Why should you even care much about email marketing strategy, when social media has such a vast audience pool? Bear in mind that while social media is great for targeting, it’s also extremely noisy. Small businesses can struggle to get people’s attention, unless they’re constantly stretching their budget to pay for ads.
With email marketing, you own your subscriber list, so you’ll never lose visibility because of a sudden algorithm change. And it's super cost-effective, with an average return on investment of $36 for every $1 you spend, making it one of the highest-performing marketing channels.
Email also stands out for allowing you to build a relationship with your customers. Earning brand loyalty is the goose that keeps laying the golden egg.
The next question you may well ask is, if I create good marketing emails, why do I need to geek out on measuring campaign performance?
The answer is that email marketing metrics show you what’s working and what’s not. Effective strategies and efficient use of limited resources are the cornerstones of small business growth.
Let’s summarize all the benefits of a good email marketing strategy:
All your email efforts should have a defined goal, to make sure you’re measuring the right data points. If you’re not getting a clear picture, you could be missing out on opportunities for improvement or more revenue.
For example, let’s say you run a flash sale. A bad metric to focus on would be the open rate, since that’s not the main goal. For a promotional email like this, your priority is to increase your conversion rate i.e. did people buy?
On the other hand, if you send a newsletter (educational email), your focus should be on click-through to the articles you linked to, as well as read time, and shares.
Using the S-M-A-R-T framework is the best way to create goals that are the right fit for each email or campaign:
To make your SMART goals even smarter, you’ll want your emails to reflect the customer journey where different segments of your subscriber list are at, so you’re giving them the most relevant content. This is a proven way to increase your conversions.
These are the main customer journey stages, similar to the main marketing funnel:
Let’s look at the main data points you should keep a close eye on for your email campaigns, so you know what’s engaging your audience, and what’s not. Metrics get rid of guesswork, saving time and boosting your results.
The percentage of people who opened your email, out of the total number who received it. You calculate this by dividing the number of emails opened with the number of emails delivered, then multiply by 100.
Benefits:
The percentage of people who entered your email and clicked on a link. You calculate this by dividing the number of clicks with the number of emails opened, and multiply by 100.
Benefits:
The percentage of people who completed your desired action after clicking a link, like buying something, signing up to your newsletter, or filling out a form. In other words, this is where the money is. You calculate conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions with the number of clicks, and multiply by 100.
Benefits:
The percentage of emails that couldn’t be successfully delivered to the subscribers on your email list. You calculate bounce rate by dividing the number of undelivered emails with the total amount of emails you sent, and multiply by 100.
Hard bounce means it couldn’t be delivered because of an non-existent email address, so you need to remove it from your list. While a soft bounce means it’s just a temporary issue, like a full Inbox that has reached its storage limit, or temporary server problems.
A high level of bounced emails will hurt your sender reputation and could land you in the spam folder.
Benefits of measuring delivery rate:
The percentage of people who opted out of your email subscriber list. You calculate unsubscribe rate by dividing the number of unsubscribes with the number of total recipients, and multiply by 100.
Benefits of measuring subscriber engagement drop-off:
This conversion rate measures the growth of people subscribing to your newsletter. Calculate list growth rate using this formula: new subscribers − subscribers − email bounces, then dividing that number with your total list size, and multiply by 100.
Benefits of measuring new users:
Also called the Forwarding Rate, as the title suggests this is the percentage of people who shared your email in social media posts, or forwarded it to someone.
Benefits of keeping an eye on this metric:
Success will look very different depending on whether your goal with an email campaign is to build brand awareness and a subscriber list, sell more products, or keep customers coming back for more.
In other words, you can’t measure success without understanding exactly what you’re trying to achieve, who your audience is, where they are in their journey with your company, and what kind of email you’re sending.
And while it’s important to understand the key email marketing metrics as a starting point, generic or industry standard benchmarks can give you misguided insights. Reason being is they don't account for your audience, tone, or offer for each email.
Generic email measurement can also make your performance appear below average, when in fact your growth rate is good for your individual business niche.
Here’s a quick summary of the main types of email marketing campaigns, and the key things that make them a success, and the specific metrics to focus on for each one:
These emails promote a sale, offer, product launch, or time-sensitive event. Your goal is
to drive traffic, increase profits, generate leads.
Top tips for success:
Campaign performance metrics to track:
These are triggered automatically after a user completes an action, such as a purchase, registration, or password reset. Your goal is to confirm the action so the user knows where they stand. This builds trust, and is an important part of creating a good customer experience.
Top tips for success:
Email metrics to track:
This type of email covers all types of informational content, from newsletters and how-to guides, to tips on how to make the most of your product or service. Your goal is to provide value, and position your brand as helpful to build customer loyalty.
Top tips for success:
Email marketing metrics to track:
Automating a welcome (also called onboarding) series of emails is an important way to make a good impression. Your goal is to build brand trust, start to develop a relationship with your new customer or subscriber, and engage their interest.
Top tips for success:
Campaign performance metrics to track:
These emails are sent to subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked any of your emails in a while. Your goal is to win back their interest. They also help you keep your email list clean and relevant, because after a few attempts, you’ll know to remove them (it;s not a good idea to keep clogging their Inbox as that will just come across as spammy).
Top tips for success:
Email marketing metrics to track:
This automated series of emails should guide people through the specific customer journey over a period of time. Your goal with a drip campaign is similar to a marketing funnel, where you educate to build trust, and gradually gain their interest for conversions.
Top tips for success:
Email marketing metrics to track:
This type of email asks the customers to fill out a short survey, rate your business, or give a testimonial. It’s an invaluable way to get direct insights on how your audience feels, so you can strengthen weak areas, double down on things they love, and gather social proof that makes more people want to buy from you.
Top tips for success:
Your chosen email performance measurement tool needs to help you easily understand what’s working, flag what you need to fix, and give you valuable insights for future campaigns
For small businesses on a lean budget, it also needs to be low cost as you grow, and straightforward. You don’t need all the advanced bells and whistles of corporate level tools.
These are some desirable features to help you choose the right tool:
1. Streamlined Dashboard
You’ll want your tool to have an at-a-glance dashboard that automatically tracks and displays the core performance metrics we looked at in the section above. Although with time you’ll be able to tweak the reporting to suit your specific business needs, it should be plug and play, very beginner friendly. There should be no need for coding or setup.
2. Actionable Reports
You should get clear reports on every email campaign, where you can instantly see:
For automated triggers, like welcome or abandoned cart emails, it’s good to also have breakdowns of how many people received each email, which emails performed best in a sequence, and where users dropped off.
3. Integrations
The most popular tools we’re about to recommend will cover 90 to 100% of what you’ll need to measure email campaign success.
But if you’re interested in tracking stuff like how many people bought something on your website after clicking an email, you’ll need your tool to integrate seamlessly with other platforms like Google Analytics or your e-commerce platform.
Your email tracking tool should make this easy, with features like auto-tagged links with UTM parameters, and one-click integrations with platforms like Shopify, or WooCommerce.
We recommend the following email tracking tools for your small businesses, because they have Free Plans while you’re building your subscriber list, and give you the key features we’ve covered plus more. So your choice will come down to which tool you find most intuitive to use, and your volume of subscribers:
Performance data is just numbers if you don’t interpret it in a way that gives you clear and effective action steps to improve total revenue. Every click, open, and conversion tells a story about your audience.
The reason email marketing has always delivered high ROI is because you’re developing a relationship with your customers, which in the long run also lowers your marketing budget because you don’t have to keep chasing new leads.
Let’s look at how you turn this data into gold:
The bottom line is that email metrics empower you to improve your conversion results with each new campaign. The formula here is: insight = action = growth.
Once you’ve sent a few email campaigns and gathered the data points we discussed above, like open rates, click rates, then ask yourself these key questions to turn your metrics into gold:
With people’s Inboxes already overflowing, sending one-size-fits-all emails is a fast way to lose subscribers. Always remember, your goal with email marketing is to build a relationship with each customer. Personalization lets you do this.
This is a standard feature offered by most email marketing platforms these days. By using a customer’s name, and tailoring your messaging around their location, past behavior, or preferences, you’ll boost engagement, conversion rates, and overall customer experience.
Examples are:
Breaking your email list into smaller groups based on specific characteristics is key to building relationships with customers, because you can then create emails that resonate more closely with them. Segmentation with compelling, tailored subject lines can dramatically improve your results.
Key segments for small businesses are:
Email performance data gives you direct feedback on where your weak points are. You can often fill these gaps with automated email sequences that develop customer trust without you having to lift another finger.
Examples of automated emails that deliver good results are:
Example of an effective automated email sequence:
These are some proven approaches to optimize your email automation. To refine your emails even further, you’ll want to do regular A/B testing:
These are the areas that most often snag small businesses when it comes to email performance measurement, along with advice on how the pros avoid these pitfalls:
1. Relying Too Heavily on Open Rates
"Open rates have become a vanity metric. They give you a rough idea, but they don’t tell you whether your email worked." — Val Geisler, Email Marketing Strategist and Customer Evangelism Consultant
Open rates on their own are misleading because they can be skewed by email client privacy changes like Apple Mail Privacy Protection, image blocking, and people opening an email but not reading or engaging with it.
Fix:
2. Ignoring Conversion Data
"Clicks are not conversions. A click only tells you someone was curious. Conversion tells you they found value." — Chad S. White, Author of Email Marketing Rules
Don’t stop at measuring Click-Through Rate. Track what happens after someone clicks an email link, as that data is even more valuable. Experienced email marketers think holistically, it's not just about one marketing channel.
Fix:
3. Measuring Success Without a Goal
"Start with your goal, not your metrics. The goal defines the metric, not the other way around."
— Joanna Wiebe, Copywriter and Founder of Copyhackers
This is such a sticking point that we wrote an entire section on it. Jump to the SMART Goals heading and give it another read, so you don’t fall into this trap.
But here’s a quick summary of the fix:
4. Ignoring Segmentation
"You don’t have one audience, you have many micro-audiences. Segment your data like you segment your list." — Dan Oshinsky, Former Director of Newsletters at BuzzFeed & The New Yorker
Treating your entire email list as one audience is a sure way to get mediocre results at best from your email campaigns. And there’s no point segmenting your subscriber list, if you don’t also segment your data for accurate results.
Fix:
5. Overlooking Deliverability & Bounce Rates
"Deliverability isn't sexy, but it's foundational. If your emails aren’t being delivered, nothing else matters." — Laura Atkins, Email Deliverability Expert at Word to the Wise
High bounce rate and poor delivery rate can flag you as a shady sender, which could see your future emails dumped straight into spam folders.
Fix:
6. Not Tracking Long-Term Engagement
"Email success is a marathon, not a sprint. One campaign is not the full picture." — Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx
Looking at only a single-campaign will keep you blind to key long-term trends, like past interactions, declining engagement, or content fatigue.
Fix:
7. Neglecting Mobile Performance Metrics
"If your email doesn’t look good on mobile, it doesn’t look good, period." — Justine Jordan, Email Marketing Designer
This is a bit of a broken record, but keep in mind that over 40% of email opens happen on mobile these days. So neglecting to track mobile-specific performance means you’re missing out on valuable insights and opportunities for improvement.
Fix:
In a small business, every email you send is an opportunity to connect, convert, or build trust. Every customer counts. Unlike social media or paid ads, emails give you more direct access to your audience. That’s why each message should have a clear goal, be tailored to a specific type of person, and offer genuine value.
Think of email marketing as an opportunity to build relationships over the long-term. If performance is measured consistently and in the right way, you’ll gain invaluable insights into your customer’s preferences and needs. This is how you create brand loyalty.
You’ll also uncover patterns and insights that help you improve each campaign. Over time, if maintained well, a subscriber list can become your goose that keeps on laying the golden egg.
To truly unlock email growth rate, get in the habit of measuring, interpreting, and acting on email performance data. A/B testing will help you enhance your email success even further.
And if you’d like to find out about a range of small business tools to boost your success the easy way, check out the Build & Grow Hub.
Why is email marketing still important for small businesses?
Email marketing has always had an unmatched ability to deliver personalized communication that builds relationship with customers. And you own your subscriber list, unlike with other marketing channels where an algorithm change can see you losing visibility.
The importance of email marketing is also high ROI, it often outperforms other digital channels, making it perfect for small businesses with limited budgets. You also have more free rein to craft unique, compelling campaigns that help you stand out from the noise.
What are the key metrics to track for email campaign performance?
These re the most important email campaign performance metrics, read the dedicated section in this guide to learn more:
How do I calculate ROI from email marketing campaigns?
To calculate ROI (Return on Investment) from your email campaigns, use this simple formula:
Revenue from Campaign – Total Campaign Cost ÷ Total Campaign Cost × 100
Start by totaling all revenue generated directly from the campaign (such as product sales or sign-ups with a monetary value). Then subtract the total cost of the campaign, including software, design, and labor. Divide that by the total cost, and multiply by 100 to get your ROI percentage.
What is a good open rate for small business email marketing?
As of 2025, the average email open rate typically ranges between 20% to 25%. A good email open rate is generally considered to be above 30%, which suggests your subject lines, timing, and sender reputation are all in healthy shape.
How can I improve my email click-through rate (CTR)?
These are some top tips to increase email click-through rate:
What causes a high bounce rate in emails and how do I fix it?
A high email bounce rate is usually caused by invalid, outdated, or misspelled email addresses, as well as full inboxes, and domain issues that prevent delivery.
To fix email bounce issues, regularly clean your email list by removing inactive or incorrect addresses, use double opt-in for valid sign-ups, and monitor your sender reputation. Also avoid spammy content or attachments that might trigger filters.
How do I set SMART goals for my email marketing campaigns?
The S-M-A-R-T framework goes like this:
Read the dedicated section of this guide to learn more, including matching SMART goals with different stages of the customer journey.
Which email automation tools are best for small businesses?
These email automation platforms are currently the most popular:
Read the dedicated section of this guide to find out why, as well as what the main criteria to suit small businesses.
From newsletters to effective signatures, here’s why email is integral to your marketing arsenal.
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