How to Track Cold Emails [The 2023 Guide]

Andrew Pierno

Apr 3, 2023 • 5 min read

You may be sending impeccably planned and executed cold outreach emails, but you’ll be wasting your time if you’re not tracking the critical metrics.

Why? Listen, the key to a successful cold outreach strategy is to keep pivoting and optimizing as you go. And for that, you must know which email metrics to track and how each impacts your campaign performance.

In this article, I’ll show you the critical cold email metrics you need to track to measure your campaign's success. It's worth checking out if you’re struggling to see ROI in your campaigns and want to take your cold outreach strategy to the next level!

Metrics to Track In a Cold Email

Opens

Open rates are the number of times a prospect opens an email. Various email marketing tools have a tracking feature that will add a small, invisible tracking pixel to your email's HTML code.

A good open rate ranges between 20-50 %. However, high open rates still don’t guarantee that your emails are enticing enough to get you replies.

source

In most email marketing tools, you’ll find two metrics to track open rates: total opens and unique open rates.

Total opens indicate your overall open rates.

On the other hand, unique opens show the number of times your emails get opened by a single person.

Tools To Track Open Rates

Mailtrack is an excellent tool to measure the open rates of your cold emails. You can track how many times an email has been opened, which gives you insights into both the unique and total opens of your email.

However, if you already use a cold outreach tool like Super Send, you’ll see these metrics when you log into your dashboard.

Tracking Link Clicks in Cold Emails

One of the many reasons to include a link in your emails is to enable tracking, though I’d rather you do it naturally than insert it forcefully. You need to be very careful while placing links and ensure they’re not spam-triggering, or else your emails might land up in the spam or get blacklisted.

How to Track Link Clicks

You can simply track link clicks on your email using Super Send. Just go to the dashboard, and you’ll see the metric “clicks” for each email sequence you send.

A great way to do so is by adding a custom tracking domain that improves your email deliverability by allowing you to keep your primary domain reputation separate from the tracking domain.

You’ll also get more detailed metrics on your email campaigns, such as the number of clicks and opens, which links were clicked, and how many times.

Replies

Reply tracking shows how often your email is replied to. This can sometimes include auto responders or unsubscribe messages, but typically the metric you really care about is positive replies.

To calculate the reply rate, take the number of replies you get, divide that number by the total emails you send, and multiply the result by 100. Make sure to only consider emails that were opened and replied to!

Bounces

This is another metric you can see on your Super Send dashboard. In short, bounces answer the question: how often are my emails blocked from landing in the recipients’ inboxes?

It often points to invalid email addresses.

When analyzing the bounce rate of your emails, remember—there are two types of bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces.

A hard bounce occurs when an email address is invalid or no longer exists.

A soft bounce occurs when an email is returned because of a temporary issue like a full inbox or a server error.

Once you know what’s up, you’ll be able to either improve your lead quality, add more email verification tools to your toolkit, or change your lead-sourcing methods.

Should You Track Daily Sending Volume for Cold Emails?

Every email service provider and outreach tool has a daily limit on the emails you’re allowed to send. Here at Super Send, we’d let you send a whole bunch of emails, but your email provider would block us. (That’s why we make sure you quickly warm up your inbox.)

Again, you can easily track the daily sending volume on Super Send.

Then, you can break down these metrics by day, week, or month to stay on top of your campaign goals while adhering to the sending limits to keep your reputation and deliverability in check.

Unsubscribes

This is the rate at which prospects unsubscribe to your messages. Generally, a low unsubscribe rate is desirable, but there is no one-size-fits-all standard for what constitutes an acceptable rate.

With Super Send, you can see how many people unsubscribed after reading a particular email, which doesn’t clearly indicate your emails aren’t good. It might also mean that the lead doesn’t qualify as your ideal lead, and perhaps that’s the area you need to work on.

Campaign ROI

Your campaign ROI is the return you get after investing your cost, time, and efforts in a cold outreach campaign.

Here’s how you measure your cold email campaign ROI:

Before measuring ROI, make sure you have your goals right— do you want to generate leads, drive sales, or increase brand awareness?
Calculate the total cost of your cold email campaign, including the cost of email marketing software, list acquisition or maintenance, copywriting, design, and any other expenses.
Use conversion tracking to measure how many recipients of your cold email campaign took the desired action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase.
To calculate your ROI, subtract your total campaign costs from your total revenue and divide by your total campaign costs. Multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage.

Use Data To Optimize Your Outreach Efforts

If you can’t see it, you can’t improve it! Tracking cold emails helps you measure the success of your email campaigns and make data-driven decisions to optimize your outreach efforts.

With Super Send, you can keep track of your cold outreach campaigns and decide whether or not you should pursue a prospect and follow up. It automatically tracks all your emails and provides a neat real-time overview of your campaign performance.

(And that’s without mentioning that you can rely on it for everything from inbox warmup to omnichannel outreach via LinkedIn and Twitter.)

Start your outreach journey with Super Send today!