The big question I always hear from email marketers is how to analyze their emails and programs from day to day, week to week, or month to month and what metrics should they pay attention to and monitor routinely?

Here are a few metrics that you can’t afford to ignore:

  1. Click To Open Rate (COTR) – There is the obvious click-through-rate that should not be ignored. However, the COTR is a straight-forward and reliable metric that provides a quick overview of the email performance and directly ties into your conversion rates. For example, if the email generated a high open rate but CTOR is low, it may indicate that the message didn’t deliver a value prop and the email content or template may need to be modified to be more relevant to the person.
  2. Open Rates – Any changes in the average open rates can indicate possible list fatigue (or a need to segment your email list). It can also indicate potential delivery issues or maybe the content isn’t relevant or resonating with your audience.
  3. Open Rates By Domain – This metric is an overview of your email’s performance by a specific domain. Let’s say your average open rate is 20%, but for Hotmail, it’s only 4%, you can clearly see that there is a deliverability issue with Hotmail that needs to be addressed.
  4. Bounce Rate (Hard & Soft) – Look for any spikes out of the norm that may indicate ISP blocks and IP reputation issues.
  5. Revenue Per Email – How much money was made from an email can also be an important metric to track. You may have a large email list (and continue to acquire new email addresses), but if your acquisition costs are outweighing your profits generated, there are bigger problems because you’re in the red and losing money.
  6. Unsubscribe Trends – You want to keep a close eye on this to make sure that unsubscribe levels stay consistent. A rise in the unsubscribe rate can mean the loss of interest in your content by your subscribers or maybe you’re sending too many emails – too frequently.
  7. List Growth – The number of new signups within a period and the rate at which your list is growing. This metric can also provide you insight into how well you’re converting your traffic into email signups.
  8. Open Reach Rate – More insightful than open rate, Open reach is the percentage of subscribers who opened at least ONE email during a set period of time (i.e. 30 days, 90 days, etc.).

Which of these metrics do you find most important? Did I miss any metrics that you check regularly?