In email marketing, sending a campaign is only part of the job. After that, you need to regularly track metrics, evaluate campaign performance, and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.

What email campaign metrics are

Email metrics are numerical indicators that reflect the effectiveness of a campaign and let you understand whether a marketing campaign worked or not.

There are more than ten different metrics for evaluating email campaign performance, but we'll cover four basic ones: Open Rate, Click Rate, Click-to-Open Rate, and Unsubscribe to Opens Rate.

And at the end of the article, we've included a table with benchmarks for these metrics across different industries.

Open Rate, OR

This metric shows what percentage of your subscribers opened your email out of all delivered messages.

You can calculate OR with a simple formula:

Number of opens / number of delivered messages × 100%

How it works: your brand's last email went out to 2,000 recipients, and 900 of them opened it. 900 / 2000 × 100% = 45%. The open rate equals 40%.

You can count this metric in two ways — by unique and non-unique opens. Unique opens show how many subscribers in total opened your email. Non-unique opens show how many times the message was opened by the same number of users. One recipient might open your message 20 times, but that would count as one unique open and 19 non-unique opens.

For a more honest picture of your open rate, it's better to count only unique opens.

Three ways to boost your Open Rate:

  • Personalize your emails.
  • Tell subscribers about discounts, sales, and promotions in your emails.
  • Share useful content: talk about interesting case studies and give recommendations, for example.

Click Rate, CR

This metric reflects the percentage of subscribers who clicked a clickable element in the email. That could be a button, a link, an image, or a hyperlink.

The formula for calculating CR:

Number of clicks / number of delivered messages × 100%

How it works: you delivered 2,000 emails and got 180 clicks. 180 / 2000 × 100 = 9%. CR is 9%.

The click-through percentage lets you assess how interesting and relevant the offer inside the email is to your users.

Three ways to boost your Click Rate:

  • Send campaigns to audience segments instead of running a single sequence to your entire list.
  • Create short, focused emails so users see your offer faster.
  • Add several clickable elements to an email instead of limiting yourself to one at the very end.

Click-to-Open Rate, CTOR

The previous metric showed the percentage of clicks relative to all emails delivered to readers; CTOR reflects the ratio of clicks only to opened emails.

The metric is calculated using the formula:

Number of clicks / number of opened messages × 100%

How it works: 900 users opened the campaign, 180 clicked. That gives 180 / 900 × 100% = 20%. CTOR is 20%.

This metric lets you evaluate the quality of the campaign's content. A good CTOR is 10–15% — at those numbers you can consider the content quality and engaging. However, benchmarks can vary depending on the niche.

Unsubscribe to Opens Rate, UTOR

Another basic metric that helps assess campaign performance. UTOR shows the percentage of subscribers who opened an email and then unsubscribed from the company's mailing list.

The formula for calculating it:

Number of unsubscribes / number of opened messages × 100%

How it works: an email got 900 unique opens, and 40 users unsubscribed. 40 / 900 × 100 = 4.4%. At these numbers, UTOR comes out to 4.4%.

A result above 3% is usually considered an alarm bell and a reason to analyze the campaign, understand the causes of unsubscribes, and adjust your marketing strategy.

Wrapping up

To evaluate a campaign's performance, it's enough to keep an eye on four key metrics. However, keep in mind that these aren't the only email marketing metrics, and you can analyze a campaign even more thoroughly.

In the Letteros editor you can also get statistics on email read depth — we analyze subscriber engagement, calculate how much time they spend with the content, and build a link heatmap and geography of clicking users.

We're currently actively working on improving Letteros, and in the future the editor will offer even more options for analyzing your emails.

In the meantime, stay with us, follow the news, and try the demo version.

Metric benchmarks from Letteros

As promised, here's the table with average metric benchmarks for 22 popular niches.