To get the best results from your email marketing efforts, it’s essential to understand what campaigns are working well and where there’s room for improvement.
That’s where email marketing KPIs come in. The right KPIs give you the necessary insights to create engaging messages that resonate with your audience and stand out in busy inboxes.
In this article, you’ll learn about 15 of the most valuable email KPIs, why they’re important and how to use them to improve your marketing performance. You’ll also discover four ways to monitor and track your email marketing KPIs in Pipedrive.
What are email marketing KPIs?
Email marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) measure the success of your campaigns individually and over time. They show how well you engage with buyers and sales prospects and how accurate your email list is.
KPIs for email marketing fall into five main groups, each focusing on a different part of your process:
Delivery metrics. Discover how many of your emails reach recipients’ mail servers and inboxes.
Engagement metrics. Track how people interact with your emails and click through to your website.
Conversion metrics. See how many people take the action you want – like making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or requesting a sales demo.
List health metrics. Assess the quality of your email list so that your messages reach decision-makers’ inboxes, not their spam folders.
Campaign metrics. Find out how your current email campaigns perform compared to previous ones.
Start by setting your KPIs to match industry benchmarks. You can find these in marketing blogs and publications, email marketing platform articles and industry research reports – like the Global Data and Marketing Alliance (GDMA)’s International Email Benchmark study.
For example, your competitors get a 20% open rate for email, and you get 15%. First, target 20% to match them, then aim even higher to gain a competitive edge. An increased open rate will reduce your customer acquisition cost because you reach more potential customers without spending more on extra marketing.
Tracking your KPIs shows what works for your business and where to improve. Keep a close eye on your performance so you can fine-tune your campaigns to boost profitability and drive more sales with every email you send.
Next, you’ll discover 15 key metrics you should track to improve your email marketing results. These are grouped under the five core areas explored above.
Email marketing delivery KPIs
Delivery metrics matter because they tell you how many people on your list see your email. The more decision-makers you reach, the more sales opportunities your salespeople have to follow up.
Your “sender reputation” or “sender score” is key to your delivery metrics. A strong reputation and score mean more emails will reach your intended audience.
Note: Sender reputation is the level of trust email service providers place in your domain/IP address based on how closely you follow email-sending best practices. Email service providers use it to decide whether to let your email get through to the recipient. Sender score is a rating from third-party email trust services like Return Path that assigns a score to your sending behavior.
Below, you’ll learn the three KPIs you need to focus on to improve your sender reputation and get the best delivery rates:
1. Delivery rate
Your email delivery rate is the percentage of emails you send that email service providers allow through. 90% is the industry benchmark. Hitting this target shows that email service providers trust your sending practices and the quality of your email list.
Follow these four steps to boost your email deliverability:
Keep your list clean. If an email address bounces, returning as invalid or dormant, remove it from your list immediately.
Use double opt-in sign-up. When someone signs up, send them a confirmation email asking for permission again. The double opt-in approach helps weed out fake or mistyped addresses.
Authenticate your email address. Set up Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) to add your sender address to your domain’s DNS records. These three email protocols tell email servers you’re sending from your domain instead – which is crucial because spammers tend to use third-party servers.
Monitor spam services. Find out if your domain or IP is on a blocklist like Spamhaus or Barracuda. If it is, contact the blocklist provider and ask to be removed.
2. Inbox placement rate
The inbox placement rate is the percentage of emails you send that successfully land in recipients’ inboxes. Sometimes, an email server’s filter may send your message to a spam, update or promotions folder.
While the delivery rate shows how many email filters you successfully passed, it doesn’t guarantee that your email reached the inbox. Response rates plummet if your email ends up in the wrong folder.
Around 85% of emails get through to the inbox, so make that figure your initial inbox placement rate benchmark. The higher your inbox placement rate, the more decision-makers see your offers, improving your chances of boosting sales.
Try these approaches to do better with this critical metric:
Be interesting. Your audience expects information and offers on specific products and services, so give them what they want. Share updates, promotions and tips that solve their problems or offer new insights to keep their attention.
Segment your audience. Send more frequently to people who interact with your emails most and less often to less active subscribers. This approach means you stay in touch with everyone while maximizing customer engagement.
Avoid spam triggers. Certain words like “free” or the use of too much punctuation, such as exclamation marks, can trigger spam filters. So can complex, cluttered emails with images that look more like catalog pages.
Run a small pre-send test. Set up 10 or 20 Gmail addresses and email each one before running your campaign. Keep tweaking your subject line, sender names, content and formatting until the email appears in more of your dummy inboxes.
3. Email address validation rates
The email address validation rate measures the percentage of your email list that consists of valid, real and active inboxes. This KPI is useful to track so you can avoid sending emails to invalid addresses, which harms your sender reputation and reduces your campaigns’ reach.
Use an email validation service to check that your addresses are still active. Avoid repeatedly sending to invalid addresses, as this will damage your sender score.
A 100% validation rate is impossible because people start new jobs, switch companies and move homes, meaning data changes constantly. Still, your aim should be to get as close as possible to 100%.
To keep your email list as clean as possible, follow these four steps:
Use reputable validation services. Run all your email addresses and new sign-ups through established services like ZeroBounce, NeverBounce, Kickbox and Verifalia.
Require new sign-up confirmation. Send a welcome email asking subscribers to confirm their address. If they don’t follow through, remove them from your list.
Review your sources regularly. Switch email list suppliers if your current provider sells you cold email addresses that regularly get low validation scores.
Schedule routine clean-ups. Run validation checks quarterly or monthly, removing addresses that fail to maintain and improve your sender score.
Focus on the above three email metrics to increase the number of people seeing your emails. This creates more opportunities for lead generation, successfully closing deals and building brand awareness.
Next, it’s time to turn your attention to making your marketing emails more engaging.
Email marketing engagement KPIs
Engaging email content draws in new leads and drives sales. Higher levels of email interaction mean people value the information and offers you’re sharing as part of your marketing strategy.
Below, find three of the most valuable email engagement metrics and how to track them.
4. Open rate
Your email open rate is the percentage of recipients who open your email. The GDMA report puts the average open rate at around 33.89%, meaning if you send a message to 10,000 people, 3,389 will open it and see the contents. Aim to reach this level first, then find ways to build on it.
Increase email open rates with these four approaches:
Use clear, concise subject lines. Make the subject line and email preheader compelling so readers feel immediately curious to achieve a good email open rate.
Test sending times. Experiment with different days and hours to see when most people open your emails. Send your future campaigns at the times users interact the most.
Keep a familiar sender name. Use your company name in the “From” field, so recipients recognize who you are and feel confident about opening your emails.
Send personalized emails. Include small personal details like the recipient’s first name in the subject line so your email feels directly addressed to them.
5. Time spent reading
Time spent reading measures how long recipients engage with your content after opening your email. This metric helps you understand how well your content captures and keeps your audience’s attention. The longer they read your email, the more relevant your messaging is.
Include a tracking pixel in your email campaigns to measure the length of time people spend reading your content. The latest industry read rate benchmark is nine seconds.
Read rate in seconds
Four ways to improve on this core email marketing metric are:
Get to the value fast. Shorten or eliminate any preamble so you get straight to the value proposition. For example, instead of starting an email with how pleased you are to announce a new service and why you’re introducing it, tell recipients about the tool straight away.
Tell a coherent story. Your sales copy should have a clear narrative packed with valuable information, explaining jargon in simple, easy-to-understand terms.
Break up long text. Avoid “walls of text”, particularly on mobiles, by using shorter sentences, paragraphs, headings and bullet points for easier scanning.
Add relevant visuals. Adding images, diagrams and charts can greatly improve storytelling and make your email more engaging.
6. Click-through rate
The click-through rate (CTR) measures how many people who receive your email click through to your website. According to the GMDA, the average click-through rate is 3.53%.
Four ways to get more people to your site include:
Using a single, standout call-to-action (CTA). Place one clear, visually distinctive button or link, ideally near the top of the email. This way, you’ll also reach those readers who are unlikely to scroll.
Matching your CTA to the subject line. Ensure your CTA delivers on the promise you include in the subject line. For example, if your subject line says ‘Get 25% off today only’, your CTA should direct readers to the discount, stating ‘Click here to save 25%’.
Teasing the reader. Preview just enough information to spark curiosity and ask customers to click the link to reward them with the desired answer.
Using the Problem-Agitation-Solution formula. One of the most successful copywriting techniques is highlighting a common problem, stirring up why it’s an issue and then promising a solution via your link.
Consider engagement the second step in the sales process after reaching prospects’ inboxes. Once you’ve got a buyer’s attention, you can guide them towards a sale or inquiry. The following section focuses on this point.
Note: The click-to-open rate (CTOR) measures clicks as a percentage of opened emails rather than sent emails, as in CTR. Some digital marketing experts prefer CTOR as a more accurate reflection of how well content connects with people who actually open emails.
Email marketing conversion KPIs
Conversions are when recipients take the action you want, such as subscribing to an email newsletter, booking a webinar or leaving their details for a follow-up email or call.
Conversion metrics can track the tangible results of your email marketing efforts. Here are three KPIs you can use to monitor and boost your email marketing conversion rate.
7. Conversion rate
Your conversion rate is how many recipients complete your desired action out of every 100 recipients.
According to figures from Bloomreach, different industries have different conversion rates. For example, B2B manufacturers see a 2.18% conversion rate (218 out of 10,000), while fintech firms see 5.8%.
Here are four ways to get more leads and inquiries from your email marketing campaigns:
Keep your landing pages focused. If your email content promises a 20% discount on an order, highlight it prominently on your landing page.
Declutter the customer journey. Place sign-up forms and “Buy Now” buttons on your landing pages where visitors can’t miss them. Don’t make them hard to spot.
Sell on value. Give solid reasons to “do it now”. For instance, remind visitors why your free white paper download will be valuable to them.
A/B testing. A/B testing compares the results you get from two versions of an ad layout, offer or product description to see which drives more conversions. If you find that one ad outperforms the other, use it in future campaigns.
8. Revenue per recipient (RPR)
Revenue per recipient (RPR) shows how much revenue the average recipient brings on a campaign. To calculate email RPR, divide the total sales value from a campaign by the total number of emails sent.
Klaviyo reports an average email RPR of $0.11, with the top 10% of email campaigns reaching $0.95. A higher RPR means your emails connect well with your audience, increasing purchases or orders.
Four tips to raise your email RPR ratio to improve your campaign’s success are:
Focus on targeting enthusiastic customers. To boost average revenue, create a VIP list of high-spenders who engage heavily with your campaigns.
Promote the most popular products/services. Examine your sales data to see which products and services sell the most and promote them more in future campaigns.
Personalize your recommendations. Improve the customer experience by suggesting products based on individuals’ browsing or purchase history.
Stop or restrict campaigns to low-spenders. Lower email open rates drag down your RPR and sender reputation, so stop emailing these recipients or do it less frequently.
9. Revenue per click (RPC)
Revenue-per-click (RPC) shows how much revenue you generate from each link in your email. This metric benefits businesses like e-commerce companies that send email marketing messages with links to multiple products.
Here are four ways to drive up your RPC:
Link directly to high-conversion products or pages. Skip the homepage and send recipients straight through to transactional pages (where your visitors purchase your products and services) that already convert well.
Improve your site experience. Optimize your site for quicker loading and streamline your checkout procedure to simplify buying.
Feature clear pricing and offers. Transparency builds trust, so show clear pricing in your email and on the web pages you link to. When customers know exactly what they’re paying for, they’re more likely to complete a purchase.
Analyse which links perform the best. Regularly check your analytics and focus future campaigns on the links that get the most revenue.
By now, you’ve optimized every stage of the email marketing process – delivery, engagement and conversion. You’ve maximized your chances of increasing sales, leads and positive client interactions with each campaign.
The next two sets of metrics – email list health and campaign performance – help you maintain a high-quality email list and track how well your campaigns achieve your goals over time.
Email marketing list health KPIs
Good list health boosts your sender reputation. So does regularly reassessing what email recipients want from you. By understanding them better, you create more engaging content that prospective customers want to read.
Here are three ways to keep your email lists hygienic.
10. Bounce rate
Your bounce rate measures how often your emails fail to reach a recipient’s mailbox.
There are two main types of email bounces:
Hard bounces are permanent problems like invalid email addresses or closed domains
Soft bounces are temporary blockages and can happen with a full inbox or a server issue
According to the GDMA, the average hard bounce rate is 0.6%. So, for every 10,000 emails you send out, 60 will hard bounce. Soft bounces happen at a rate of 0.4%.
Here are four top tips to reduce email bounces:
Remove hard bounces immediately. Hard bounces don’t fix themselves, so delete these addresses from your database immediately.
Remove soft bounces after the third attempt. After three soft bounces, remove an address from your email list to protect your sender score.
Contact your recipients. If an email isn’t getting through, contact the person by phone or LinkedIn and ask for their new address. Make sure they double opt-in for added security.
Slim down your email. Assume recipients have limits on the size of emails they can receive, so try to keep yours as concise and as light as possible.
11. Unsubscribe rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who choose to stop receiving your emails. It shows you whether subscribers still find your emails valuable. If many people unsubscribe, you should examine your content or sending frequency to find clues as to why.
To retain existing subscribers and keep new subscribers on board for longer, follow these four tips:
Don’t bombard recipients. Try reducing your email cadence to see if that affects the number of opt-outs.
Run different types of newsletters. Let subscribers pick what kind of emails they want. Offer multiple newsletters, each with different themes and focuses.
Don’t always be selling. Don’t flood each newsletter with sales pitches; instead, deliver the content you promised at sign-up.
Failing to offer incentives to stay. At the same time, remember to reward recipients. Exclusive offers or discounts can give them a financial reason to stay subscribed.
12. Spam/complaint rate
The spam or complaint rate measures the percentage of people who receive your email and mark it as spam or report it as spam to their internet service provider (ISP).
People who send spam complaints to your ISP about your emails can badly damage your sender reputation.
The GDMA reports that the average global spam complaint rate is 0.01%. So, your sender reputation may be at risk if you receive three or more complaints for every 1,000 emails you send.
Here are four ways to reduce spam complaints:
Make unsubscribing easy. Many people file spam complaints when they can’t easily find a prominent unsubscribe option in an email.
Get recipient feedback. Send a customer survey to identify why unsubscribed individuals are leaving and learn from the feedback they give you.
Use honest subject lines. Don’t trick readers into opening emails by making false promises or misleading statements.
Streamline newsletter option selection. If you send multiple newsletters, make it easier to choose or drop individual editions.
Good email list health results in lower bounce rates, fewer unsubscribes and minimal spam complaints. A healthy list is key to a strong sender score and getting into decision-makers’ inboxes.
Email campaign performance KPIs
Never base your entire email marketing strategy on the results of one campaign, whether good or bad. Review your performance metrics over time to see what works best with your audience.
Here are three KPIs you can use to judge how well your campaigns are performing overall.
13. Subscriber list growth rate
The subscriber list growth rate measures the increase in the number of people subscribing to your emails over a specific period. This metric reflects how effectively you target new subscribers and retain existing ones.
Try these four tips to grow your subscriber list for campaign success:
Place clear sign-up forms in key spots. Add simple sign-up web forms to your homepage, blog posts and product pages. Reduce friction by only asking for an email address.
Offer an incentive to join. For example, offer discounts, free downloads or early access to new products to encourage visitors to sign up instantly.
Promote via social media channels. Promise exclusive updates, insights or deals for subscribers you don’t offer anywhere else.
Add exit intent email pop-ups to your site. Ask visitors to join your newsletter with a pop-up that catches their attention before they leave your site.
14. Subscriber lifetime value
Subscriber lifetime value (SLTV) measures how much revenue an average subscriber generates over the entire time they remain on your list. A high SLTV means your email marketing creates long-term relationships where customers order from you repeatedly.
Lifecycle email marketing means sending subscribers emails that reflect their current stage in the customer journey. These stages range from finding out about your products to making a purchase and beyond.
Follow these four suggestions to maximize your SLTV ratio:
Provide great customer support. Make it easy for people to contact you and build a knowledge base on your site so customers can help themselves.
Celebrate milestones. Send congratulations on a recipient’s birthday or the anniversary of their first purchase to show you value them as individuals.
Set up email automations. Send sequenced emails to welcome new sign-ups or a re-engagement campaign to customers who haven’t ordered from you for a while.
Launch a loyalty program. To boost sales, offer perks, discounts or new-product early access to your most engaged and high-spending customers.
15. Forwarding rate
The forwarding rate shows how often subscribers share your emails with others. When people forward your messages, they find your content compelling and trustworthy. Industry benchmarks for this metric range from 0.5% to 2%, so aim for this range as a starting goal for your campaigns.
Here are four ways you can improve the sharability of your email content:
Invite recipients to share. Add a “Share with a friend” link or button to your emails and test different placements or designs to see what encourages more forwards.
Look for trending content. Monitor apps like BuzzSumo and threads on X and Reddit to find popular topics in your industry. Share your views and start a conversation.
Incentivize sharing. Offer rewards to subscribers who forward your messages the most. Track their efforts by asking them to include your address when they forward your email.
Experiment with different formats. Study which content people share the most (like short tips, in-email videos and easy-to-scan summaries) and produce more of it in the future.
While email open rates are valuable, business owners should remember that the real goal of email marketing is to create a reliable and profitable route to market. Use each metric to continually improve and maximize the return on your email list costs.
4 ways Pipedrive enhances email campaign performance
Pipedrive’s sales CRM contains powerful email marketing software you can use to create, send and track campaigns. It also has several sales email templates you can easily edit to suit your campaign needs.
From the platform, you can monitor KPIs like delivery, engagement and conversion rates to fine-tune your approach and improve your email marketing results.
Here are four ways Pipedrive can help you monitor and improve your email marketing KPIs.
1. Run an email campaign report in Pipedrive
In Campaigns by Pipedrive, you can create and view single campaign reports and reports over time.
To run an engagement report for a previous campaign, go to the “Email campaigns” tab.
This will take you to the campaign overview. There, you can run these reports on engagement: “total/unique opens”, “open rate”, “total/unique clicks”, “click rate” and “click-through rate”.
Run a report in the “Delivery” section to see how many emails were “successfully delivered (the inbox placement rate), “bounces”, “unsubscribes” and “reported as spam”.
Dig deeper to discover email addresses that produced hard bounces, soft bounces, temporary bounces and blocked bounces.
Check how many people clicked on links in your email.
It can take a number of days for the results of an email campaign to filter in.
Click on “Performance over time” to see which days and times your campaign got the most opens and clicks to help you plan the most effective times for future campaigns.
Pipedrive’s Campaigns reporting functionality gives you a clear snapshot of delivery, open and click rates, plus bounces and unsubscribes, all in one place. Benchmark each campaign against your longer-term performance metrics to determine the success of each campaign.
2. Lead enrichment based on email activity in Pipedrive
Every time a contact interacts with one of your emails, Pipedrive records it in its customer history.
Click on a contact’s detail view to see every specific campaign in which a contact has engaged with actions like a click-through, download or inquiry.
This type of enriched sales data is particularly useful for sales teams because it helps them spot their most engaged leads. With these insights, they can focus their follow-ups on those most likely to convert – saving time, boosting productivity and getting more deals over the line.
3. Email campaign reporting over time in Pipedrive
You can view the performance of your email campaigns over periods you choose with Pipedrive’s Insights for Campaigns.
Go to Insights and click “+”> “Report” > “Activity” > “Emails performance”.
Select what you want to measure from “open rate”, “click-through rate”, “spam report rate”, “unsubscribe rate”, “delivery rate”, “click rate” and “bounce rate”.
Then, choose the time scale you want to track to generate visual and database reports.
This information helps your marketing team identify long-term trends in email performance. By spotting what works best at different times of the year, they can adjust campaigns to boost results and maximize return on investment.
4. Segmenting your customers in Pipedrive
Pipedrive’s Campaigns email segmentation tool allows you to filter your contact list according to various criteria, including:
By person. Segments built on information stored in your Pipedrive sales CRM, such as deals, activities, products, demographics, job titles and company size.
By campaign. Segments based on how recipients interacted with previous campaigns. For instance, you can target those who opened your last email but didn’t click any links or those who consistently engage with your content.
Combine person and campaign filtering to create highly targeted specialized audiences.
Pipedrive’s segmenting benefits your sales and marketing teams by helping them send messages that are more likely to connect with individual decision-makers. This will improve engagement, increase conversions and lead to more meaningful customer relationships.
Start planning your email marketing campaign now
Final thoughts
Not every email campaign lands, even when you’re confident it will. By tracking email marketing KPIs, you can see how well your emails match your audience’s expectations and make changes to get closer to increased conversion for long-term success.
With Pipedrive’s powerful email marketing software, you can manage your campaigns, analyze every detail of their performance and improve your strategy for even better results. Over time, these insights can help you build stronger, more profitable relationships with your buyers.
Take a 14-day free Pipedrive trial to elevate your company’s email marketing efforts.
