Tips for designing your emails, and which email marketing KPIs to use.

Email is one of the most widely used and important tools for businesses. It has been used for business purposes since its inception and remains highly important today, although medium and large companies now use marketing automation or CRM tools to send these emails. Therefore, below we’ll share various tips on email design and email marketing KPIs, and in a future post, we’ll walk you through the technical checklist to follow for a campaign launch.

9 Tips for Designing Effective Emails.

Our years of experience working with top-tier brands have led us to understand that there are a number of requirements or best practices that every email design should follow. They are as follows:

1. Limit the content to one objective per email. Only in periodic newsletters can we include more than one objective.
2. Try to balance the space taken up by text and images.
3. Use clear CTAs and no more than two per email (you could include another one, such as a “ghost button,” with a white or transparent background and a border in the same color as the text).
4. Highlight text of interest by using font size, uppercase letters, color, and boldface. Organize the content hierarchically and establish a reading order using these elements.
5. Personalize your email using the data you have (name, location, interests, email, etc.). Don’t overuse this feature—it can come across as somewhat intrusive—but use it wisely to spark interest. Be careful not to include personalizations using fields that aren’t in the list or “data extension” to which the contacts belong, since some tools won’t be able to send the email to users who don’t have these variables.
6. When an email contains a lot of text, we usually break it up into sections, highlighting a headline for each one. This makes it easier for the reader to determine from the headlines whether any of the text below is of interest to them. However, if we included the entire text in one block, as if it were a Word document, they most likely wouldn’t read anything at all—or, at best, just the beginning.
7. To separate text or sections, use changes in background color, typically very light shades of gray or very light bluish-gray tones.
8. Subject lines: The shorter and more direct, the better. The open rate depends on how interesting the subject line and the sender are, but you shouldn’t promise something that isn’t in the email—otherwise, it will leave a very bad impression.
9. CTR: The click-through rate is influenced by the relevance of the content—whether it is appropriate for the user (personalized, valuable) and also consistent with the subject matter.

Now that we know how to design a winning email, let’s move on to the other key aspect of email marketing: measuring performance using the right KPIs.

Which email marketing KPIs should I use for my email marketing campaigns?

First and foremost, it’s essential not to confuse a KPI with a metric. A metric is basically used to track how your campaigns or initiatives are performing, providing day-to-day monitoring so you can analyze the data with a view to optimization. However, a KPI lets you see at a glance whether or not you’re meeting the goal you set for yourself. Therefore, KPIs are closely tied to your predefined goals.

Below, we’ll share with you the main metrics and KPIs used in email marketing. They are as follows:

1. Open Rates:
   1. Unengaged: This metric should be between 1% and 5%.
   2. Between 10 and 20 percent.
   3. Top Users. Between 20% and 50%.
   4. Transactional: It would have to be above 50%.

2. CTR or click-through rate:
   1. Unengaged: This metric should be between 1% and 2%.
   2. Between 5 and 10 percent.
   3. Top Users. Between 10% and 25%.
   4. Transactional: It should be above 40%.

3. Spam Complaints. This should be less than 0.1%.
4. Opt Out. It should be less than 1%.
5. Hard Bounces. Also below 1%
6. Soft Bounces. Also below 1%
7. Total clicks / Unique clicks: a very useful metric for evaluating the level of interest in the various links included in a single email (usually in newsletters).

Every business is different, just as every moment and every database is. This will determine which metrics are most worth analyzing. The interesting thing about this is that you learn from what the metrics show you and gradually improve.

At MioGroup, we incorporate email marketing strategies into our overall approach to increase sales and generate leads for our clients. To this end, our teams of experts in email marketing and email automation—working with both external and internal lists through CRM management—will provide you with the best possible support for your communications. Should we talk?

Héctor Cordero, Marketing Automation Manager at

Mio Consulting