Email Marketing: KPIs You Should Know
How to measure and break down the differences between: Open Rate, Click Rate, Click-Through Rate, and Conversion Rate.
Key Takeaways
The open rate is the percentage of people who opened your email out of the people to whom you sent your email.
The click rate is the percentage of people who clicked over a link or an image in your email.
The click-through rate is out of the people who opened your email, how many of them clicked on a link or an image in the email.
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who completed a purchase, bought some of your services or products on your website out of the people to whom you sent your email.
Open Rate
The first KPI you should know and you should be aware of is actually an open rate. You might have already heard that it’s the percentage of the people who opened your email out of the people who send your email to.
So for example, if you have 15 people that opened your email out of the 100, you send your email to that makes 15% open rate. Simple, right? But why is it important, it shows actually how successful your subject line was.
So if your open rate is low, it means that you may have to do some AB testing out of your subject lines to see which is actually the best one for your business.
Click Rate
Second key indicator is the click rate. It is the percentage of the people who clicked over a link or an image in your email. So, if five people clicked over a link or an image in your email out of the 100, that's a 5% click rate.
If you have a high click rate, then it means you're doing a good job with showing off links and choosing amazing images in your emails. But if your click rate is low, you might have considered adding some buttons or more interesting call to actions (CTA).
Click Through Rate
Click Through Rate is a combination of the open and click through rate. It's how many people who opened your email and then clicked on a link or an image in your email.
To optimize your click through rate, you first have to optimize your open rate and click rate.
For example, if we have 15 people that opened your email out of the 100 and five of those 15, actually clicked on a link or an image, then that makes 30% click through rate.
Conversion Rate
The last metric is the conversion rate. The conversion rate is an important metric not only in email, but in every part of marketing like PPC, Landing Pages, Social Media Ads, etc. However, for this explanation, we are going to stay in the context of email marketing.
Conversion rate is the percentage of people that completed a purchase or bought some of your services or products on your website from an email you sent. So, if you have one person who completed a purchase out of the 100, it's actually 1% conversion rate.