Email Marketing Engagement Score Metric

Open Rate = (Emails Opened/ Emails Sent - Bounces) x 100
Click Rate = (# of Clicks / # of Emails Sent) x 100

Email Marketing Engagement Score Definition

The Email Marketing Engagement Score metric measures how effective your campaigns are at engaging your audience by tracking key metrics like open and click rates. Each of these metrics represents a different type of engagement which will help you assess the performance of your campaign. Open rates are linked to subject line performance, the credibility of the sender, and the time the campaign was sent; click rates, on the other hand, are indicative of how well the content resonates with the audience and the relevance of the message.

Key Terms

• List subscribers: The number of people who subscribed to an email list maintained by your marketing team.
• Open rate: The percentage of list subscribers that open an email message sent by your team.
• Click rate: The percentage of list subscribers that click links included in your email message, including calls to action, social share or follow links, or generic links back to your website.

Email Marketing Engagement Score Example

Suppose you sent 500 emails, of which 150 open the message. Of that, 80 click on something:

Open Rate = (150/500) x 100

= 30%

Click Rate = (80/500) x 100

= 16%

Email Marketing Engagement Score Benchmarks

MailChimp provides a useful and continuously updated list of average open rates and click rates by both industry and company. The following are some of the many featured:

Business and Finance:

• Open Rate: 21.31%
• Click Rate: 2.76%

Construction:

• Open Rate: 22.53%
• Click Rate: 1.96%

E-commerce:

• Open Rate: 16.80%
• Click Rate: 2.47%

Manufacturing

• Open Rate: 22.70%
• Click Rate: 2.04%

Marketing and Advertising

• Open Rate: 18.22%
• Click Rate: 2.04%

Non-Profit:

• Open Rate: 25.20%
• Click Rate: 2.84%

Professional Services:

• Open Rate: 20.82%
• Click Rate: 2.61%

Software and Web App:

• Open Rate: 21.43
• Click Rate: 2.38%

If your industry is not listed above or you are interested in the average open rate and click rate for a company your size, take a look at MailChimp’s Email Marketing Benchmarks.

Email Marketing Engagement Score Success Indicators

• A high and/or improving open rate.
• A high and/or improving click rate.

Email Marketing Engagement Score Challenges

One of the biggest challenges with email marketing is deliverability. If your Email Marketing Engagement Score isn’t where it should be, reassess the subject lines and content of your emails. It might not be that people aren’t interested in your content, you might just be going straight to their spam or not getting to their inbox at all. The Email Marketing Score won’t tell you what’s working and what isn’t, but it will indicate that there’s a problem worth further investigation.

Email Marketing Engagement Score Best Practices

The first goal of any email marketing campaign is getting past spam filters. According to research from MailChimp, if you want people to open your emails, you have to avoid spammy keywords and phrases, and avoid using ALL CAPS or too many exclamation points!!!! Take the time and learn how spam filters work.

Not seeing the open rates and click rates you wanted? Take a hard look at your subject lines and email content. Don’t sell what’s inside, tell what’s inside. MailChimp’s secret formula for subject lines: Your subject line should (drum roll please) describe the subject of your email. Yep, that’s it.

Successful email marketers extensively A/B test subject lines, call out text in an email, and the time emails are sent. The result is an email marketing program that is fine-tuned to your subscription list with campaigns capable of generating a high level of engagement. As with any marketing activity, email campaigns are designed to generate leads for your business. Therefore, engagement scores should be tracked alongside goal conversion rates and social interactions to demonstrate marketing ROI.

How to Monitor Email Marketing Engagement Score in Real-time

Once you have established metrics for measuring Email Marketing Engagement, you’ll want to establish processes to monitor this and other marketing KPIs. Dashboards can be critical in this regard.

Learn more about how to track your Email Marketing Engagement Score on a Email Marketing Dashboard.

Email Marketing Engagement Score: Top Resources

Why Deleting Email Subscribers can Improve Your Marketing Efforts, Tom Ewer

11 “Sneaky” Tricks to DOUBLE Your Email Conversions, Richard Lindner

Email Engagement Metrics: Applying What We’ve Learned

Email Marketing Benchmarks, MailChimp