Open and click rates are essential metrics to monitor your progress. However, measuring the success of your email marketing can be complex. True email marketing success lies in improving engagement, retaining customers and using insights to influence your strategy. There are standard KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of email marketing. These are:
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Bounce rate
- Unsubscribe rate
Ensuring these rates are healthy builds better relationships with your audience. When recipients consistently open, read and interact with your emails, it fosters trust, strengthens brand loyalty and encourages long-term customer retention. This is invaluable as retaining customers is far cheaper than acquiring new ones.
By tracking open rates, click-through rates and conversions, you can fine-tune your email campaigns. Deliver content your audience cares about. Make every message more engaging and impactful.
Setting Goals For Your Email Marketing
Understanding your email marketing metrics is essential for setting and achieving your goals. By tracking performance and making improvements, you can build a stronger sender reputation, which boosts the deliverability of future campaigns. High engagement also signals a healthy relationship with your audience.
Email marketing is the ‘ultimate way to get to know your audience’. Through segmentation, you can uncover a lot about your audience. This can include campaign engagement, purchase history and browsing behaviour. Analysing these metrics helps you understand what drives your customers and what content resonates with them.
Campaign performance also provides insight into audience trends and interests. Open rates and click-through rates can guide your marketing calendar by showing which campaigns perform best at key times, such as Black Friday, Christmas, or other seasonal events. Using these insights to set clear, measurable goals ensures your email marketing remains targeted, relevant and effective.
Key Email Marketing Metrics and Benchmarks
Open rate
The open rate is the percentage of your audience that opens your email. Consistently monitoring this metric is important, as it directly affects your sender reputation. If your open rate remains low over time, it could even put your account at risk of suspension.
What is a good open rate for email?
The average open rate from Mailchimp is 35.63%. A good benchmark is to aim for a consistent open rate between 30-40%. However, you should always strive to improve this further, as open rates are a strong indicator of your relationship with an engaged customer base. We have seen clients achieve a 70-80% open rate with the right segmentation.
Click Rate
This metric is split into total clicks and unique clicks. Unique clicks show how many individual users clicked, while total clicks count every click. For example, if one contact clicks five times, that equals one unique click but five total clicks.
A high click rate usually means your email content is engaging. Use these insights to guide future campaigns. Include more elements that encourage your audience to click, and pay close attention to what they are clicking on. This information can help you shape stronger, more targeted emails in the future.
What is a good click-through rate?
Mailchimp reports that the average click rate for email marketing is 2.62%. A good click rate generally falls between 2-5%. If your campaigns are below this, focus on making your content more compelling and clickable.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is split into hard and soft bounces. Soft bounces indicate temporary delivery issues, such as a full inbox. Hard bounces usually mean the email address is invalid. To protect your sender reputation and improve overall deliverability, make sure you clean your database regularly.
How High Is Too High for Your Bounce Rate?
For both hard and soft bounce rates, the average is below 2 per cent. You should aim for under 1 per cent to protect deliverability. Hard bounces indicate invalid addresses and should be removed, while soft bounces are usually temporary. Regularly cleaning your list helps keep bounce rates low and ensures your emails reach your audience.
Unsubscribe Rate
Contacts can unsubscribe for a number of reasons. The top 2 reasons are receiving too many emails and the content being irrelevant. A high unsubscribe rate can also impact your sender reputation. If a large number of users unsubscribe after each campaign, the platform may begin to identify your emails as spam.
To keep your unsubscribe rate low, focus on delivering content that feels relevant to your audience. Use dynamic product blocks where possible and personalise your messaging to reflect customer interests and behaviour. It also helps to offer opt-outs for sensitive topics, such as Father’s Day, so subscribers can tailor the content they receive without leaving your list altogether. We recently explored this topic further in this blog here.
How High Is Too High for Your Unsubscribe Rate?
Mailchimp reports that the average unsubscribe rate is 0.22%. A healthy rate is generally below 0.5%, though rates under 1% are still considered acceptable to help protect and maintain your sender reputation over time.
Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Table
| Metric | Good Performance | Industry Average | Action Required If… |
| Open Rate | 30-40% | 35.63% | Below 30% |
| Click Rate | 2-5% | 2.62% | Below 2% |
| Bounce Rate | Under 1% | Under 2% | Above 2% |
| Unsubscribe Rate | Under 0.5% | 0.22% | Above 1% |
Source: Mailchimp industry benchmarks
Pro Tip: These benchmarks serve as starting points. Your specific industry, audience size, and email frequency can influence what’s considered “good” for your business. Focus on consistent improvement and tracking trends over time rather than hitting exact numbers.
How Can Pod Improve My Email Marketing Results?
At Pod, we help you set clear goals and understand the purpose behind your email marketing. Once the purpose is defined, we build strategies for acquisition, retention and tailor your email templates to maximise impact.
By monitoring your email performance, we can compare campaigns and identify what truly resonates with your audience. These insights can then be applied across all your digital marketing channels.
How do your email marketing metrics measure up? If you would like expert advice or support to improve your email marketing, contact us today.
