5 key metrics: open rate, click rate, click-to-open rate, bounces and spam

To analyse your campaign results as well as possible, you need to be familiar with these 5 metrics:

1 – Open rate:

Open rate (%)= number of email opens / number of emails sent × 100

The open rate is the ratio of emails opened by your contacts to the number of emails delivered.

For example, if you deliver a message to 100 contacts and 50 of them open it, your open rate is 50%.

Interpreting your open rate helps you assess in particular:

The relevance of your email subject lines
The quality and engagement of your contact list

It is calculated automatically by most email marketing software.

2 – Click rate:

Click rate (%)= number of clicks on a link in an email / number of emails sent × 100

The click rate is the ratio of emails in which a contact clicked a link to the number of emails sent.

For example, if you send a message to 100 contacts and 20 of them click a link in the email, your click rate is 20%.

Interpreting the click rate helps you assess:

The relevance and appeal of your offers
The effectiveness of your calls to action

It is an important metric for measuring how engaged your contact base is with your marketing emails.

3 – Click-to-open rate

Click-to-open rate (%)= number of clicks on a link in an email / number of emails opened × 100

A complement to the click rate, the click-to-open rate is still the ratio of emails in which the user clicked a link, but this time compared with the number of emails opened only.

For example, if you send a message to 100 contacts, 50 of them open it and 25 click a link, your click-to-open rate is 50%.

4 – Bounce rate (soft bounce / hard bounce)

Bounce rate (%)= number of undelivered messages (DNS or SMTP error) / number of emails sent × 100

The bounce rate is the ratio of emails returned to the sender with an error message because they could not be delivered, compared with the total number of emails sent.

There are 2 types of bounces:

Soft bounce:the recipient address is temporarily unavailable (connection error or full mailbox)
Hard bounce:the recipient address does not exist or no longer exists.

This last metric is the most important: it should always be 0%! The best option is to use a solution that automatically removes addresses generating hard bounces to optimise your deliverability: sparrowmailing does exactly that.

5 – Spam rate:

Spam rate (%)= number of spam complaints / number of emails sent × 100

The spam rate is the percentage of complaints (reports as junk mail) generated by your campaign.

For example, if you send an email to 100 contacts and 2 of them report it as spam, your spam rate is 2%.

This statistic has the biggest impact on your deliverability: a rate above 0.1% can get you classified as spam by an ISP.

To help you avoid this, sparrowmailing automatically blacklists unsubscribers and contacts who clicked “This is spam”.

Unsubscribe rate / click rate:

Unsubscribe rate / click rate (%)= number of unsubscribes / number of clicks × 100

This rarely used but easy-to-obtain statistic measures a campaign's relevance by comparing the engagement it generated with the disengagement.

Interpreting this rate is mainly useful for monitoring and assessing your marketing pressure.

Our advice:if your click rate is not at least 4 times your unsubscribe rate, the marketing pressure you put on your contacts may be too high. It is then worth rethinking the targeting and content of your campaigns.

ROI (return on investment):

ROI (%)= profit generated by the campaign / cost of the campaign × 100

The aim of this metric is to calculate a campaign's profitability by comparing the profit it generated with its cost.

The simplest method is to calculate the average profit generated by each click on a link in your campaign, multiply it by your number of clicks and divide by the cost of the campaign:

ROI = value of a click × number of clicks / cost of the campaign

src (fr.sendinblue.com)

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