21 Email Metrics to Track for Sales Outreach

We could talk for days about the most critical elements of an effective email marketing campaign: some common mistakes, few shortcut formulas, different ways to pitch, and whatnot. But they are only impressive in the short term. But what matters the most is whether you know the right email metrics to track for sales.

Why Track Sales Email Metrics?

Email marketing is a powerful strategy. Yet, if you do not track the sales email metrics, the benefits that arrive from it will never see the light of day. That’s why defining and tracking relevant metrics is critical for success.

• Provides you with a summary of interesting topics that engage with the audience.
• Email Analytics offers you the best recommendations for increasing conversion rates.

High-performing sales teams consistently measure the health of their business. By tracking the essential metrics, your sales email can perform better.

21 Important Email Metrics to track for Sales

It is easy to get wrapped in any kind of metric. However, these 21 sales email metrics that will move the needle in your favor are:

Open Rate

Open rate is the percentage of email receivers who opened your mail. The first sales email metric to track is your open rate.

It is an essential metric in email marketing because your emails are of no use if the recipients are not opening and reading them. Most email marketing campaigns have a little over 30%.

The main factor that draws more readers to your email is a compelling subject line. The average open rate should be between 15–20%.

TIP: This metric can sometimes be misleading, as open rate deals with the number of opened emails. But if the same receiver tries to open the email more than once, it is not included in the open rate. So try to give more value to the unique open rate.

Conversion Rate

The rate at which the user performs a particular action that could lead them to become a customer. The action can be to subscribe to an email newsletter, make a purchase, etc.

You can calculate the conversion rate by taking your number of conversions and dividing it by the number of interactions.

For Example:-

Conversions=9

Interactions=100

Conversion rate= 9/100=0.09

0.09*100=9%

This means 9% of people who visit your website convert.

The conversion rate helps to ascertain whether your investment is paying you off.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the number of emails that have not reached the subscriber’s inbox and have probably bounced.

Emails can bounce due to many reasons:

• Subscriber’s mailbox is full.
• Subscriber’s email server was down at the time you tried to send an email.
• Invalid email address.
• Blocked IP address

Bounce rate is a critical email metric that helps you to determine the deliverability of emails sent.

Tracing your cold email bounce rate is very simple. You will get an email back every time one of your messages bounces. You can compile all such addresses and don’t use them for future campaigning.

As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 per cent is excellent. 41 to 55 per cent is roughly average. 56 to 70 per cent is higher than average but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 per cent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The click rate is the percentage of people who respond to your offer in the email by clicking the link to reach your sales page.

CTR is one of the most critical sales email metrics, and the sales team depends mainly on this to understand how each individual performs. It provides substantial insights into the interests that the individuals hold for your product or service.

You can take this ahead by understanding this metric deeply.

Return on Investment(ROI)

ROI (Return on Investment) shows you how much you earn compared to how much you invest. It helps you to understand how successful the campaign has been in terms of cost-effectiveness.

As a part of a sales team, your email marketing campaign must produce a healthy return, and you need to be able to calculate it easily.

The simple method to calculate your overall ROI is by subtracting all the costs required to run this campaign from the campaign’s total revenue, then dividing the overall result by the initial cost and multiplying it by 100.

Email marketing is one of the cost-effective strategies as compared to other channels.

Opt-Out Rate

Opt-Out rate is the percentage of people who opt-out from your email list by unsubscribing it or sending it in spam.

The opt-out rate is:

(Unsubscribe numbers/Email delivered) * 100

You can expect a certain amount of people unsubscribing from your email list. It is pretty normal. However, most experts agree to the fact that anything below 0.05 is acceptable across all industries.

The significance of taking out opt-out rate is to get insights on what’s going on and whether there is any particular thing that your audience is not liked. The content might not be relevant, or maybe the sales pitch has been overstated.

Email Sharing Rate

The rate at which your receivers shared your email on social media or forwarded your email. It helps to bring new leads and creates awareness of your brand.

How does it happen?

Whenever a recipient engages with your content and finds it useful, they will share it among their connections. It helps to build a new chain of leads.

How to calculate?

(Total social shares+total emails forwarded)/ total emails delivered *100.

Email sharing rate is a vital email metric to measure, as it helps you know what type of content is gaining attention and generating leads. You can further tap into this type of content for upcoming email marketing campaigns. The best way to understand what the reader wants.

List Growth Rate

As the term clearly says, it is the rate at which your subscriber list is growing. May it is any business, the primary thing that we look at is whether the business is growing as time passes by or not.

The same is the case here. Are we able to expand our audience and create more awareness for our brand?

Calculation:

[(No of new subscribers-(No of unsubscribes + spam addresses))/ Total no of email addresses on your list]*100

It would be best if you kept a tab on your growth rate numbers. With this, you can measure your new subscribers’ growth and have an idea of whether you are going in the right direction or not.

Spam Compliant Rate

If email service providers mark your emails as spam, it can get discouraging. You should pay attention to spam complaints because your ESP might penalize you and even block your account if the rate is too high.

Though the email service provider will keep a count of the spam complaints, you have to keep an eye on the number to make sure that there is no technical problem and the content of your emails is as per your standards.

Engagement Over Time

When you track engagement time, it will help you find out the right time to send messages in the day. It is one of the critical email metrics to track for sales.

Though automation will help you send emails based on a trigger or the customer’s behaviour, tracking engagement will help you get results. It will fetch you the maximum open rates and click rates.

There are email service providers that automate engagement tracking, but it is good to track it on your own too. You can find out when you should shoot our emails to prospects to get maximum benefits.

Mobile Open Rate

The mobile open rate is the same as the usual open rate, but the only difference is that this metric applies to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

The desktop open rates are more during the weekday as people are on their 9–5 jobs. On the other hand, mobile rates are higher on weekends when people decide to chill out with their mobile devices.

Mobile Click Rate

Just like the mobile open rate, this metric is also for mobile devices. You get to know the email click rates on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.

When compared to desktop click rates, mobile click rates are lower. You can operate work on multiple windows and browse easily on a desktop than when on the tab or phone.

You must make sure that the mobile email engagement process is as simple as it can be.

Domain Open Rate

The domain open rate is an essential sales email metric as it ensures the success of the email campaign. This rate helps you see how many people are opening your emails on a particular email service provider(the value will be in percentage).

It will help you understand whether your emails are landing in the spam folder of a particular ESP. You can accordingly take the necessary measures.

Domain Click Rate

The domain click rate will help you see how many individuals are clicking open your emails in a specific ESP. When you have this metric in front of you, you can compare one provider’s click rate with that of the other. It will help you find out whether there is a problem with a particular provider’s spam policy.

You need to find the average and make the comparison.

Revenue per email

To know the overall return on investment, there is the ROI metric; What about measuring each email’s performance?

Revenue per email is a metric that helps you find out which email is doing the best and which are the ones that are bringing the total ROI down.

Revenue per subscriber

To take an in-depth look at the ROI, you can calculate the revenue per subscriber. It is different from the revenue per email metric. Revenue per subscriber will help you find out which demographic is helping you get better revenue. It will enable you to focus on demographics that are beneficial for your business.

You can start concentrating on the ones that are profitable and ignore the ones that are not. It will help you rebuild your strategy. After all, you are working so hard to see positive results at the end of the day, aren’t you?

Email audience trend

Gaining and losing subscribers is quiet natural. When you come to know that the number is declining at an earlier stage, you can foresee the outcome and prevent major financial issues shortly. You can take action and try to find out why your subscribers are leaving you and what should you do from your end.

Early action will prevent your business from facing problems at a later stage. It is always better to contain the damage at an early stage.

Active audience trend

It is essential to check the increase or decline of your active audience. The active audience refers to those who engage with your emails and are the ones behind bringing the maximum revenue.

It directly means that you have to communicate the most with them.

In case there is a problem, it would be better if you can detect them early. It would prevent your active audience from reducing in number.

You can track this sales email metric using the formula below:

(New active subscribers) — (Subscriber changing to lapsing)/active audience) x 100

Email Delivery rate

It is often the delivery rate of an email that you measure first after sending an email. It simply means that the server of the recipient accepted it. When there are deliverability issues, there is a drop in the delivery rate.

With a clean database, you will be able to get a 99% or more delivery rate. You can start worrying when it falls below 97%. You have to start by finding out from where you are getting the email addresses.

A higher delivery rate is nothing to be proud of because your email can end up in the junk or spam folder instead of hitting the inbox. It is of no use to you as the recipient won’t come to know about it, and you would lose the very purpose of emailing.

Here is how this email metric is calculated:

(Email delivered) / (Emails sent) x 100

Time spent viewing email

Some tools help in finding out the time people spend viewing one email. It is helpful to find out whether the content you are providing is important to customers or not. Are they able to find what they are searching for?

When a click short follows the reading time, it indicates that the prospect could find what he was looking for.

Contrarily, when a prospect takes too much time to read and doesn’t click, it simply means that he has not found what he was looking for. It may not be a very critical metric, but you must have a watch over it.

Purchase Rate

The purchase rate is different from the conversion rate. It measures the percentage of people going ahead and purchasing your product or service through the email campaign.

Return on ad spend

People often categorise emails as ‘free’ because they don’t take the other costs involved into consideration. That includes the cost of creating and maintaining an email list. You should also consider the time that the team members spend in creating the email campaign’s content.

In addition to that, you have to pay for the platform you use. Therefore, you must take a look at the profit and loss involved. Are you getting enough returns on the amount you are spending or not?

Warm reply rate

The warm reply rate is a metric worth paying attention to. When you see open rates of more than 40%, you can get happy, but that doesn’t generate revenue directly. You should ask yourself whether or not you are getting the leads you want from the campaign. You can aim for a warm reply rate of 5–6% on cold emails.

Conclusion

Every sales team is bound to a goal that is to be achieved. Dig deeper into your own sales prospecting efforts. Set the right metrics according to your goal. It helps you to understand and follow the right direction.

However, the sales email metrics will guide you with purposeful action, highlighting trends and make the team more efficient over time. Track these sales email metrics regularly, regardless of your process.

With these email metrics, you will get an idea about how well you are progressing. In case there is a problem, you can take the necessary measures to change your strategy or work on it again. It will go a long way in preventing losses and helping your business reach where you want it to.