Analytics for Email Marketing: What You Need to Know

People keep telling you how powerful email marketing is. Its conversion rates are three times that of social media marketing, and consumers are six times more likely to click links than in organic social media. But are you actually seeing the results that these figures imply?

To know for sure, you’ll need to turn your attention to marketing analytics. Email marketing statistics are useful, providing you with best practices and benchmarks. If you want to evaluate your success, analytics for email marketing are key. These give you your report cards–both for individual campaigns and for your marketing efforts as a whole.

Here’s what you need to know, and the platforms and tools that will help you find it.

What Are Email Marketing Analytics?

Email marketing analytics is the field of crucial newsletter metrics you use to measure the success of your email campaigns. With this information, you can ensure that your emails reach – and engage – the right people.

These metrics include:

• Open Rates: The percentage of emails that were opened by recipients.

• Click-Through Rates: The percentage of emails that had a link clicked by recipients.

• Conversion Rates: The percentage of emails that resulted in a desired action (such as making a purchase).

• Bounce Rates: The percentage of emails that could not be delivered to the recipient's inbox.

• List Growth Rate: The rate at which new contacts are added to an email list.

• Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate: The rate at which emails are shared or forwarded to other contacts.

• Overall ROI: A measure of the return on investment for an email marketing campaign, taking into account both the cost and revenue generated from it.

Information is power. The more you have, the better–so long as you can decode its proper meaning and put it to use.

How Do You Measure Email Marketing Effectiveness?

By tracking these metrics, you gain an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Which messages resonated with which audiences? How did you get the most opens? The most clicks? Did these lead to the conversions you expected?

You also need to monitor email deliverability. Campaigns can’t succeed if your emails never reach their targets. Poor deliverability also snowballs if left unchecked, sending you in a slow slide toward the spam folder.

Good analytics tools generate detailed reports about your emails from delivery to the customer journeys that they launch.

How Do You Improve Email Marketing Effectiveness?

Practice makes perfect, and you’ll continually refine your campaigns based on the results of the last one. Low open rates? Experiment with different subject lines or sending times. Low click-through rates? Try changing up your content or design. Low conversion rates? Take a hard look at your landing pages and promotions.

But you can–and should–start applying your information immediately, tweaking campaigns in progress.

Combine your analytics tools with A/B testing to compare different versions of subject lines, content, and CTAs. Start by sending only to a sample set of your audience, then collect the best of what you have to send the rest.

Analytics for Email Marketing: The Best Tools

How do you collect all this lovely information? The good news is that it isn’t hard.

Best Email Marketing Platforms for Analytics

You’ll find many of the tools you need built into popular email marketing platforms. Data collection on bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and open rates are industry-standard. Don’t settle for any platform that doesn’t meet these minimum requirements.

Ideally, though, you want a platform that does more. beehiiv’s analytics include numbers for email link clicks, spam reports for each post, and a whole lot more.

For example, the scale plan gives you important analytics about subscribers and newsletter conversions. Learn about open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, referral rates, and premium upgrade rates by acquisition source. In other words, where are you getting your most engaged–and profitable–audience?

Third-Party Analytics Email Marketing Tools

We want you to succeed, no matter what your email marketing platform is. If yours lacks the analytics you want (and you don’t want to switch platforms), there are third-party tools that integrate with many of the most popular platforms.

In addition to providing the key performance indicators (KPIs) above, there are other use cases for third-party tools. You might:

• Track specific e-commerce conversions

• Perform A/B tests (if your platform doesn’t allow it)

• Increase your automation and personalization options

• Combine your analytics for email marketing with information from other channels

Google Analytics for Email Marketing

The most popular tool is (no surprise) Google Analytics.

Setting up email tracking in GA is relatively straightforward. After creating a new property in your Google Analytics account, you'll be able to generate a unique tracking code for each email campaign you send out.

Add this code to the HTML of your emails. You'll be able to view detailed reports about important metrics, such as which links readers clicked and which segments of your audience opened the emails.

Dos and Don’ts for Email Marketing Analytics

Here are a couple of best practices, common mistakes, and a few final tips about analytics for email marketing:

Do: Prioritize the Right KPIs

Different email marketing metrics can matter more to different businesses. For instance, a business that sells physical products might find it beneficial to track click-through rates and purchases.

On the other hand, a content provider may prioritize open rates and unsubscribe rates when analyzing email campaigns’ success. Did their customers find value in the email itself? No need to waste time asking each of them directly. The numbers tell all.

Do: Pair Quantitative with Qualitative Information

Don’t ignore other forms of customer feedback. Let’s pretend that you sent out an email that had an incredibly high click-through rate, but two seriously offended subscribers wrote to you about their concerns with the content. Even setting aside the potential politics/morality of the issue, you need to give the emotional reactions their proper weight. Where are you in danger of losing people? You also need to assume that your vocal subscribers represent a silent subsection of readers who were turned off by your message, and didn’t click on your link, but didn’t take the time to tell you.

Don’t: Focus Exclusively on Open Rates

Not every person who opens an email will take the action you hope to inspire. Open rates indicate engagement with your brand, which is a positive sign. But how much business are these engaged parties generating?

Don’t: Fail to Contextualize Numbers

Sometimes the numbers actually don’t mean anything. Let’s say Russia and China declare war on the U.S. (Too real?) Most people would not be opening marketing emails on such a day, even if they truly loved your brand.

In a less apocalyptic example, a poor response could indicate problems elsewhere in your business. Do you need to revisit your website, customer management, or products?

Don’t: Over-analyze or Overweight the Data

With great information comes great responsibility–both to your audience and to yourself. Don’t drive yourself insane by trying to divine the meaning of life in each new open or unsubscribe. Focus on large trends, and wait for them to emerge.

Learn to Love the Numbers

You don’t need to be a master statistician to understand and use email marketing analytics. beehiiv makes it extra easy by giving you all the information right in your dashboard, but third-party tools can supplement other platforms.

All you need to do is establish your priorities, track the right email newsletter metrics, and continually refine your process in response.

Go ahead. Check out the numbers for your last campaign. Start by identifying one area where you can improve, and make a list of corresponding ideas.

100% of Megans have confidence in your success to master analytics for email marketing.