It’s important to have specific email marketing KPIs and product goals in mind so that you can successfully define and measure the success of your email campaigns.

We believe in treating our user’s inboxes with respect, so the first step before sending an email is figuring out why it actually needs to be sent.

Goals like increasing revenue, building awareness and engagement around new features and reengaging users are all great reasons to send an email.

If you don’t have a goal set for each email you’re sending, you’re just throwing emails into the wind and hoping they perform. Not great.

A quick sanity check and way to figure out if you should send the email is by asking yourself “What product related goal do I hope to achieve with this email?”.

At the same time, it’s important to have specific and trackable KPIs in mind so that you can continue to measure and improve upon the emails that you’re sending.

If you’re sending an email just to send the email, it’s probably one you don’t need to send.

KPIs for Email Marketing

Sending emails for the sake of sending emails is highly unlikely to be a productive email marketing strategy. 

As we mentioned in the introduction of this guide, email is an incredibly powerful tool and marketing channel. However, running a successful email marketing strategy takes a bit of work and fine tuning along the way. 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable metrics that help you track the success of a specific goal or objective. In the context of email marketing, KPIs are measurable metrics that help you track the performance of your email campaigns.

Identifying and fine tuning the “correct” KPIs may vary business to business. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, even if they are all SaaS businesses. 

They can vary due to differing business goals, industries, audience, pricing models as well as overall marketing strategy. For example, a company targeting millennials may optimize for social media followers and engagement where a company targeting Gen X or baby boomers may find it more wise to optimize for website traffic stemming from an email campaign.

There is no right or wrong answer.

For those reasons, it is extremely important to identify the KPIs that are the most relevant and valuable to your business in order to successfully measure the success of your email marketing campaigns.

Most Commonly Used Email Marketing KPIs

Despite there being a varying number of KPIs worth measuring depending on your business, there are a handful of commonly tried and true KPIs that may be beneficial to your SaaS. 

Email marketing KPIs that may be important to your business can include metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. By tracking these metrics, you can gain insights into the effectiveness of your email campaigns and make data-driven decisions to optimize future campaigns.

Open Rate

An email open rate is the percentage of email recipients who opened an email that was sent in one of your email marketing campaigns. 

Open rates tend to be a key metric that most SaaS companies use when evaluating the success of their email marketing campaigns. A higher open rate may indicate that the email subject line was effective in grabbing the recipient's attention and encouraging them to open the email.

However, while this is certainly a metric worth paying attention to, it is becoming increasingly important to note that open rates are not a perfect method to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. More than ever, open rates are becoming a vanity metric (and that’s totally okay!). More on that here. 

To calculate: Divide the number of unique opens by the number of emails sent, and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Here is the formula:

Email open rate = (Number of unique opens / Number of emails sent) x 100%

Example: Let’s keep the math simple and say that you sent an email to 1,000 subscribers or customers, and 250 of them opened the email. 

Email open rate = (250 / 1,000) x 100% = 25%

This means that the open rate for this email campaign is 25%.

Click-through Rate

An email click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of email recipients that clicked a link within one of your email marketing campaigns. 

Click-through rate is often an important metric for email marketers to measure because it indicates how engaging and relevant the email content was to the recipients. A higher CTR typically means that the call-to-action was effective in driving clicks. 

To calculate: Divide the number of clicks by the number of emails delivered and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Here is the formula:

CTR = (Total clicks ÷ Total emails delivered) x 100

Example: We will keep the math simple again. Let’s say you send an email campaign to 10,000 subscribers or customers and 500 of them click on a link (any link will count) within the email.

CTR = (500 ÷ 10,000) x 100 = 5%

This means that the click-through rate for this email campaign is 5%.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate of an email marketing campaign is the percentage of email recipients who completed the desired action as a result of your email marketing campaign. 

This action could be any type of activity that you’re hoping the recipient takes such as creating an account, downloading a resource, or subscribing to a newsletter.

To calculate: Divide the number of email recipients who completed your desired action by the total number of emails delivered and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Here is the formula:

Conversion rate = (Number of people who completed the desired action ÷ Total emails delivered) x 100

Example: If you send an email to 10,000 subscribers or customers and 500 of them click on the links within the email and out of those 500, 50 people make a purchase, you can calculate your conversion rate as follows:

Conversion rate = (50 ÷ 10,000) x 100 = 0.5%

This means that the email received a 0.5% conversion rate.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate of an email marketing campaign is the percentage of sent emails that were returned to the sender because they were undeliverable. A bounce can occur for a variety of reasons, such as an invalid or mistyped email address, a full mailbox, or a server issue.

To calculate: Divide the number of bounced emails by the total number of emails sent, and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Here is the formula:

Bounce rate = (Number of bounced emails ÷ Total emails sent) x 100

Example: If you send an email campaign to 10,000 subscribers and 500 emails bounce, you can calculate the bounce rate as follows:

Bounce rate = (500 ÷ 10,000) x 100 = 5%

This means that the email campaign had a bounce rate of 5%.

Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate for an email marketing campaign is the percentage of subscribers who unsubscribe (opt-out) from your email list after receiving an email campaign. This means that you will no longer be able to send these recipients emails going forward.

This metric helps email marketers understand how many subscribers are no longer interested in receiving their emails and it can provide insight into the types of content a recipient may not be interested in and how to improve future campaigns.

To calculate: Divide the number of subscribers who unsubscribe by the total number of emails delivered, and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Here is the formula:

Unsubscribe rate = (Number of unsubscribes ÷ Total emails delivered) x 100

Example: If you send an email campaign to 10,000 subscribers and 100 people unsubscribe, you can calculate the unsubscribe rate as follows:

Unsubscribe rate = (100 ÷ 10,000) x 100 = 1%

This means that the email campaign had an unsubscribe rate of 1%. 

This is an important KPI to measure and take very seriously. A high unsubscribe rate likely indicates that your email content is not resonating with your subscribers in some way.

It may mean that the frequency of your emails is too high or simply that the content or offers are not worth opening the emails for.

Ultimately, tracking a meaningful set of KPIs is just one set of important metrics to measure as you tweak your email marketing strategy for success. 

There is no true one-size-fits-all approach to sending successful email marketing campaigns so it is important to keep an open mind and measure your results often.

Email Marketing Goals

Your email marketing campaigns will likely have a variety of goals, both short-term and long-term that will need to be considered when sending emails. You will need to consider the business’s overall objectives as well as where your recipient is in their customer journey in relation to using your SaaS product or service.

These goals can and should exist alongside the email marketing KPIs outlined above.

In fact, there are probably more important product goals that you should be setting and measuring from day one ahead of the traditional KPIs.

Are you confused as to what some common email marketing goals may be and are looking for a starting point? Here is a list of common categories that product-related email marketing goals may fall into:

• Acquisition

• Onboarding

• Aha Moment

• Retention

• Re-engagement

• Reactivation

The individual importance of each of these can vary based on your business. Ideally, whichever goal you choose should move the needle for you or serve a tangible need.

For example, if you’re not trying to convert a user, you should be trying to serve another purpose like sharing your latest updates or improvements that may lead them to increased usage of your product.

Why Email Marketing Goals Make More Sense Than KPIs

Product-related email marketing goals like those above should often take precedence over the outdated email marketing KPIs you are probably more used to such as open and click rate.

That is because the traditional KPIs like open rate are no longer as reliable as they once were. This is quite the hot take coming from an Email Sending Platform, but it’s true.

New initiatives from some of the largest email gatekeepers (Apple specifically has been focused on this with their MPP initiative) are quietly removing email senders ability to successfully track metrics like open and click through rates in the name of privacy.

Additional platforms will likely follow suit and other platforms like Outlook often block external images (aka tracking pixels) by default.

The variability in email sending platform’s privacy tracking will have immeasurable impact on your open and click tracking, so make sure to set a product goal alongside your more traditional KPI.

You can also skip tracking altogether and disable open/click tracking in providers like Loops. Definitely consider this option if you have privacy centric users or a very technical audience. Calling this out may even be a selling point to some of your potential users.

Apple is leading the charge with their new “Mail Privacy Protection” that allows users to opt-in to having Apple pre-load their email upon receipt. This will artificially inflate open rates for users using the Apple mail client as their emails will automatically show as opened whether they truly do or don’t.

Ultimately, these changes to open and click tracking are completely out of your control and won’t be reversed anytime soon (ever), so instead of solely focusing and stressing on KPIs like open rates, it’ll be important to redirect a chunk of your time and effort into the metrics and email marketing goals that you truly can control.

It’s also important to remember to track these goals against your current baseline (prior to taking action) so that you have quantitative data that can shape future goal setting and email initiatives. It’s likely that your first or even second courses of action will have minimal or even no sizable impact on your product goals. Continue to measure and tweak as needed until you begin seeing positive results.

Setting The Right Email Marketing Goals

Deciding on and implementing the right actionable email marketing goals is critical to the overall success of your campaigns and SaaS business as a whole. 

Here are some simple steps that you can take to help you begin setting the right goals:

1. Determine Your Overall Business Objectives: Start by defining the main objectives for your business that can be accomplished through your email marketing campaign. Your objectives could include increasing trial signups, increasing social media followers, increasing revenue, or improving overall customer engagement.

2. Analyze Your Audience: Analyze your customer base that is receiving your campaign to better understand their needs and preferences. This will help you tailor your email marketing campaign to their needs in order to increase the chances of achieving your objectives.

3. Set Specific and Measurable Goals: Your goals should be specific and measurable so that you can track your progress and make adjustments if needed. For example, if your objective is to increase paying customers for your SaaS, you might set a goal to achieve a specific number of trial or freemium customers and track how that bucket of users convert to paying users.

4. Set Realistic Time Frames: Setting realistic time frames for achieving your goals will help keep expectations in check. This will help you stay focused and motivated throughout your campaign and ensure that you are making progress towards your objectives. It is unlikely that a single campaign will achieve all of your goals so it is important to iterate instead of throwing in the towel after one failed campaign.

5. Measure and Adjust Your Campaign: Continuously measure and tweak your email marketing campaigns based on the performance of past campaigns towards your key metrics and business objectives. This will help you optimize your campaign for better results each and every time you send a new email.

By following these steps, you are setting the right goals for your email marketing campaign from the start and are in a good spot to increase your chances of a successful campaign.

Once you have outlined a handful of steps and guidelines for how you will run your email marketing campaigns, it’s time to pick some specific goals that you and your team can work towards one email at a time.

If we look back at some of the common categories that a product-related email marketing goal may fall into we can begin to surface some realistic and actionable goals.

Acquisition Goals

Whether you’re starting a new SaaS company or simply trying to grow your current business, email marketing can be an affordable and efficient way to acquire new customers. 

Some specific email marketing goals related to user acquisition for your SaaS worth considering are:

• Grow Your Email List: Use lead magnets or other incentives to encourage people to sign up for your email list. Growing your email list will give you a larger audience to target with future email marketing campaigns.

• Increase Sign-ups and Trials: Use email marketing campaigns to promote sign-ups and trials of your SaaS product. You can offer incentives like free trials, discounts, or special promotions to encourage people to sign up for your actual product after they have been lurking on your newsletter or email list for some time.

• Promote Referrals: Use email marketing to encourage existing customers to refer their friends and colleagues to your SaaS product or to simply forward your emails onto them. Referral marketing can be an effective way to acquire new customers at a lower cost. Getting potential customers on your email list is a great way to target them for a sale again in the future.

By setting user acquisition goals like email list growth, sign-ups and trial growth, and referral increases, your SaaS company will be able to measure the true results of your email marketing campaigns.

Onboarding Goals

User onboarding is a critical early step in your SaaS user’s journey within your product. You’ve gone through the tedious work of acquiring this user or potential user, now it’s time to successfully use email marketing to get them fully up to speed. 

Some specific email marketing goals related to user onboarding for your SaaS worth considering are:

• Welcome New Users: Use email marketing to welcome new users to your SaaS product and introduce them to its key features and benefits. Invite your new users to reply to the email to introduce themselves.

• Educate Users: Send early emails that aim to educate new users on how to best use your SaaS product effectively. This could include tutorials, tips and tricks, and best practices for using specific features. Track how often these tutorials are viewed and rated against how many new users reach out to support for help on the same topics.

• Jumpstart Early Engagement: Send early emails that encourage new users to engage with your SaaS product and take specific actions, such as completing a profile, setting up integrations, or inviting team members. Track how many new accounts complete these steps after opening your emails vs those that don’t. 

• Gather Feedback: Send an email with a simple form to gather feedback from new users on their onboarding experience and how you can improve it. This will help you identify areas for improvement and ensure that you are providing a high-quality onboarding experience while listening to any potential bottlenecks from newly onboarded users.

By setting user onboarding goals such as welcoming new users, educating those same users, jumpstarting early engagement with your product, and gathering initial feedback, your SaaS company will be front and center in your new customer’s mind as you hope to have them stick around for the foreseeable future.

Aha Moment Goals

Getting your users to the Aha moment of your product is challenging but incredibly important. This is when your users will fully realize the full potential and value of your product. Once a user finds this Aha moment they are far less likely to churn. 

You should leverage email marketing to help guide your new users to this critical moment.

Some specific email marketing goals related to the Aha moment worth considering are:

• Guide Users Towards the Aha Moment: You should know what your Aha moment is for the majority of your users, send an email series that helps guide them towards it. This could include sending targeted emails based on their past usage in your app that helps direct them towards the next features that will make everything come full circle.

• Celebrate the Aha Moment: Send a quick message to celebrate the Aha moment with users. This could include highlighting their achievements or providing recognition for their success. Let them know that you see them and will celebrate with them at a time when they are likely the most pleased with your product. Offer them a discount to upgrade their account and track how often this is claimed. 

• Encourage Sharing: Once your user has found their Aha moment, send an email to encourage them to share their Aha moment with others. This could include social sharing buttons or referral incentives that motivate users to spread the word about your SaaS product. Track how often these moments are shared and interacted with after the fact.

By setting goals like these centered around finding and celebrating the Aha moment within your product you are not only ensuring that the user is less likely to churn in the near future but also connecting with them at a time when they are more likely to share your product with others. Take advantage of this great opportunity!

Retention Goals

The retention stage of a SaaS is also very important. If a user slowly stops using your product, they are likely to churn. To prevent that from happening, use email marketing to keep them engaged and finding value in your product.

Some specific email marketing goals to help retain your users are:

• Increase Product Usage: Send emails that encourage customers to use your SaaS product more frequently. This could include providing tips and best practices for using specific features, highlighting new or underutilized features.

• Reward Customer Loyalty: Thank your active customers by sending them a thoughtful email. Send them exclusive discounts or access to beta features.

• Stay In Touch: Send a regular newsletter with product updates, tips and tricks, or industry resources to highlight that you are still actively serving them as a customer. Track how often these product updates are being used following the sending of a campaign.

• Gather Frequent Feedback: Gather feedback from customers on their experience with your product. Track how often users are providing feedback as well as the general feedback trends within responses.

• Promote Upgrades: Send emails that promote upgrades or upsells for your SaaS product. For example, you could offer a discount on a premium plan or promote additional features that are available for purchase. Track how many users upgrade from a free to paid plan following this offering.

By setting product goals related to retention you are putting in the necessary work to keep users engaged with your product. The more a user uses your product, the less likely they are to churn and find a different solution to their problem.

Re-engagement Goals

Re-engagement is yet another critical aspect of the customer journey for a SaaS company, as it can help bring back customers who have become inactive but are still paying customers… for now.

Some specific email marketing campaign goals that can help re-engage your users before it’s too late are:

• Identify Inactive Customers: Identify customers who have become inactive with your SaaS product. This could include customers who have not logged in or used your product in a certain period of time. Once you’ve done that, send them a quick email asking them if there is anything that you can help them with. Offer an easy way for them to take action (ex. “Simply reply to this email”).

• Gather Feedback: Yes. More feedback. Use this opportunity to try and gather feedback from inactive customers on why they stopped using your product. This will help you identify areas for improvement and address any issues that may be contributing to their lack of use. Maybe you are simply one feature away from them becoming a power user and super fan. You won’t know unless you ask.

• Promote New Features: Send an email to promote new features or updates that may be of interest to inactive customers. This could include highlighting specific features that are relevant to their previous usage or features that were previously a highly requested addition to your product.

• Reduce Churn Before It Happens: Send personalized emails to customers who have not used your product in a while, offering personal customer support to address any issues or concerns. Track how many of these customers respond with support questions, how many ignore the offer and continue as is, and how many cancel their subscription.

By setting re-engagement product goals you are utilizing email marketing as a last ditch effort to find and fill any potential missing gaps with your current inactive customers. Keep a close eye on these goals and continue to measure their impact and effectiveness. You don’t want to go through the long acquisition process only to lose a customer if it can be prevented. 

Reactivation Goals

Okay, so a customer churned and stopped being a paying customer. That happens. But it’s not the end of the world and doesn’t mean they won’t become a paying customer again. 

Reactivation email campaigns can be a lifesaver when it comes to your SaaS business, as they can often bring back previously churned customers at a lower cost than acquiring a completely new customer.

Some specific email marketing campaign goals that can help you reactivate a churned customer are:

• Exit Survey: Send an exit survey to gather feedback from churned customers on why they left your product. This will help you identify areas for improvement and address any issues that may be contributing to customer churn. If they are missing a specific feature, ask them if you can contact them again in the future if you add it.

• Offer Incentives: Send a final email that provides incentives or deals for churned customers to return to your SaaS product. This could include offering discounted or extended trials. You would rather have this customer on a cheaper plan or extended trial than with one of your competitors.

The reactivation product goals are unfortunately a necessity when it comes to a SaaS business. With increased competition and dropping prices, it is easier than ever for a current customer to decide to try a competitor. Keep a close eye on your churning customers as well as your customers to ensure that you have realistic goals and expectations when it comes to your reactivation incentives. 

When To Use Email Marketing KPIs vs Email Marketing Product Goals

Ultimately, both KPIs and product-led goals should be utilized and measured alongside one another. They are both powerful in their own rights but also each have their own gaps in usefulness.

While traditional email marketing KPIs used to be the end all be all of email marketing, current regulations and gatekeeping are making them tougher to rely on as your only success measurement. 

By adding product-led goals alongside KPIs you will be able to track metrics such as open and click rate alongside revenue moving metrics like trial-to-paid conversions.

Is this slightly more work? Yes. But it’s how you can successfully use email marketing to get a leg up on your competition.