The Anything but Basic Guide to Email Marketing in 2024

Marketing isn’t cut and dry, and it’s the same for email marketing. You need to put in the effort and adapt to ongoing industry changes.

This is why tracking your marketing metrics is an important part of email marketing.

It helps your team focus their efforts. It gives you insights into how you can improve your campaigns going forward.

Of course, what metrics you track will depend on your goals. For example, if your goal is to drive leads, the metrics you track will look a little different than if your goal is to drive demand and inbound requests.

Demand creation email metrics

For example, demand creation email campaigns will likely look at metrics such as:

Read rate.
Link clicks.
Open rate.
Bounce rate.
Unsubscribe rate.
Newsletter signups.

At Cognism, we take this tracking one step further by enriching our email list data to find out who is engaging.

What’s their seniority?
What industry are they in?
What’s their company size?

This way, you can better understand if you’re reaching the right audiences with your email campaigns. Therefore able to make better decisions about what content to create and distribute via email in future. In order to better engage your target audiences.

And it doesn’t end there.

Demand creation email campaigns aren’t about driving immediate conversions and are more focused on delivering high-quality content to drive brand admiration. So, we encourage our email audiences to join us in our other ‘value loops’.

Which means it’s important for us to be tracking if we see growth in those places. If our audiences feel they’re getting value from our emails, they’re more likely to want to get that value on our other channels. Simply giving us another indication of their engagement level.

But if demand creation isn’t your goal, and you need to focus on leads - here’s a list of Cognism’s must-track email marketing metrics:

Lead gen email marketing metrics

1. Top-level metrics

Lasering in on the following revenue-focused metrics will help you win at email marketing:

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).
Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQOs).
Closed-won deals.
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
Average deal size.
Average sales cycle.

However, your focus shouldn’t only be on the deals you’ve won through your email campaigns. It’s also important to track your team’s efficiency by following these metrics:

Cost per MQL.
Cost per MB (Meeting Booked).
Cost per SQO.
Cost per acquisition.

When tracking these metrics, it’s vital to look at which campaigns are creating conversions. This will give you a clearer idea of how to make your email marketing more efficient.

To help with this, you’ll also need to track the following:

1.1. Your average response time to an inbound request.

At Cognism, we target under 3 minutes and compensate our SDRs on this by tracking it daily.

1.2. The percentage of inbound requests that have an outcome.

We try to target 70%. It’s one thing to action an inbound straight away, but you also want to motivate your SDRs to be persistent and track down outcomes consistently.

1.3. Stalled and inactive MQLs: by region, rep and campaign.

At Cognism, we have an “Inbound Dashboard” where we track these metrics. You can do the same via an Excel or Google sheet, that can be updated by your team.

2. Campaign metrics

Liam said:

“CW and revenue are your ultimate metrics; you want to be optimising for this at all times.”

“You may find that a campaign generates leads but not SQOs – if that happens, turn it off. You may find it generates SQOs but not revenue – why? How can you adapt it, to get people over the line?”

“You want to be looking at the closed-won number and what is an acceptable customer acquisition cost for your business or product to truly determine campaign success.”

“MMR is individually important too; you want to optimise your campaign to churn out the biggest deals possible, not just deals themselves.”

Working hand in hand with your top-level metrics are your campaign metrics. There are six that you absolutely need to track:

1.1. Leads

It’s important to watch your raw number of leads and your CPL so you can keep track of how many are coming in. However, it’s not a determining metric on its own. You can accept more or fewer leads or a higher CPL if the metrics further down the funnel look good.

1.2. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

These are the B2B leads that fit within your ICP and can be worked into your pipeline. It’s always a good idea to qualify your leads before handing them over to your outbound sales team. This way, the funnel metrics further down don’t start to show poor quality leads.

1.3. Meetings booked

Keeping track of your meetings booked will give you a good indication of the quality of your MQLs.

1.4. Meetings attended

Like meetings booked, tracking the meetings your AEs attend is a good indicator of the quality of your MQLs and helps you predict your SQOs.

1.5. Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQOs)

This is a metric you want to watch closely, and one you should optimise campaigns toward. Your SQOs are strongly indicative of incoming revenue, while also telling you which of your campaigns are performing well.