email campaigns measure far beyond opens and clicks, focusing on in-depth business metrics.
- Diverse strategies required. Tailor your email metrics to match your specific business type — retail, B2B, subscription services,or media.
- Benchmark wisely. Use benchmarks that match your business’s scope and scale to accurately measure email program success.
As frustrating as it is to hear “It depends” when you need an answer, it’s far worse to get an overly simplified answer that flattens all the nuance out of a situation. Often, that’s the case with email marketing metrics.
Email opens? Clicks? Revenue? Chances are you’ve seen those held up as the end goal for email programs. And they may be for you. However, they’re most likely not. And even if one or more of those email marketing metrics are, they’re likely not the only metrics you should care about.
That’s because every industry is unique, and that uniqueness should be reflected in the overall mission of your email program, as well as your key performance indicators. That said, there are some commonalities. In the fourth edition of my book, “Email Marketing Rules,” I discuss four buckets that companies’ email programs tend to fall into:
- Revenue-driven email programs
- Lead-driven email programs
- Retention-driven email programs
- Engagement-driven email programs
Each of those types of programs have their own goals, and therefore their own key performance indicators (KPIs). Let’s talk about each one.
Related Article: 4 Stakeholders Every Email Marketing Program Has & What They Want
4 Important Email Marketing Metrics
Revenue-Driven Email Programs
Retailers, direct-to-consumer brands, and other B2C companies will likely focus their email marketing efforts on increasing sales, which they’ll measure by tracking metrics like:
- Revenue
- Profit
- Average order size
- Order frequency
- Order returns, with the goal of reducing them
- Customer lifetime value
Lead-Driven Email Programs
B2B companies, financial services and insurance companies, and sellers of high-price durable goods will likely focus their email marketing efforts on generating qualified leads to pass along to their sales reps and agents, tracking metrics like:
- Lead form completions (webinars, reports, etc.)
- Volume of phone calls and emails to sales, with the goal typically to increase it
- Marketing qualified leads
- Sales qualified leads
- Lead quality and lead scoring
- Lead-to-close conversion rate
- Pipeline value and pipeline growth
- Time to close
Retention-Driven Email Programs
B2B services and B2C subscription-based companies will likely focus on customer satisfaction and retention by tracking metrics like:
- Email engagements (opens and clicks)
- Webpage visits or app sessions from email
- Volume of phone calls and emails to customer service, with the goal typically to reduce it
- Monthly active users
- Annual recurring revenue
- Renewal rate
Engagement-Driven Email Programs
Media companies, consumer packaged goods companies and manufacturers will likely focus on engagement, which they’ll measure via metrics like:
- Email engagements (opens and clicks)
- Webpage visits or app sessions from email
- Time on site or in app
- Social media engagement
- Evangelism
Your first thought might be: Most of those aren’t even email marketing metrics! And you’re right. Most of the metrics by which you should measure your email program have nothing to do with email and everything to do with the metrics by which you measure your business. Email marketers need to track subscriber activity down-funnel as far as they can to truly demonstrate impact.
That’s not to say that measuring email marketing metrics like opens, clicks, inbox placement and unsubscribes aren’t important. They are. But those metrics are generally email program health metrics, not performance metrics.
Your second thought might be: Our email program spans two or more of those four groups. That may well be the case. For instance, many B2B companies will surely have a portion of their program that’s lead-driven to acquire new customers and another portion that’s retention-driven to keep the customers they have. Use the appropriate metrics to measure different aspects of your email marketing program and its different audiences.
Related Article: 4 Ways Brands Go Wrong With Digital Marketing Metrics
Different Campaigns Have Different Goals
Even if your brand uses email in a singular way, you will almost assuredly want to consider additional secondary metrics that align with other types of email programs. That’s because the goal of every campaign you send likely isn’t the same.
For example, while retailers will overwhelmingly be sending promotional campaigns that seek to drive sales, many also send campaigns that promote events, articles, videos and social media content that aim to drive engagement and evangelism (which are precursors of purchases). Most retailers also send reengagement campaigns that focus solely on generating a measurable open or click.
For each of the campaigns you send and automated programs you set up, understand what the goal is and use appropriate metrics to gauge their success.
Related Article: 10 More Common Email Marketing Mistakes — And Solutions
What About External Benchmarks?
Everyone loves benchmarks because everyone is eager to compare their performance to others. While some want to confirm their awesomeness, others just want to assure themselves that they’re not falling (too far) behind.
But because of these four very different ways of using email marketing, benchmarks can be misleading. If the audience used to construct a benchmark doesn’t use email marketing more or less how you use email marketing, the benchmark will be less useful.
Typically, brands look for benchmark universes that are broad. But you may be better off with a universe that’s much more narrow, if that universe is full of companies that look like yours. For instance, some ESPs specialize in serving retailers or B2B brands. If that’s you, benchmarks from those ESPs are probably more useful than ones from ESPs that focus on needs of small, midsize or enterprise businesses that span many industries.
Some ESP and third-party sources break out benchmarks by company size or industry. Just be mindful of how many companies those figures are based on to make sure it’s truly representative.
All of that said, even when you can get benchmarks that align well with your email program, I recommend focusing on using external benchmarks primarily as guide rails. They can tell you when an aspect of your program is deviating too much from the norm.
Otherwise, focus on internal benchmarks and systematically improving your program. The best benchmark is how you did last quarter and last year. You consistently beat those and your program will be doing great.
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