Open your email dashboard and count the numbers staring at you.
Open rate. Click rate. Click-to-open rate. Bounce rate. Unsubscribe rate. List growth. Revenue per email. Spam complaints. Somewhere in that percentage wall, most founders do the sensible thing: They take a look at one or two, feel reasonably good or a little worried, and get back to actually running the company.
I understand it. I would even call it rational, because most of these numbers don’t deserve your attention.
But some of them actually predict where your email program will go. And at least one of the most cited metrics in all of email marketing has been quietly broken for years, while most people continue to read it like it’s 2019.
Let’s figure out which is which and, more importantly, what we can actually do about each one.
Do you have little time? Here are the key takeaways
- Open rate is a trend, not a truth: Privacy changes have increased the number of opens across the board. Pay attention to the direction, not the number.
- Click-through rate is your honesty metric: Openings can be automated. A click is a conscious human action.
- Revenue per email pays the bills: If you’re serious about pursuing a number, make it this one.
- Unsubscribes are feedback, not an error: A steady trickle is that your list is cleaning itself. Spikes are what need to be examined.
- Metrics only matter if they change what you send: A dashboard that you look at but never react to is decoration.
Open Rate: The Broken Speedometer
Let’s start with the unpleasant thing.
Open rate used to be the most important metric in email marketing. Then in 2021, Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection, which preloads emails on subscribers’ devices regardless of whether they read them or not. Each of these preloads is registered as open. Overnight, open rates increased across the industry, and the absolute number no longer meant what everyone still claims.
So if 45% of your list “opened” your last campaign, let’s be honest? A significant part of them are machines.
Should you stop watching it? No, but change the way you read it. Inflation hits every station roughly equally, so the trend still tells the truth even if the number doesn’t. Slide for three months straight? Something real is happening: stale subject lines, a sold-out list, or a sender reputation problem.
Direction, not precision. That’s all there is to open rate.
It’s still worth having.
CTR: The one who can’t lie
No one accidentally clicks on a link and no privacy feature clicks on behalf of a subscriber.
This makes CTR the most honest number on your dashboard and the number I would trust more than anything else to judge whether your content is engaging.
There are two flavors, and the difference between them is where the diagnosis lives. The click-through rate (clicks divided by clicks delivered) provides insight into how the campaign performed overall. The click-to-open rate (clicks divided by opens) tells you how the content was received by the people who actually saw it.
Now watch what happens when you read them together. Low click-through rate but healthy click-to-open? Your content is good and your subject lines undercut it. High opening speed but weak click-to-open? The opposite: Your subject line wrote a check that the email failed to cash.
The same two numbers, and they tell you exactly which half of the email needs fixing. This is about as close to a free advisor as a dashboard can get.
Revenue per email: The adult metric
Engagement is beautiful. Commitment is not a business either.
Revenue per email is the point at which your sends match reality. The revenue attributed to a campaign divided by emails delivered. One number, comparable for every campaign, every automation, every month. And it has a wonderful way of reordering your assumptions: the clever campaign you were proud of that sold nothing and the boring product email that quietly delivered numbers suddenly fall into their true order.
Two related numbers deserve a monthly look. Firstly, the share of emails in your overall shop sales. For healthy eCommerce brands, this number is typically around 20-30%, and if you’re much lower than that, email is underperforming relative to what it should be doing for you.
Second, the split between campaign revenue and automation revenue. Automated processes, your welcome series, abandoned carts, post-purchase, almost always generate far more revenue per email than one-off campaigns because they arrive at exactly the right time in a person’s journey. If your automations only account for a fraction of your email revenue, that’s not a reporting issue.
This is your to-do list, written in numbers.
The smoke detectors
Three metrics that you’ll ignore 95 weeks out of 100 and be very glad you tracked the other five weeks.
Bounce rate. A hard bounce means that the address does not exist. A rising hard bounce rate means your list hygiene is slipping, and inbox providers are definitely noticing this. Keep the value below 1% and ensure your platform automatically suppresses hard bounces.
Unsubscribe rate, which is perhaps the most misread number in emails. A steady trickle, around 0.2 to 0.5% per campaign, is not a problem. It’s your list that silently removes the people who would never buy, protecting your engagement and deliverability. I would go further: a 0% unsubscribe rate is a warning sign because it usually means your unsubscribe link is too hard to find. What counts is the top. A campaign triggers three times your normal rate? This email told you something about your audience. Find out what.
Spam complaints. The one with the teeth. Even above 0.1%, complaints actively damage your sender’s reputation and can quietly impact whether your emails even reach inboxes. Rising complaints are almost always due to frequency (too much), relevance (too little), or an unsubscribe link that people weren’t looking for but clicked on “spam” instead.
The fifteen minute monthly ritual
This is where most analytics advice silently fails: it ends with “monitor these metrics.”
Monitoring doesn’t change anything. Deciding does.
So here is the whole system. Once a month, fifteen minutes, four questions. Which campaigns generated the highest revenue per email and what did they have in common? Which one had the best click-to-open rates and what was different about it? In what direction are opens, clicks and unsubscribes trending over the course of the quarter? And which automations pull their weight against idleness?
Then, and this is the whole trick, change exactly one thing. Not five. One. Rewrite the underperforming welcome series. Steal your best campaign’s subject line style for the next three sends. Lower the frequency to the segment that unsubscribes the fastest.
It helps tremendously if the platform makes the connection for you. Omnisend’s reporting links revenue to each individual campaign and automation, breaks down performance by segment so you can see who is responding and who is deviating, and puts campaigns and automations side by side. The monthly ritual becomes a fifteen-minute read rather than a spreadsheet project.
Final thoughts
If there’s one idea to put an end to, it’s this: your dashboard isn’t for monitoring. It’s there to argue with.
Clicks tell you the truth. Sales tell you what it’s worth. The smoke detectors tell you when something is burning. Everything else is commentary.
Omnisend brings you the version of this dashboard designed for decision-making: real-time revenue attribution, segment-level insights, and campaign and automation performance in one view. Foundr readers also get 50% off the first three months, just use code FOUNDER50 when you log in. Fifteen minutes a month, one change after another, and your email program is no longer something you send, but something you control.
P.S Are you switching to Omnisend from another platform? Your migration team will move any flow, list, and template for you in five days, free of charge. You just show up when it’s ready and pay up to 35% less with SMS starting at $0.007 per message.
