How This Solves It
Track the metrics that actually matter: reply rates, meeting bookings, deal influence, revenue attribution, and lifecycle stage progression. Connect email performance to real business outcomes so you can double down on what works and bin what doesn't.
What You'll Need
Hub: Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise (for advanced reporting and attribution)
Can work with less: Some tracking works on Starter (reply rates, manual tagging) but you'll miss attribution and advanced custom reports.
Other bits:
- Email campaigns already running
- Deal pipeline set up
- UTM parameters or campaign tracking configured
- Custom properties (we'll create these)
How to Set It Up
Step 1: Track reply rates
This is massively underrated. Opens mean nothing if nobody responds.
Create a custom contact property called "Email Reply Rate" (percentage). Then set up a workflow:
Automation > Workflows > Contact-based workflow Enrollment trigger: Marketing email reply (any email)
Add actions:
- Increment a number property called "Total Email Replies"
- Set a property "Last Email Reply Date" to current date
- Optionally, tag them with a lifecycle stage change or lead score bump
Build a report comparing emails by reply count. Marketing > Email > Analyze tab, create custom columns showing replies per send. Suddenly you'll see which emails start conversations vs which get ignored.
Step 2: Track meeting bookings from emails
Go to Settings > Properties > Contact Properties and create "Meetings Booked from Email" (number).
Create a workflow: Enrollment trigger: Meeting scheduled AND Contact property "Last marketing email open date" is less than 7 days ago
Add action:
- Set property value: Meetings Booked from Email = [calculate: increment by 1]
- Set property value: Last Email Drove Meeting = [name of last email]
Now you know which emails actually get people to book time with you. This is gold for outbound sequences.
Step 3: Build email influence reports
This shows which emails touch deals before they close.
Go to Reports > Create custom report > Deals Add filters:
- Associated marketing emails: is known
- Deal stage: Closed Won
Group by: Associated email name Show: Count of deals, Sum of amount
This reveals which emails appear in winning deals. An email with 5% open rate but appears in 20 closed deals? That's valuable. An email with 60% opens but zero deal association? Bin it.
Step 4: Track lifecycle progression
Create a report showing how many contacts moved lifecycle stages after receiving specific emails.
Custom report > Contacts Filters:
- Lifecycle stage changed in last [period]
- Marketing email delivered in last [period]
Group by: Last marketing email name Show: Count of contacts, grouped by "Previous lifecycle stage" to "Current lifecycle stage"
Shows which emails push people from Subscriber to Lead, Lead to MQL, MQL to SQL, etc. Way more useful than opens.
Step 5: Revenue attribution by email
Marketing > Email > Analyse Click on any email, scroll to "Deal attribution"
This shows:
- Deals influenced by this email
- Revenue from those deals
- Average deal size
- Time to close
Create a dashboard comparing:
- Email name
- Sends
- Revenue influenced
- Revenue per send (total revenue / sends)
An email sent to 100 people that influences £50k in pipeline beats an email sent to 10,000 people that influences £5k. Track both.
Step 6: Set up engagement scoring
Instead of just "opened" or "clicked", score engagement depth.
Create a contact property "Email Engagement Score" (number)
Build a workflow that awards points:
- Opened email: +1 point
- Clicked any link: +3 points
- Clicked multiple links: +5 points
- Replied to email: +10 points
- Forwarded email: +8 points (if you can track it)
- Clicked specific CTAs (demo request, pricing page): +15 points
Reset the score monthly. Now you can segment by "highly engaged" (20+ points) vs "barely engaged" (1-5 points) and treat them differently.
Step 7: Track unsubscribe and spam patterns
Don't just count total unsubscribes - see why people leave.
Create a report:
- Unsubscribes by email
- Unsubscribes by day sent
- Unsubscribe rate by audience segment
If one audience segment unsubscribes at 5x the rate, you're sending them wrong content. If Friday sends get more unsubscribes, send Tuesday instead.
Check spam complaint rate (found in email performance details). Anything above 0.1% is dodgy. Above 0.5% and you're asking for deliverability problems.
Things Worth Knowing
Open rates are broken anyway - Apple Mail Privacy Protection and other privacy features fake opens. Some emails show 80% open rates but nobody actually read them. Focus on post-open actions instead.
Time to conversion matters - An email that drives meetings in 2 days is better than one that takes 30 days. Add "Days from email send to conversion" as a metric.
Segment everything - Overall email performance is meaningless. Break down by:
- Industry
- Company size
- Lifecycle stage
- Previous engagement level
- Geography
What works for enterprise doesn't work for SMB. What works for leads doesn't work for customers.
A/B test beyond subject lines - Everyone tests subject lines. Test:
- CTA placement and copy
- Email length (short vs detailed)
- Personalisation tokens
- Send time
- From name
- Problem-focused vs solution-focused messaging
Mobile vs desktop - Check performance by device. If 70% open on mobile but all clicks are desktop, your mobile CTA isn't working.
Forwarding and social sharing - If your emails get forwarded or shared, that's massive social proof. Track forwarding rates in email settings (enable forward tracking). High forward rate means content is valuable.
The goal isn't to measure everything, it's to measure what drives decisions. Once you're tracking influence, replies, and revenue instead of opens and clicks, your entire email strategy shifts. You'll write different subject lines, target different segments, and send fewer but better emails.
