Make the Most Out of Your Email Marketing Dashboard by Tracking These 7 Metrics

It can be tough to know how your email marketing is performing and even tougher to optimize campaigns if you're not seeing the desired results.

Without the proper email marketing analytics, you could be wasting time and money on campaigns that aren't effective or not taking advantage of opportunities. 

This is where we welcome email marketing dashboards and the key metrics you need to track while using one to get a hold of all the important information pertaining to your email marketing performance.

In this article, we'll go over the different metrics that will give you a comprehensive view of your email marketing and tips and formulas that come as a package.

Key Takeaways: 

• The email dashboard is the ultimate tool for tracking email marketing performance: what content resonates with the audience, what campaign makes the biggest impact on the bottom line, what nurturing sequence is more effective at driving leads further along the funnel, etc.
• Leveraging email marketing dashboard, the team is able to make informed decisions and optimize campaigns timely to drive better results.
• Key metrics to include in your email marketing dashboard are conversion rate, revenue attributed to email source, average order value, email audience trend, and bounce rate.
• To elevate your email marketing analytics, use software that pulls data from all relevant sources and feeds your dashboard with high-quality data.

What is an email marketing dashboard?

An email marketing dashboard is a tool used to track the progress of an email marketing strategy. It pulls all relevant data into one place, presents it in an easy-to-digest manner, and automates analytics across hundreds of email campaigns and audiences.

With this dashboard in place, marketers can see key metrics and detailed analytics of their email efforts in near-to-real time. This helps them make informed decisions on how to improve their email strategy and each sequence, in particular, allowing them to quickly and easily identify trends and spot issues. Combined with a revenue attribution model, the email dashboard shows how emails influence the bottom line and what role they play in customer journeys. 

By investing in an email marketing dashboard, businesses can make emails more profitable and drive more sales in a world where there are 4 billion email users.

The Benefits of Using An Email Marketing Dashboard

Dashboards provide a simple, centralized view of all of your email marketing performance data in one place–giving you an optimal tool for fine-tuning your messaging, timing, design, and ultimately increasing ROI. 

But other than having convenient access to data, the following are the benefits of using an email marketing dashboard.

A complete view of your email marketing campaigns

Above everything, monitoring performance allows marketers to measure and understand the effectiveness of campaigns they usually spend thousands of dollars on.

What is the ratio of acquisition cost to revenue per subscriber? Do your investments in email strategy pay off? 

Understanding how certain initiatives perform helps marketers refine their strategy to get better results as they go along. Measuring performance also helps them identify areas where they are doing well so that they can continue to focus on those areas or double their budget for better results.

Data-driven decisions about your email marketing strategy

With the right data, marketers can make more accurate decisions in order to better target and engage with their audiences. 

By using a comprehensive dashboard to track key email metrics, marketers have all the tools to make data-backed decisions rather than rely on their gut feeling or present success. 

Email marketing analytics is only a tiny piece of the puzzle. We've gathered 25 dashboard templates to help you build a well-rounded marketing analytics in the shortest terms.

Better allocation of your time and resources

Email marketing can bring up to $45 return for every $1 invested, one of the highest ROI among marketing strategies. But to reach high returns, marketers need to know metrics to optimize for and have advanced analytics to guide them.  

Track These 7 Key Performance Indicators in Your Email Marketing Dashboard

According to Statista, email marketing revenue is likely to reach 11 billion dollars by the end of 2023. Just another reason to take emails seriously, right?

As a digital marketer, choosing the right metrics to track in your email marketing dashboard is one key to ensuring your email marketing actualizes its goals.

Without the proper data, you won’t have an accurate picture of how well your campaigns are performing—which can lead to flaws in strategy decisions and wasted resources.

So, what metrics should you be paying attention to?

1. The number of orders

One of the most straightforward metrics to add to your email marketing dashboard is the number of orders attributed to email. Why is this a metric? Because placed orders indicate that the email campaigns helped lead a prospect to make a purchase—the end goal of an average funnel.

The number of orders can give insight into customer behavior and the effectiveness of your campaigns. This includes understanding the types of customers that are interested in your product, as well as seeing which emails or campaigns generate more sales.

For example, you introduce a number of email blasts set off with specific triggers—customer actions. By tracking the number of orders and comparing the numbers against historical data, you'll get a sense of how effective this innovation was, whether you effectively mapped customer journeys and segmented your audience, and so on.

2. Conversion rate

Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to track. It measures how many people take the desired action after viewing, reading, or interacting with your email in different stages of the marketing funnel.

This could be anything from signing up for a newsletter to making a purchase, downloading an app, booking a call, or any other action you want your customers to take. Tracking your conversion rate will help you understand which emails are more successful in driving desired actions.

3. Subscriber acquisition cost (SAC)

Subscriber acquisition cost (SAC) indicates how much your company spends on acquiring a new subscriber. It's vital to know SAC to understand whether your efforts are cost-effective and optimize campaigns accordingly. Besides, by tracking this metric, you'll be able to calculate average revenue per subscriber and return on investment more accurately. 

4. Revenue per email (RPE)

Revenue per email is calculated by dividing revenue generated from a certain campaign by the number of emails delivered successfully. Knowing this number, you can remove any bounced or permanently failed emails and experiment with the messaging. You can run A/B tests to determine what is more effective in driving revenue. 

This data also helps marketers plan future campaigns and allocate budgets more strategically. Additionally, analyzing DMARC reports can provide valuable insights into email authentication and deliverability, further enhancing the effectiveness of email campaigns and ensuring optimal revenue per email.

5. List growth rate

The subscriber list growth rate indicates how fast (if at all) your email list is growing. It tells marketers how successful their campaigns have been in acquiring new leads, engaging existing customers, and building relationships with potential clients. However, without regular email list validation, a growing list may also accumulate invalid or inactive contacts. This metric is particularly important for businesses that depend on email campaigns to generate revenue.

6. Unsubscribe rate

Unsubscribe rates provide insight into campaigns' effectiveness in retaining customers and engaging with them. If the unsubscribe rate is too high, it could indicate that customers are not interested in your content or product offerings. 

Analyze the pattern of your unsubscribe rate in the context of the overall strategy. Did you change the email format, resulting in a rise in the unsubscribe rate? 

7. Bounce rate

The bounce rate indicates the percentage of emails that fail to hit a recipient's inbox. This metric can tell you how many of your emails were actually delivered and if there were any issues with sending out messages. Running a quick email lookup before adding contacts to campaigns can prevent undeliverable addresses from dragging down performanceHigh bounce rates can also be linked to poor email authentication. Ensuring that your domain has a valid DMARC record in place – using a free DMARC record checker – helps reduce the risk of your emails being rejected or flagged as spam.

There are hard and soft types of bounce:

• A hard bounce indicates a permanent error—for example, you're sending an email to an invalid or non-existent address. 
• A soft bounce refers to a temporary problem with a valid email address, a problem with the recipient's server, or other temporary technical issues.

Email Marketing Dashboard Best Practices

Are you looking to optimize your email marketing efforts and make sure every message is as effective as possible? Below are just some of the ways that you can do so.

"Email has an ability many channels don't: creating valuable, personal touches—at scale"  – David Newman.

1. Use software that can pull all relevant data 

Analytics tools and dashboards that are native to email platforms don't hold all of the relevant data required to analyze your email marketing performance and revenue attributed to email source. By integrating with other digital marketing tools, marketers can create a more comprehensive and cohesive approach to analyzing their email campaigns and target audiences.

Thus, to build a comprehensive email marketing dashboard, you'll need to pull data from CRMs and eCommerce, as well as logs of actions from your analytics platform, like Google Analytics. Then, bring the data to a unified format through data transformations, and only then push it to a visualization, BI, or analytics tool.

Automate this process by utilizing a marketing analytics solution that integrates with other digital marketing platforms to efficiently and successfully aggregate data from multiple channels.

2. Utilize multi-touch attribution (MTA)

Multi-touch attribution is an essential component of email marketing analytics because it allows marketers to track the hits and misses of their marketing efforts accurately. It helps marketers to understand how individual emails and campaigns are performing, as well as which ones are driving conversions. 

By thoroughly tracking the performance of every touchpoint—from website visits to email opens to click-throughs—marketers can gain valuable insights into optimizing their email marketing campaigns and making smarter decisions.

3. Pay attention to dashboard design (still)

Data visualization is an integral component of creating effective email marketing dashboards. Design can influence how marketers interact with the dashboard, whether they're able to find the information they need quickly, whether the data is communicated clearly, and how easy it is to compare several data points. 

Final Thoughts

The use of an email marketing dashboard is essential for digital marketers to measure and understand the effectiveness of their campaigns.

With a comprehensive dashboard, marketers can gain valuable insights into how their campaigns are performing and make data-driven decisions regarding their strategy.