Email Campaign Report: Tracking the 6 Important KPIs
When you spend so much time and money on email marketing, wouldn’t you want to know your ROI? The effectiveness of your email campaigns isn’t about hitting ‘send’ and hoping for the best — you need to understand the numbers and polish your email marketing strategies accordingly.
This is where the email campaign report comes in — it helps you understand your email marketing KPIs from a single place. It’s a comprehensive document that provides insights and analysis of your email campaign performance.
Without this document, you might find it challenging to make data-driven decisions, ultimately impacting your email campaign performance. To avoid making this mistake, let’s learn about the importance of measuring your email campaign performance, understand the different KPIs, how to build an email campaign report, tools and platforms for tracking, and best practices to increase your email metrics.
Why It’s Important to Track Your Email Campaign Reporting?
Successful businesses don’t just sell their products or services; they share their brand stories that connect with their audiences and build trust. But to know if you’ve succeeded, you must track and analyze your email campaign performance to understand your audience.
Tracking your email campaign reporting is helpful because it:
- Helps evaluate your performance: Tracking metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions provides a quantitative approach to your email marketing. It allows you to realize the true potential and performance of your email design, performance, and overall strategy.
- Aids in data-informed decision-making: The email campaign report provides detailed insights into audience preferences and likes. You can then use this data to make informed decisions on content optimization, audience segmentation, and campaign refinement.
- Helps with goal alignment: Tracking email metrics ensures your email marketing campaigns align with your overall marketing and business goals. Analyzing your email metrics helps you deliver targeted email content that your audiences find interesting.
- Assists with proper resource allocation: Continuous tracking shows how well your resources are being used. It prevents wasting time and resources on strategies that don’t work with your audiences.
- Gives you a competitive edge: Tracking helps you adopt best practices and set benchmarks against industry standards to retain your competitive edge. Knowing your strengths and areas for improvement is useful to increase brand awareness and sales.
- Helps with continuous improvement: Regularly tracking and analyzing your email campaign metrics helps you gather important data on your audience and email campaign performance.
- Measures your ROI: Tracking is essential to prove your email marketing performance to your stakeholders and to determine the ROI.
Tracking your email campaign reports isn’t just about numbers — it’s about understanding the narrative behind your audience’s interaction with your brand. While the benefits of tracking are plenty, you must first know what email campaign metrics to track.
Understanding Different Email Marketing KPIs for Your Email Campaign Report
To ensure success with your email marketing, all your key performance indicators (KPIs) must align with your overall marketing goal. This means having a high open rate or click rate won’t help, you need to focus on elevating all the metrics together. Let’s tell you what metrics you must track and analyze:
| Email Marketing Metric | What it Represents |
|---|---|
| Open rate | Number of emails opened / Number of delivered emails x 100 |
| Click-through rate | Number of people who clicked on a link in your email / Total number of emails delivered x 100 |
| Conversion rate | Number of recipients who took action / Total number of email deliveries x 100 |
| Bounce rate | Number of bounce received / Total number of emails sent x 100 |
| List-growth rate | Number of new subscribers – Number of unsubscribers / Total subscribers x 100 |
| Unsubscribe rate | Number of unsubscribed users / Total number of emails delivered x 100 |
These email metrics are data points that show you the areas for improvement and optimization. Your email campaign reporting must be a thorough view of these metrics to help you calculate the overall email campaign performance.
Email Campaign Reporting Guidelines
Here are the main steps to help you prepare your email campaign reporting well ahead:
- Define clear objectives: Define your email marketing objective — is it to increase traffic, drive sales, or promote brand awareness? This will help you narrow your focus and create tailor-made campaigns for each audience segment.
- Choose a reliable ESP: A robust email marketing platform helps you quickly analyze email metrics and implement the changes to your campaigns. Campaign Refinery provides an elegant and user-friendly interface to view all your email campaign metrics. This means you get to track your email marketing performance from a single place as well as use our unique features and tools to establish higher email revenue and customer relationships.
- Use UTM parameters: A UTM parameter allows you to track analytics, such as how many people are coming to your website if they interact with your emails or any content associated with your email campaigns.
These guidelines will help you create a meaningful email campaign reporting mechanism. To make it simpler, we’ve outlined the email marketing KPIs in detail and why you must include them in your email campaign reporting.
1. Open Rate: How Well Did Your Subject Lines Perform?
Open rates show how many people find your email campaigns interesting enough to open and engage with them. Having this metric as part of your email campaign reporting is necessary to understand audience engagement and responsiveness to your email campaigns.
The average open rate across industries is 38.49%. A healthy open rate is between 20-40%, and anything lower than that could mean your email subject lines need better optimization.
You can compare your open rates with the industry benchmark (around 21%) or compare it with your previous email campaign performance, which is more effective. Yet, we don’t recommend you base your email marketing strategies entirely on this metric alone.
Strategies to Increase Your Email Open Rate
Your open rate is an indicator of how well your email subject lines are performing and is an important metric to include in your email campaign report. Increasing this metric requires a combination of strategic planning, compelling content, and understanding your audience preferences.
Here are a few tactics to increase your open rates:
- Craft compelling subject lines: Use personalization techniques and create urgency to grab the reader’s attention. You can use industry insights, brand news, or data/numbers to make your subject lines more attractive.
- Optimize your email timing: Consider factors such as subscriber time zones and the nature of your email content to determine the best time to send emails. You may also experiment with different sending times to understand when your audiences are the most active.
- Segment your email list: This is the most critical step — use segmentation strategies to divide your audiences based on their demographics, purchase behavior, and preferences.
- Ensure mobile compatibility: Ensure your emails are of the same size across different devices. A mobile-friendly email design can make the user experience more pleasant and positively increase your email open rate.
- Maintain email list hygiene: Regularly clean your email lists to remove unwanted or harmful email addresses. You can do this manually or become a client and use Campaign Refinery’s automatic email list cleaning tool to make your task easier.
- Use clear and consistent sender names: Subscribers are particular about opening emails from unknown sources. By using a consistent sender name, you can gain their trust and eventually request them to whitelist your email address for future use.
- A/B test continuously: Make it a practice to continuously test and monitor your email open rate regarding different times, sender names, and email content.
Increasing email open rates is a continuous process and requires constant testing of elements in email marketing.
2. Click-through Rate: Do Your Subscribers Click on Your Email Links?
The click-through rate shows how many people clicked on one or more links in your emails. This metric determines the effectiveness of your email content quality — is it interesting enough to generate a click?
Including this metric in your email campaign reporting is important to measure it against other email metrics such as CTOR (click-to-open rate) and open rates.
The average benchmark for CTR is around 2.44%; however, this could differ across different email campaign sequences and types.
| Email Campaign Type | Average Result |
|---|---|
| Triggered emails | 3.69% |
| Autoresponders | 4.26% |
| Newsletters | 2.13% |
| RSS | 7.24% |
Tips to Increase CTR
- Relevant and valuable content: Remember why your subscribers signed up in the first place, and provide tailored content for each audience segment. Also, ensure you fulfill the promise made in your subject line.
- Button design and placement: Your CTA buttons must find a balance between subtle and striking; they must be easy to locate and click on.
- A clear CTA: Include no more than one action-oriented CTA, and state the benefits of your product or service. For example, “Download the email excellence marketing sheet.”
Focus on creating content based on where your customers are in their buyer’s journey. Once you segment them accordingly, it’s easier to create relevant and interesting content that will give your email campaigns a higher CTR.
3. Conversion Rate: Do Customers Want to Be a Part of Your Email Marketing Journey?
Conversion rate tells you the number of people that have taken the desired action or become a customer. But the important question is — do all conversions have the same value?
This makes conversions a valuable addition to your email campaign reporting — it helps measure your business impact on customers, evaluate your ROI, and align your overall marketing goals.
However, conversions can differ with end goals — do you want to increase website traffic or point customers toward purchases? In this sense, the conversion rate can be nuanced and require a more practical approach.
Here are the steps that will help you calculate your conversion rates:
- Define your goal: Conversions can be any valuable goal based on your brand needs. For some, conversions are completing purchases; for others, it can be any action you want the recipients to take.
- Use a base metric: You can use a secondary metric to help you define your conversion rate. For instance, you can base your conversion rate on CTR or calculate it against the total number of sent emails.
- Calculate with precision: Use the formula, but also ensure you take steps 1 and 2 into account. This will give you a more focused approach to your email marketing campaigns.
Ideally, a high CTR rate should correlate with a high conversion rate — meaning that a large portion of people who clicked on the links must have taken the desired action.
4. Bounce Rate: Did Your Customers Leave Without Notice?
Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that don’t land in your recipient inboxes. The higher this number, the more work your email marketing requires. Your email bounce rate affects your email deliverability rate and, eventually, sender reputation.
There is also an indirect relationship between bounce rate and open rate — a high bounce rate can hurt your open rate. If your emails are bouncing, it means they are not reaching your intended audience, and the best way to find the missing parts is by viewing your comprehensive email campaign report.
A bounce rate below 2% is considered good, and anything higher than that requires a more critical strategic approach to email marketing.
Email bounces occur for various reasons, such as:
- Invalid email address: Also known as hard bounce, it occurs when the email address does not exist or is invalid. It usually happens due to typos or deliberate inaccuracies.
- Full mailbox: Soft bounces happen when your recipient mailbox is full, thereby avoiding newer email deliveries. This is a temporary issue and resolves once your subscriber makes space in their inbox.
- Server issues: Server issues on your subscriber end typically cause emails to bounce. These can be soft bounces (temporary server issues) or hard bounces (permanently unreachable).
- Spam filter rejections: If your recipient’s email client has strict spam filters in place, even legitimate emails can skip reaching your recipient’s primary inbox.
- Inactive domain: When your subscriber domain has been deactivated, your emails will not reach them. This happens due to typos in domain names or because of inactive domains.
Regularly cleaning and updating your email list is the only smart solution to avoiding a higher bounce rate. Alongside this, use the double-opt-in method and be mindful of spam-trigger words in your email campaigns.
5. List-growth Rate: How Many People are Interested in Joining You?
List-growth rate shows how fast your email list is growing. But it depends on many factors, such as your email list quality, subject lines, and offers. Currently, the average list growth rate stands at 2.5%.
If your email list growth rate is lower than this, follow these tips to increase it:
- Offer a valuable resource to people in exchange for signing up. This could be a free e-book, email coupons, or access to exclusive content. If you’re unsure about how to attract people, download our Lead Magnet Multiplier Course and use the actionable strategies to increase lead magnet opens by up to 8x.
- Make it straightforward and easy for people to sign up. You can include a sign-up form on your website or link to the landing page via your social handles.
- Share your sign-up page through other marketing channels, especially social media. You can advertise if you find it fit and have the budget for it.
- Segment your email list to send more targeted email content and offers to specific audiences.
- Send relevant, personalized, and interesting content to your audiences. This will ensure they open your emails and interact with them.
Your list growth rate is a valuable addition to your email campaign reporting because it shows you the level of audience engagement, potential revenue growth, and provides insights for future campaigns.
6. Unsubscribe Rate: How to Keep Your Subscribers Happy Throughout Your Email Marketing Journey
The unsubscribe rate tells you if your subscribers are happy with your email content and frequency. Unsubscribe rates below 0.2% are considered excellent, while 0.5% is the standard rate.
While a high subscribe rate indicates that you are successfully attracting new subscribers, a high unsubscribe rate could mean your content, frequency, and targeting need adjustment.
Adding this metric to your email campaign reporting shows the quality of your email content, content relevance, list segmentation and targeting and helps with optimizing your conversion funnel.
Keep these points in mind before you send another email campaign:
- Send properly timed emails in intervals,
- Avoid spammy or overly promotional content,
- Always seek permission (double opt-in) before emailing your subscribers,
- Understand and meet your subscriber needs,
- Don’t use the auto-subscribe option,
- Make it easy for people to unsubscribe.
Campaign Refinery is a metric-driven company and is specific about providing super-easy unsubscribe options. Once you use our platform, you’ll see the unsubscribe option in the footer for all your email campaigns.
An email campaign report becomes necessary to compare and contrast various email campaign metrics to identify gaps and optimize your email content accordingly.
You can easily follow through email analytics with an all-in-one email marketing platform. Here are helpful platforms to consider.
Email Reporting Tools to Use for Your Business
The tools in this list help with tracking, measuring engagement, and providing insights into the effectiveness of your email campaigns. But choosing one depends on your brand goals and requirements — a few platforms provide data visualization options, while others are used for specific purposes such as surveys and tracking.
| Tool/Platform | Unique Feature | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign Refinery (ESP) | User-friendly interface, clean and comprehensive email reporting | Presents all email data points in a single-view dashboard. Plus, clients enjoy powerful automation, automatic email list cleaning, credit system, can build and manage an email list, segment audiences, and use engagement rewards for higher email metrics. |
| Google Analytics | Analytics Integration | Integrates with email platforms to track website traffic and conversions from email campaigns. |
| Hubspot | Marketing analysis | Provides insights into performance metrics and subscriber behavior. |
| DataBox | Performance data collection and measurement. | Presents an overview of all business performance data through KPI dashboards. |
These tools offer a range of functionalities to track your email metrics. However, if you’re looking for a single-view and automated reporting solution, check out how Campaign Refinery can help you.
Before we tell you more about it, let’s learn the most important aspect — how to build an email campaign report.
Best Practices: How to Write an Email Report
You can create an email report in two ways:
- Manually,
- Through an ESP (mostly automated).
While creating reports through an ESP is the most viable option, you can use manual reports too.
To do that, follow the steps below:
- Use a clean design: Start with a clean-looking email campaign report template and space it out well. Mention the purpose in the heading and make it concise and engaging.
- Use a logical structure: Your email reporting cannot start with the least important data to the most relevant. Keep the key insights at the top and use headings and subheadings to break down sections.
- Include visuals and charts: Visual representations can convey trends, patterns, and comparisons. Including a visual hierarchy will make the data more digestible.
- Involve relevant metrics: Focus on the most important numbers and keep them at the top. This will allow busy managers and teams to quickly skim through the report.
- Notice your list segments: Include the relevant audience segments, the number of emails sent to each, and the number of highly engaged subscribers.
- Feature overall trends: Constantly look at your email marketing performance over periods — are your subscribers engaged? which campaign type has the highest open rate? and so on.
- Include your customer journeys: The customer journey columns give your team a clearer picture of your customers’ likes and preferences. You can then tie them to your email segments and customer personas.
- Compare with previous benchmarks: Compare your current email performance with previous benchmarks to obtain a better understanding of your email campaign performance. If you have access to social media analytics, you can dedicate a section to that, too.
Your email campaign reporting will keep changing based on your customer needs and brand goals. You can choose to manually change the data every time or use an automated email platform to build automatic email reports for you.
Build a Comprehensive Email Campaign Report With Campaign Refinery
Creating an email campaign report manually can take up to a few hours for a single email metric. This means you will have to spend hours on every detail every time you need to send out these reports. But with Campaign Refinery, you can build and track your email metrics from a sleek dashboard.
You can integrate up to 800+ marketing channels, set up KPIs for each report, and send them out automatically. Plus, you also get the benefits of high email deliverability, automatic email list cleaning, an engagement rewards feature, and a credit system.
So, every time you log in to your dashboard, you see a comprehensive reporting of your email campaigns and a solid track record of email deliverability. We can provide the highest email deliverability rate because we adhere to email-sending best practices.
If you’re wondering how, here’s the answer — our founder has packed his knowledge into The Inbox Formula — the ultimate email deliverability handbook with actionable tips and strategies to increase open and click rates for 6x better results and you can download this resource for FREE!
If you require additional assistance with your email campaign reporting or other aspects of your email marketing, we are here to share our knowledge.
