How to Measure Email Marketing Performance Correctly

Open rate is easy to track but increasingly unreliable due to privacy features (like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection) that pre-fetch and inflate open counts — click rate, conversion rate, and revenue per email are more reliable indicators of genuine performance.

Tag email links with UTM parameters and connect email platform data to your analytics or e-commerce platform to see actual revenue attributable to specific campaigns — without this connection, you're evaluating email performance on engagement proxies rather than real business outcomes.

Aggregate metrics across your whole list can mask meaningful differences between segments — a campaign performing poorly overall might be performing very well for one specific segment, information that's lost without segmented reporting.

Compare performance against your own historical data and realistic industry benchmarks for your specific sector, rather than generic cross-industry averages that may not reflect what's actually achievable for your list size and audience type.