Email Metrics & KPIs

In a digital marketing world where we are often found in analysis paralysis, I thought it might be benefitial to simplify to a select few metrics or KPIs used for Email programs specifically.  Obviosuly ALL the others out there are important as well depending on the goals you are pursuing, but these are a few that you cannot miss.

– Status Ratio:  Gotta count your actives, inactives, held, and unsubscribes to make sure your engagement is going the right way. Your unsubscribe ratio is one you specifically should be watching.  If this is growing, you are doing something wrong.
– List Counts: A couple lists you should keep your eyes on are Total subscribed, Total Sent to (which can get you ave emails per customer), Total Openers within 180  (and 90) days, and clickers within 180 days.  Need to know the opportunities to send to for any marketing campaign.
– Retention Rate:  Count how many of your new subscribers have opened, clicked, or visited with a 90 & 180 day window.  This will tell you if your onboarding is helping or hurting.
– Delivery Rate:  No brainer.  This will tell you how good your acquisition strategies are or how clean your reputation is.  …note, this is not Inbox Delivery…which is a GREAT metric if you have access to ResponsePath or something similar.
– Open Rate:  Industry standard is around 25-30%.
– Click Rate:  Industry standard is around 5-10%
– Complaint Rate:  If you don’t know this one, you will learn the hard way.  Ave complaints are absolutely in every ESP deliverability algorythm.  If you have high complaints, you will NOT get delivered to inboxes.
– eRPM:  Grab the revenue per mille and compare it up against your CPM to make sure that you are far from frustrating your leadership with bad ROI.

Starting with these will get you to a good Digital Stride with your customers through email.  Let me know if you think I’m missing any.  Enjoy!