This post was written by guest blogger, Danielle Theisen. Learn more about Danielle here.

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It’s no easy task to put together an effective and efficient email marketing program. Once you have all the pieces in place and you’re sending email campaigns on a regular basis, diving into your analytics will help keep your email marketing program a well-oiled machine. This email marketing analytics glossary will help you to better understand the different facets of your email marketing and help you make the changes necessary to push your inbound marketing plan to new heights.

Bounce Rate

This is the rate at which your emails were not able to be delivered to an inbox. Hard bounces and soft bounces are added together to make up your total bounce rate. This is one of the most important email marketing analytics to keep an eye on as best practice is to keep your bounce rate under 5%.

Click Rate

The percentage of recipients of an email that click on any URL within the email. This number is calculated by dividing the total number of unique clicks by the number of emails delivered.

Click-to-Open Rate

The percentage of recipients of the email that actually opened the email and clicked on any URL within the email. This number is more indicative of email activity than the click rate as it is calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of emails opened, versus the number of emails delivered.

Conversion Rate

The number of recipients in an email campaign who click on a particular link or call-to-action within an email and completed the intended action, such as purchasing a product, filling out a form, downloading a piece of content or calling a sales representative. This number can be used to measure the email campaign’s effectiveness.

Delivery Rate

This is the number of emails sent that were actually delivered into a subscriber’s inbox. This number is calculated by subtracting both hard and soft bounces from the total number of emails sent. When taking a look at your email marketing analytics, you should be looking for a delivery rate of 95% or higher.

Hard Bounce

A hard bounce is when an email cannot be delivered to an inbox because of a permanent reason, such as an invalid or non-existent email address.

Open Rate

The percentage of emails that were opened out of the total number of emails sent. A quick and easy way to improve email open rate is to A/B test subject lines. The better a subject line resonates with your subscribers, the higher the open rate will be.

Pass Along Rate

The percentage of messages that were forwarded from the initial email recipient to another email inbox, or when content within the email was shared to a social network. This number can help you to understand how shareable the content within your email is.

Read Length

The length of time an email recipient opens and reads the email until they close the email.

Revenue per Email Sent

This number will tell you the ROI of an email campaign. You can calculate this number by dividing the revenue from the email marketing campaign by the total number of emails sent.

Soft Bounce

A soft bounce is when an email cannot be delivered to an inbox because of a temporary issue with the recipient’s inbox. One of the most common issues is a full mailbox.

Unsubscribe Rate

This number is the percentage of people who received the email but clicked unsubscribe and are no longer a part of your email list. When looking at your email marketing analytics, keep in mind that people unsubscribe for many reasons. A relatively low unsubscribe rate helps to keep your overall email list healthy.

What other email marketing terms and metrics do you use to measure your email marketing analytics? Share with us in the comments below! If you’re looking to improve your sales and marketing emails, contact Milwaukee email marketing agency, Accelity Marketing.