When You Change What You Measure, You Change How Your Team Performs
For years, the "Open Rate" was the gold standard of email marketing. It was the simplest way to see if people were listening. But in today’s landscape, where privacy updates like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) have made these numbers notoriously unreliable, relying on opens to judge your marketing success is like judging a salesperson's performance solely by the number of cold calls they made, regardless of how many sales they actually closed.
More Strategic Email KPIs
If your email marketing team is reporting high engagement but you aren't seeing a corresponding lift in revenue, you are likely looking at the wrong numbers. As a founder or executive, you don't need to know every click; you need to know if your marketing department is an investment or an expense.
- Revenue Per Subscriber (RPS)
Instead of asking how many people opened an email, we should be asking: "How much is each name on our list worth?" Revenue Per Subscriber is a powerful metric that forces your team to focus on quality over quantity. If your list size is growing but your RPS is shrinking, your "strategy" is actually diluting your brand. By tracking this over time, we can see exactly how effective our segmentation and offer strategies are at driving real bank deposits. - Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Growth
A tactical team looks at the success of a single blast. A strategic leader looks at the long-term value of the customer relationship. Are the customers we acquired via email staying longer and spending more than those from other channels? A healthy CRM strategy should actively push your CLV upward by creating automated "upsell" and "cross-sell" paths. If your CLV is stagnant, your marketing is merely transactional, not transformational. - List Velocity and Decay Rate
Your email list is a depreciating asset. Every month, a portion of your list will churn, change jobs, or lose interest. "List Velocity" tracks how fast you are adding new, qualified leads compared to the "Decay Rate" of people leaving. If your decay rate is higher than your growth, your business is shrinking in secret. Executive reporting focuses on the net health of the database to ensure the foundation of your revenue remains solid.
Does your current email reporting leave you with more questions than answers?
Email reporting "out of the box" is notoriously limited. At Aldrich, we do not just hand you a spreadsheet of numbers and expect you to find the meaning. We provide a narrative: What do these numbers tell us about our customers? Where is the friction in our sales process? What is the one thing we need to change next month to increase ROI? The difference between a junior marketer and a fractional leader is the insightful, actionable "Executive Summary."
When you change what you measure, you change how your team performs. It is time to stop celebrating "opens" and start celebrating growth.
If you are tired of seeing "green arrows" on marketing reports that do not match your revenue growth, let’s fix your tracking and reporting. Aldrich provides executive-level reporting frameworks that connect your marketing activity directly to your business goals.
Key Takeaway
High open rates do not pay the bills. To lead a growing company, you must move beyond "engagement" and start measuring the direct impact your email and CRM strategy have on your bottom line.
Tired of vanity metrics? Request an Executive Reporting Blueprint and start measuring the numbers that actually hit your bank account.