Module 4 – Email Marketing Metrics: Opportunities to Optimize & Experiment
These days, 99% of people check their email multiple times, every day. Email metrics are the best way to understand which of your emails are being opened and what your customers do next. They can also let you know what actions you can take to improve.
About This Article
Reading time: ~4 mins
Learning Type: Article
Email marketing metrics to consider include:
- Open rate: How many people have opened your email.
- Click through rate: How many people have clicked on a link inside your email
- Unsubscribe rate. The number of people who unsubscribed to your list.
- Bounce rate. How often emails never reach the intended recipient. There are two types of bounce rates. A soft bounce is temporary and simply indicates a delivery issue, like the file size is too large or the recipient’s server is down. A hard bounce is permanent because the email address is invalid or incorrect.
- Inbox Placement Rate. The percentage of emails that are going to users’ ‘spam’ folder. This is gaining prominence among email marketers as one of the most important metrics to evaluate a campaigns deliverability, rather than the bounce rate.
The most important two metrics to focus on as you’re getting started with email marketing are Open Rate and Click Through Rate:
Open rate:
Your open rate is how many people opened your email. For the travel and transportation industry in 2025, the average open rate is 40.31%.
If you are seeing low open rates compared to others in your industry, focus on optimizing and testing the following factors:
- Subject Line:
An optimized and engaging subject line can entice subscribers and encourage them to open and interact with your content. You can test the length of your subject line, reducing the number of trigger words like “Risk Free!”, and whether to include emojis in your subject line, among other things.
- Timing:
The day and time of day that you send your emails can have an impact on the number of people who open them (e.g. your subscribers may be more likely to open your emails early in the morning, on their commute to work). Experiment with sending emails on different days of the week and at different times of the day, to see when you capture the most attention. It is generally accepted that it is best to avoid sending weekend emails as fewer people check their emails over the weekend. Some of the best times to send emails are between 9-11 AM and 1-3 PM on Tuesday and Thursday, and avoiding evenings between 5-7 PM.
Trigger words are phrases that email providers frequently flag as fraudulent and malicious. Reducing trigger words and optimizing your subject line can also help with inbox placement and keep your emails out of your users’ spam folder and entice recipients for click on and read your emails. See these tips for optimizing subject lines.
Click-through rate:
Your click-through rate indicates how many people clicked on a link inside your email, which can tell you whether subscribers are interested in your content or offerings. The average click-through rate for the tourism, hospitality, and leisure industry is 1.4%.
If you’re seeing low click-through rates compared to others in your industry, turn to these aspects of your emails for opportunities to improve them:
- Personalization:
Personalized emails receive 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates than non-personalized emails. Simply addressing your subscribers by name at the beginning of your email makes it feel like you are communicating directly with them. Most email service providers make it simple to do this automatically.
- Mix & Flow of Content:
The average email is read in 13.4 seconds. Keep your subscribers’ attention after they have opened your email by experimenting with an interesting and engaging mix of text and visual content (like images, GIFs, video, and icons). The content of your email should be as concise as possible, in an easy-to-digest format, and drive subscribers towards a strong and catchy Call to Action (CTA).
Be sure to collect your email subscribers’ first names in your email subscription form.
Email marketing is proven to be one of the most effective and inexpensive ways for businesses of all sizes to communicate with their audiences, and turn prospects into bookings. Take a look at this article on “How to find open and click through rates in Google Analytics” and experiment with the tips above to make sure your emails stand out in your subscriber’s inbox.
Last updated: August, 2024
