If you know me, you know that there are a few things I’m truly passionate about: my family, my dogs (okay, to be fair, it’s all dogs!), and anything/everything CRM. So, it should come to no surprise that I’m a member of several email and CRM-specific groups online. Being a member of a community of like-minded individuals is a great way to share ideas, ask questions and yes, even vent when posed with face-palming scenarios like when we’re asked to asked opted out users to resubscribe.

Case in point, my love of CRM is officially inked on me for life!

So, when a colleague in the email marketing space posed a question to our community earlier this week, I thought it was a great opportunity to have an open and honest conversation about email data analytics.

What is the scope of data and analytics expected of you. Aside from vanity metrics, are you focusing on multi-touch point attribution, revenue per email, time to convert? Are you responsible for data analytics or do you have a separate team for this responsibility?

So, let’s dig into this from the perspective of someone with 25+ years of email experience.

Why vanity metrics don’t matter…at least, they shouldn’t.

First, to understand why vanity metrics aren’t the eggs to be putting into your analysis basket, we should understand what they are. In a nutshell, these are the KPIs and data points that may look impressive, but either don’t correlate to the goals and objectives your campaign or journey set out to achieve, or they’re the metrics that can be easily manipulated to look more impressive. To give some perspective on the second point, consider the following:

As you can see in the example above, metrics like click rates and open rates can easily be manipulated by only sending campaigns to specific audiences, or by re-assessing performance and eliminating poor-performing segments in an effort to inflate performance.

Other vanity metrics include total number of subscribers on your list or total number of emails sent. What does this tell you? What questions does this answer other than someone at leadership likely has a background in retail that stems from a day when catalog reigned supreme and there was a good reason to believe “the more you send, the more you sell.”

But open rates, click rates, number of subscribers and how many emails you’re sending doesn’t really help teams and organizations to understand what’s working, what isn’t and why. And it certainly doesn’t provide the insights necessary for growth, incremental optimizations and to properly assess testing scenarios.

So, what data does matter? And, in 2026 as email marketers, what should our focal KPIs be?

One metric I love to tackle for clients (specifically those that use the same opted-in list for rep

The data you should be tracking

Let’s first get the obvious ones out of the way:

Engagement Rate
“Wait, didn’t you just say that open and click rates are vanity metrics?” Yes. Alone, your opens to delivered and clicks to delivered are vanity metrics. But what happens when we combine the two to create a more robust and singular engagement-based data point that gives us the insight into those that both open and then click through on our email campaigns. Now, the formula looks like:

Clicks-to-Opens = Total Unique Clicks/Total Unique Opens

Whereas your click rate told you who was curious after opening your email campaigns, the click-to-open engagement rate tells you who was truly interested.

What you can do now:
Start tracking your Engagement Rate MoM starting with January 2025 using the raw open and click data you had used to calculate your open and click rates. This will allow you to have a nice trend line to build upon and to also see if engagement is something that occurs consistently, seasonally or – and we’ll get to this in a moment, is being impacted by a problem with deliverability.

Segmentation Analysis Data
Not a specific metrics per say, but as we see mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft tightening their sender best practices and rules for making your way into subscribers’ inboxes, having a finger on the pulse of who you’re sending to at all times isn’t just key…it’s mandatory.

What does this look like? Well, for those of us who are still batch & blasting our subscribers, it’s looking at who you’re sending to and who continually engages vs. who doesn’t and who has significant lapses in their engagement:

Not only does doing this make it easier to build smarter segments for ongoing promotional campaigns, but it allows your teams to better identify subscribers for reactivation campaigns and for labeling as “Dead In The Water”. Continually sending to customers who leave your messages in their inboxes – neither engaging or deleting them, show the mailbox providers that you likely don’t have a good sense of who you’re sending to. This implies that you’re sending messages that lack personalization, lack segmentation and you’re straddling the line of poor sending practices. The result: Messages are bounced, emails land in spam, and you may find yourself on a block list.

What you can do now:
Considering your full subscriber list and who’s engaging, who isn’t and more can be the making of a migraine. But, we don’t have to go back to day 1. Instead, look at the last 6 months of sending activity. And, if that’s too much for you or your data team to tackle, just start at 3 months. This will give you a wealth of knowledge regarding oversaturation, engagement and more.

You’ll be able to also use this data to cross-reference email engagement with purchase behavior to determine if email is always the best channel to use for all of your customers – paving the way for smarter, more multi-channel marketing programs.

Sends-to-Opens
Before you yell at me for suggesting an open rate-like KPI, hear me out (and also, this is not your mama’s open rate). The typical open rate looks to do nothing more than tell you how many recipients opened your email. And moreover, with providers like Apple now preloading all email content before the recipient even opens the message, we started seeing inflated open ratees a couple of years ago – making the metric difficult to rely on.

However, in email there are several truths we always know to be true, and one is that there should be a linear association between the number of emails you send with the number of emails opened – assuming you’re segmenting and personalizing your email campaigns and following standard best practices.

Why is this important?
If you’re not partnering with a 3rd party inbox monitoring service like Inbox Monster, then having an accurate view of any possible inbox deliverability issues you may be facing is imperative.

If you start to notice that as you’re sending more emails, or if you are always sending roughly the same total number of messages on a daily, weekly or bi-weekly basis and suddenly you see a significant drop in the total number of opens – that may indicate a potential deliverability issue.

Why? Well, customers can’t open an email they don’t see, and they typically don’t look for emails in their spam or junk folders (where providers deliver messages when they sense a sender isn’t sending following best practices) and they definitely can’t open emails that aren’t delivered due to being blocked.

Vanity metrics are dead, but email marketing isn’t.

As email marketers, we’re no longer sending campaigns in a silo. We’re now navigating the industry alongside the ever-changing landscape dictated by mailbox providers and privacy updates, security scanners, spam flags, and the ongoing inaccuracies in open tracking.

It’s vanity metrics like sends, opens and clicks that made professionals believe email marketing was dead because of how simple these metrics were and how little they told us. But email is far more powerful and useful with its personalization capabilities and ability to drive results.

The key is in how we focus on the metrics we have available to us. Using smarter KPIs to uncover a clearer picture of what’s working and what needs to be optimized vs. throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. And moreover, incorporating deliverability metrics into your KPIs is a necessity when evaluating your program’s success. If emails aren’t even hitting the inbox, is your program even successful?

Are you struggling to make sense of your program’s data? Contact me to learn how.