Email Marketing Dashboard: Key Metrics and Benefits

What is an email marketing dashboard?

First of all, you might be wondering what a marketing dashboard is. It’s a tool that helps you track all your marketing activities in one place. Instead of checking different platforms separately, you can see all your relevant data, which allows you to spot trends, measure results, and adjust your strategy when needed.

So, an email marketing dashboard does just that, but focuses on your email marketing analytics. It shows all of your important marketing metrics (we’ll get into the specifics later), allowing you to quickly see how your campaigns are performing. You can use an email dashboard to track your overall email marketing results or zoom in on a specific campaign to see how it performed. 

Most dashboards pull their data directly from your email service provider, but they can also connect with other tools like CRM systems or website analytics platforms to give you a fuller picture.

Here’s an example of an email marketing dashboard:

Why tracking your email campaigns matters

Email marketing is evolving rapidly, it’s no longer just about sending a newsletter once a month. Campaigns of 2025 involve personalization, segmentation, and customer journeys across different touchpoints. If you’re not tracking your campaigns meticulously, it’s almost impossible to know if your emails are doing their job. Not tracking emails also means potentially losing money and opportunities for performance improvement. Email marketing dashboards can help you stay on top of all the moving parts, so that you don’t need to do any guesswork.

Benefits of using an email marketing dashboard

It’s easy to get lost in numbers when running one email campaign, let alone several. A good email marketing dashboard brings everything together, helping you see the full picture without getting overwhelmed. Here are a few advantages of using one:

• Save time. Instead of having to jump between different tools or reports, you can see all of your important metrics in one place, i.e., on your dashboard. It keeps your workflow smooth and lets you focus more on things that matter, like email marketing strategy.
• Spot problems early. With a dashboard, you can catch potential issues early on — for example, a sudden drop in open rates or an unusually high bounce rate. It allows you to act quickly, meaning you miss fewer opportunities.
• See what works. It’s easier to spot which emails, subject lines, or audience segments are performing best if you have a clear view of all of your results.
• Share results easily. If you need to report to a manager, client, or your whole team, a dashboard makes it easy to show how your emails are performing. No need for 10-page reports or millions of slides!
• Improve over time. Dashboards make it simple to compare campaigns over time and spot patterns you might miss otherwise. This means you can learn from your past performance and make your future campaigns better.

Key metrics and KPIs to track

To make the best use of your email marketing dashboard, you need to know what metrics actually matter. Tracking the right numbers helps you understand how your campaigns are performing and where there’s room to improve. If you have the raw data from your email platform, you can actually calculate most of these metrics by hand using formulae, but dashboards can save you time by doing all the maths for you.

Open rate

Your open rate shows the percentage of people who opened your email out of everyone you sent it to.

It’s one of the first signs that your subject lines and timing of your emails are doing their job. If your open rate is low, it may mean that your subject line didn’t pique the recipient’s interest, or, worst of all, that your email landed in their spam folder. 

If you’re tracking several campaigns at the same time, your open rate stats may look like this:

Here’s something to consider, however — even though open rates remain an important metric, they’re becoming less and less reliable. This is due to privacy features on different devices and operating systems that can block or fake opens tracking. This means that it’s important to look at other metrics too, so keep reading!

Click-through rate

Click-through rate tells you how many people clicked on a link inside your email compared to how many received it. 

Your CTR is a good sign of how engaging the content of your email is. If your CTR is low, it might mean your call-to-action isn’t clear enough, or your email content isn’t convincing people to click.

Click-to-open rate

The term click-to-open rate (CTOR) sounds pretty similar to CTR, but they’re actually a bit different! Click-to-open rate shows how many people clicked a link after opening your email. 

The difference between CTR and CTOR is that CTR measures clicks after receiving the email, while CTOR measures clicks after opening it. When thinking about CTR, you’re asking yourself, “Of everyone I emailed, how many clicked?” whereas with CTOR, your question is, “Of people who opened, how many clicked?” 

CTOR is an important metric because it tells you how well your email content is performing after someone opens it. A good CTOR means your content and call-to-action are strong and convincing. If you have a good open rate, but your CTOR is low, it may mean that people are curious about your email initially, but lose interest once they’ve actually opened it.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate measures how many people completed a desired action after clicking your email. What is this desired action, you ask? It can be anything, like making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading a guide. It depends on your specific marketing goal for the email you’re sending. 

Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics because it shows whether your emails are actually driving results, not just getting clicks. If your conversion rate is low, it may mean the content of your email is fine, but the problem lies with your landing page, for example. 

To get the complete picture of your conversion rate, you need to track how users are behaving on your website. This usually means setting up website analytics with a tool like Google Analytics. You can connect your email service provider, such as Selzy, to Google Analytics to see how users behave after they’ve clicked on your email.

List growth rate

The name here is pretty self-explanatory — your list growth rate tells you how quickly your email list is expanding over time. List growth rate looks at how many people subscribed to your list, but also how many people you lost, such as those who unsubscribed, or invalid email addresses that bounce back. 

Basically, the aim of this metric is to show you how your audience is changing. To keep your email marketing efforts sustainable over time, you need a strong list growth rate — meaning you’re attracting new people faster than you’re losing them.

Unsubscribe rate

Again, you can probably guess what the metric here is from its name. Unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of people who opted out after receiving a specific email.

We just mentioned that unsubscribes are part of your overall list growth rate, so you may be wondering why they warrant their own metric, too. The reason is that the list growth rate shows the big picture over time, while the unsubscribe rate gives you immediate feedback on how a specific email performed. For example, a sudden spike in unsubscribes can be a warning sign — it may mean that your content didn’t match expectations, you’re emailing too often, or the message wasn’t relevant.

Bounce rate

In email marketing, a “bounce” means your email failed to reach someone. Bounce rate shows the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered to your subscribers. 

There are two ways your emails can bounce. A “soft bounce” is a temporary delivery issue. It can happen when the recipient’s inbox is full or their server is down. When your email bounces softly, it’s sometimes possible to resend it later and reach the recipient. A “hard bounce” means permanent failure, usually because the email address doesn’t exist or is invalid. If you want to protect your sender reputation (and you should!), remove these email addresses from your list straight away.

It’s important to track your bounce rates because if they’re high, it can hurt your email deliverability. If too many of your emails bounce, email providers might start marking your messages as spam.

Spam rate

Spam complaint rate shows the percentage of people who marked your email as spam after receiving it. This is very serious — even a small number of complaints can hurt your sender reputation. 

If people feel annoyed or misled by your email, or when they receive something they didn’t ask for (for example, if they didn’t subscribe to your emails), they’re likely to mark it as spam. Even if you didn’t mean to cause it, unwanted communication can lead people to hit the spam button fast. If you see on your dashboard that you have a sudden spike in spam rates, this means that something went wrong, like sending too many emails, targeting the wrong audience, or using unclear messaging.

Deliverability rate

Deliverability rate shows the percentage of emails that were successfully delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes. A healthy deliverability rate usually means your list is clean, your sender reputation is strong, and email providers trust your messages. If the rate drops, it could point to issues like high bounce rates, spam complaints, or low-quality email lists.

Revenue and ROI

Revenue shows how much money your email marketing campaigns are generating. This could be from a single campaign or across all your email marketing efforts. Some dashboards also show the number of orders (or purchases) generated by your emails, alongside the total revenue earned. You can also break it down even further, such as revenue per email or revenue per subscriber, to see exactly how much each message or contact is worth.

ROI (return on investment) metric takes it a step further. It compares the money you earned to the money you spent running your campaigns, including costs like design, tools, and ads.

Best practices for building an email marketing dashboard

If you’re just starting out, we recommend using the dashboard in your email service provider. But if you’ve gotten used to it and want to track more metrics, you can set up your own email marketing dashboard. Here are some best practices to help you build a dashboard that actually works.

Define clear goals

Before you begin doing anything dashboard-related, ask yourself what you want to achieve. What are you trying to improve, exactly? Are you looking to boost open rates? Drive more sales from your emails? Reduce unsubscribes?

Don’t just throw data at your dashboard for the sake of it, try to use the info that would reflect your main goals and success indicators. Once you decide on that, you’ll be able to pick the metrics you need.

Integrate data from all key sources

As you already know, most dashboards pull data directly from your email service provider, but they can also connect with other tools like CRM systems or website analytics platforms via their integration features. 

You can track the full customer journey by bringing together data from tools like Google Analytics, your CRM, and even your e-commerce platform. Just make sure all your tools can actually talk to each other. Before committing to any platform, check that your email service provider, CRM, analytics tools, and dashboard software can integrate smoothly, it’ll save you a lot of time and headaches later. 

Use a clear layout

Yes, we’ve covered a lot of metrics in this article. But it doesn’t mean that you need to have every single one of them on your dashboard. The best dashboards are focused and easy to scan and analyze. Depending on your goals, choose a few key metrics to highlight first. When thinking of your layout, remember the goals you outlined. What do you want to know first? What follow-up questions might you have?

This doesn’t mean you can’t include additional data in your dashboard. Make it easy to access through dropdowns, tabs, or filters. This way, you can keep the main view clean without losing access to deeper insights.

And don’t overload your dashboard with a dozen graphs or a rainbow of colors, that only makes it harder to focus. Stick to clean visuals, a limited colour palette, and consistent formatting.

Use predictive analytics

Once your dashboard is up and running, you can see information about everything that’s already happened in your campaign. Would you like to start seeing what’s likely to happen next? This is the job of predictive analytics — these are the tools that help you forecast future results, like open rates, conversions, or changes in your list size, based on past data.

Some email service providers offer their own predictive features. If yours doesn’t, don’t worry — you can still integrate with external tools that specialize in this kind of analysis, like Google Looker Studio, Tableau, or Power BI. 

Monitor and refine

Your dashboard isn’t just a one-time setup, it requires regular tailoring. Keep an eye on how your key metrics are performing, and look for patterns or changes that might need action. Use your dashboard to spot trends like dropping open rates or flattening conversions, early.

One of the best ways to test improvements is through A/B testing (also known as split testing). With Selzy, you can easily compare different versions of your emails, like varying subject lines, content, visuals, or send times, and track results in real time. The dashboard breaks it down by opens, clicks, opt outs, and more.

Conclusion

Don’t think of your email marketing dashboard as a bunch of graphs and numbers — it’s your go-to tool for understanding what’s working, what’s not, and where to go next. Set clear goals, define your most important metrics and keep your layout focused — that’s all there is to building a dashboard that actually helps you improve performance instead of just reporting on it.