Creating content takes time, energy, and sometimes money to produce – but how do you know if those investments are paying off? Marketing metrics are key to guiding your strategy.
Rather than wasting valuable resources on content that isn’t reaching or resonating with your audience, incorporate regular data collection into your marketing processes.
This isn’t about chasing vanity metrics! It’s about understanding what’s working and what isn’t – gathering real data to maximize your impact.
Tracking the right metrics can help guide your marketing choices and investments, allowing you to refine your strategy and make smarter decisions moving forward.
In my previous blog post I focused on key website and lead generation metrics. In this follow-up, we’re diving into email and social media – breaking down the terminology you should become familiar with, and how you can audit (and improve) your current marketing efforts.
Key Metrics for Email Marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing.
By landing directly in your subscribers’ inboxes, you’re able to connect with them in a personal, focused way – cutting through the noise of other marketing platforms.
Whether you’re announcing a new offer, sharing a value-packed newsletter, or rewarding loyalty with early access and exclusive discounts (or ideally, a thoughtful mix of all three), email gives you the opportunity to connect directly with your audience—deepening relationships and building your brand identity over time.
However, for your emails to work, they need to be seen and interacted with.
Building familiarity with key email metrics, and tracking them for your own content, can help you optimize your efforts and refine your strategy – ensuring you’re moving the needle in the right direction.
Open Rate:
Your open rate is the percentage of people who opened your email, out of the total number of emails delivered.
Opens By Device:
This metric tracks the total number of email opens per device type (for example, mobile vs. tablet vs. desktop users).
Click-Through Rate (CTR):
The percentage of total clicks on an email link, or CTA, compared to the total number of email opens.
Bounce Rate:
The percentage of undeliverable emails as a proportion of the total number of emails sent.
Unsubscribe Rate:
The percentage of people who opt-out of your email list over a given period of time.
Email Marketing Metric Considerations
Open Rate:
Open rates can offer insight into how interested your audience is in your content.
High open rates indicate an engaged, responsive community whereas low open rates can indicate technical issues or a disconnect in the content you’re sharing.
Keep in mind: Apple Mail privacy settings may inflate these numbers – making them appear higher than they actually are. If your platform allows, consider turning off Apple’s ‘pre-check’ when looking at your email insights, to get more accurate results.
If you’re looking to improve your open rate, consider:
- Is your subject line compelling and relevant? Does it spark curiosity or provide clear value?
- Are your emails personalized and segmented?
For more tips on building your email list and creating engaging email content, check out these blogs:
- Email Marketing Essentials for Small Businesses: Best Practices for Starting and Building Your Email List
- How To Implement Email Sequencing In Your Small Business
Opens By Device:
It’s important to make sure your emails translate across devices. People are on-the-go more than ever and tend to switch devices quite regularly.
Large text or images can cause extremely long scrolls or may display poorly on smaller devices, making emails frustrating to navigate.
Consider,
- Are your designs responsive and easy to navigate on all devices?
- Are large images or text causing layout issues on mobile?
Test your emails across multiple devices for readability before you send them out to your audience!
Click-Through-Rate (CTR):
Click-through rate (CTR) is often a more reliable measure of engagement than open rate. It lets you know that recipients aren’t just opening your emails—they’re actively clicking to learn more, take action, or explore your offer.
If your CTR is low, consider:
- Do you have too many links embedded in your email? In general, focus on one CTA to avoid distraction.
- Are links clearly marked so readers know they are clickable? Opt for vibrant buttons to help your CTA stand out.
- Is your call-to-action clear and aligned with the email’s purpose?
Streamline your email content so that people know what to expect, and have a clear next step if they’re interested in learning more.
Bounce Rate:
- A soft bounce can happen when a subscriber’s email inbox is full, or due to temporary server issues.
- A hard bounce typically means that the email address is not real – either someone provided a fake submission, or there is a typo in the email.
I recommend cleaning your email list regularly (at minimum every 6 months) to remove hard bounces, or contacts who are clearly not engaging with your content (for example, if they haven’t opened any of your emails within the past 12 months).
Before removing inactive subscribers, consider sending a re-engagement sequence. Offer something of value, like a special discount or free resource, to rekindle interest. In the final email of that sequence, let recipients know they’ll be unsubscribed unless they opt back in—giving them one last chance to stay on your list.
Cleaning your list helps improve open and click-through rates, giving you a more accurate picture of what’s resonating. Leaving unengaged subscribers on your list can drag down performance metrics and distort your data.
Unsubscribe Rate:
It’s absolutely normal to see a few unsubscribes with each campaign you send. People’s needs, interests, and circumstances change, and if your content is no longer relevant to them it’s better that they opt out than remain inactive and skew your analytics.
This is especially true if you haven’t sent an email in a while! However, if your unsubscribe rate is high, or spikes randomly, it’s worth investigating.
Here are a few common factors that could be influencing your list:
Email Frequency
Setting expectations around email frequency early on can help you avoid unsubscribes.
For example, on the sign-up page or in a welcome email, let subscribers know how often you plan on emailing them. Do you send a monthly newsletter? Weekly updates?
If people expect more than a monthly email and you don’t deliver, they may perceive your email list as low-value and unsubscribe. If they’re expecting an update monthly but instead receive weekly emails, they may feel overwhelmed.
Follow-Up and Onboarding
At a minimum, send a confirmation email after someone signs up for your email list. Better yet, create a short welcome sequence to introduce your brand and set expectations.
If someone subscribes to your emails but then doesn’t hear from you for weeks, they might forget why they joined in the first place.
Lead Magnet Delivery
If you offer a lead magnet, make sure it’s delivered immediately. Subscribers should receive this download or resource automatically, moments after signing up for it – or you risk losing their interest and trust.
Add an automatic follow-up email to this lead magnet sequence a few days later to ask your subscribers if they have questions or want to book a call with you.
Capture their interest with a nurture sequence that invites them into your community, lets them know what you’re all about, and delivers value.
Consider,
- Are you sticking to the schedule you initially promised subscribers? Are you emailing too frequently—or too infrequently?
- Are you meeting any other expectations set during the sign-up process (for example, regarding the type of content you promised to send or the value you said you would deliver)?
- Do you have an onboarding email or welcome sequence in place?
- Do you have an automatic lead magnet delivery set-up? What about a follow-up nurture sequence?
First impressions matter. Set clear expectations, follow through, and show up consistently—setting the stage for better long-term engagement.
Key Metrics for Social Media
Social media is a powerful marketing tool – offering you the chance to connect with new audiences, share behind-the-scenes moments, get creative, and experiment with different content formats.
You don’t need to have a presence on each and every social media platform there is.
Focusing your energy on 2–3 platforms that align with your business and audience can be an effective way to build community, extend your reach, and support your business goals.
To understand what’s resonating, get to know these key metrics for your business and content.
Engagement Rate:
The total number of interactions (for example, comments, clicks, likes, or shares) on a piece of content, as a percentage of your audience size.
Follows and Subscribers:
The total number of people who have shown interest in your content by choosing to follow your profile.
Shares:
The total number of times a post or page has been shared on social media, a website, or a blog.
Audience Growth Rate:
The growth of your social media audience over time.
Post Reach:
How many times a piece of your content has shown up in people’s feeds (note: this does not mean people interacted with it, just that it has been seen).
Shares of Social Voice:
Also known as social listening, this metric looks at how often your brand is mentioned online, compared to your competitors.
The only way you can really follow this is by checking specific hashtags to your brand, searching specific keywords, or monitoring content you’re tagged in.
Approval Rate:
The goal of the approval rate measurement is determining how many positive interactions followers have had with your posts.
Most of these metrics can be viewed for Facebook and Instagram, through the Meta business suite.
Social Media Metric Considerations
Approval & Engagement Rates:
Focusing on engagement and approval metrics are generally a better indication of interest than followers, because it means people are actually interested in and interacting with what you’re posting.
While engagement includes interactions of any kind, approval rates focus on those that show your audience genuinely enjoys what you’re sharing.
Increasing positive engagement and approval rate can indicate alignment with your audience – an important metric in building trust and brand identity.
Consider,
- Which platforms give you the best results? Can you prioritize showing up there more often? Does it make sense for you to move away from lower performing platforms?
- What types of posts get the most interaction? Consider both the content theme or focus, as well as the form of content (for example, video, graphics, or photos).
- As a general rule of thumb, shareable carousel graphics, short videos, posts with real people, and behind-the-scenes content tend to perform well.
- Would a different content format resonate more with your ideal audience?
- If you’re sharing video content, look at where people begin to drop off. Is your content too long or drawn out?
- Are you encouraging engagement by asking questions or utilizing storytelling to better connect with your audience? Comments can help let the algorithm know that your content is important and resonating – encouraging it to be promoted more by the platform!
- Are you staying up-to-date with algorithm changes, trends, and platform features so you have a better chance of platforms pushing out your content?
- Are you maintaining a consistent voice, tone, and brand presence that builds trust and connection?
Follows, Subscribers, and Audience Growth Rate:
Over time, as you share content and build your brand, your online community tends to grow too. While I don’t like to put too much pressure on follower numbers, a positive growth rate can indicate that your content is resonating.
Follower and subscriber numbers also play a role in building credibility – signaling authenticity and authority.
Focus on growing an intentional and aligned community, rather than simply aiming for the largest audience.
Consider,
- Is your bio on each platform clear and compelling? Does it give viewers a good idea of who you are, what you offer, and how you can help them, so they’re intrigued and want to learn more?
- Is your profile optimized for new visitors? Do you have searchable keywords in your content and bio so that people are more likely to find you?
- Are you showing up consistently? Are you posting valuable, good quality content?
- Are you taking advantage of trends, partnerships, or new platforms to reach new people?
- How can you focus on creating more shareable content?
- Have you tried honing in on your social media strategy? Or are you posting randomly?
- Have you experimented with different content types? What about different posting schedules?
If your content is being seen but those views aren’t converting into followers, it’s an indication that there is a disconnect of some kind.
Consider,
- Are you creating content that’s relevant to your ideal client and their interests?
- Is there a clear call-to-action in your caption or video?
- Are you posting too often (which could be viewed as spam) or too little (so people end up forgetting who you are or why they followed you)?
- Are you posting about too many different themes or topics?
- Are you focusing too heavily on virality, rather than providing real value?
- Are you giving people a reason to stay—offering consistent value, entertainment, or inspiration?
Strengthening your profile, messaging, and consistency can turn views into further connection and community. Asking for feedback from your current audience can allow you to uncover further insights.
Shares:
Social shares are a powerful tool for expanding your reach – allowing your content to be seen on different platforms and by new audiences.
Consider,
- Is your content valuable or entertaining enough to be shared?
- Are you tagging relevant collaborators, products, companies, or audience members? This can help encourage those tagged members to share the content on their prospective platforms.
- Are you encouraging people to tag their friends or family in the comments (when relevant)? For example, running a giveaway where one of the qualifications is tagging someone in the comments.
Post Reach:
The further your social media reach, the better your brand recognition. A lot of the same questions as above apply!
- Are you posting at peak times?
- Are you creating relevant, shareable data?
- Are you taking note of changes to the algorithm on the particular platform you’re on, so you can take advantage?
Social Listening:
Word-of-mouth marketing is a powerful tool! How can you encourage people to organically share about your brand? And how can you encourage people to have those conversations publicly, online?
- Are you using and monitoring branded hashtags?
- Are you encouraging followers to tag you in content?
- When followers do tag you in content, are you commenting on and interacting with those posts to show that you’re paying attention and listening?
- Are you creating a positive experience for your clients and customers that they want to share about?
Influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and/or online referral programs might be tools to look into to expand your online presence by encouraging social shares and mentions.
Remember, marketing is about more than content creation
Marketing is about more than content creation – it’s also about the response you receive to your marketing efforts, and what that tells you about your audience.
What are they responding to? Where is there a disconnect?
Schedule regular, focused data review into your calendar so you can analyze these insights and optimize your future efforts.
If you need more help with this process, book a free consultation call! I offer strategy sessions, marketing training, and digital marketing audits which may be supportive for you.
