As we’ve already discussed, email is a solid tool to assist in your marketing efforts. To make sure you’re not wasting your time, it’s important to check in every once in awhile to see how your email strategy is going. There are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep your eyes on.

First, before you can measure if you’re reaching your goal, you must determine what that goal is. This should be done before the email is sent out, or even formatted. What are you trying to accomplish with this email? Are you trying to convert leads into customers, or maybe build awareness of your brand? Whatever it is, use the following measurements to see if you have properly reached your goal, as well as any other measurements that may connect more specifically to what that goal is.

Email KPIs

• Open Rate. Open rate is actually not as important as it may sound. If one hundred percent of receivers opened the email but don’t proceed from there, your email has essentially failed. Open rate only indicates the effectiveness of your subject line, plus it can point out a good reputation, making receivers excited to open your emails.

• Clickthrough rate. This is the percentage of people who clicked on the link in an email (calculated by clicks divided by number of emails sent). Clickthrough rates shows engagers: which people are interested in your emails, and what they are interested in. A good yet attainable clickthrough rate is around 6%.

• Conversion Rate. This is the percentage of people who go through all of the steps that were intended with your email. Of all metrics, this one is most important, as it illustrates most precisely how well your goal is being reached. To calculate this, you will need to use a unique tracking URL in your email.

• Bounce rate. How many people are actually receiving the email you sent? If only half of your email list receives said email, that’s not a very successful email. But there are two types of bounces: hard and soft. A hard bounce is something permanent, like a deleted or non-existent email address. A soft bounce, however, means all is not lost: It is a temporary issue, such as a full inbox, and can be resolved. Make sure to remove hard bounces because Internet service providers use that as a metric to determine the reputation of a sender. Too many hard bounces and you may be treated as spam.

• List growth rate. This is the rate at which your email list is growing. Take into consideration new contacts, unsubscribes and hard bounces. Email databases naturally decay around 22% per year. On that note, it’s important to realize that while some do focus specifically on unsubscribes, that is not such an important metric to be tracking. Many people don’t actually go through the steps of unsubscribing, they will just ignore emails. Therefore, factors like clickthrough and conversion rates are more telling.

• Sharing/forwarding. This includes social media shares and email forwards. This is an important metric because this is how to generate new contacts.

• ROI. Return-on-investment is all about the hard numbers. Are you getting back what you are putting in? If not, you may want to rethink your strategy.

Some of these metrics may be more important than others, depending on what you are trying to measure. Once you’ve got the hang of measuring email success, try playing around with layout, images, videos, text content, subject lines and whatever else you can think of to see what drives the best results. Also stagger the times and days that you send out mail and keep an eye on which seems most effective. If a certain email seems to have failed, don’t throw it away- instead examine it and see what you can do better next time.