Does email engagement affect close rates?
You send nurture emails, sales sequences, and campaign blasts. But do prospects who open and click your emails actually close at a higher rate? Here is how to find out, and why the answer is harder to get than you would expect.
The short answer
Usually, yes. Prospects who engage with your emails (open, click, reply) tend to close at higher rates than those who do not. But to prove it for your business, you need to cross-reference email engagement data from Mailchimp or HubSpot with deal outcomes in your CRM. Most businesses have never done this analysis because the data lives in two different systems.
Why correlating email engagement with revenue matters
Your Mailchimp dashboard says your last campaign had a 24% open rate and 3.2% click rate. Your HubSpot dashboard says you closed 8 deals last month. But did the people who clicked your emails become the people who bought? Or did those 8 deals close regardless of email?
If email engagement genuinely drives close rates, you should invest more in email. If it does not, you are spending time crafting campaigns that make your metrics look good but do not move revenue. The only way to know is to connect the two datasets.
This is especially important for businesses running both marketing emails (Mailchimp campaigns) and sales emails (HubSpot sequences). The two serve different purposes, and their impact on close rates is likely different.
What email engagement correlation actually means
You are comparing two groups of deals:
- Group A: Deals where the contact engaged with emails. They opened at least one marketing email, clicked a link, or replied to a sales email before the deal closed.
- Group B: Deals where the contact did not engage. They either received no emails or never opened/clicked any of them.
You want to compare: What is the close rate for Group A vs. Group B? What is the average deal size? What is the average days-to-close? If Group A closes faster, at a higher rate, and at higher value, email engagement is a real contributor.
How to measure email impact on close rates manually
This requires combining data from your email platform and your CRM. Here is the process:
- 1Export your deal data from HubSpot
Go to CRM → Deals. Filter for all deals created in the last 90 days (both won and lost). Export to CSV with Deal Name, Amount, Stage, Close Date, and Associated Contact Email.
- 2Export email engagement from Mailchimp
In Mailchimp, go to Campaigns → select a campaign → View Report → Clicked or Opened. Export the list of engaged contacts. Repeat for your major campaigns over the same 90-day period.
- 3Match email addresses across both exports
Use VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH in Google Sheets to flag which deal contacts also appeared in your email engagement exports. This tells you which deals had email-engaged contacts.
- 4Compare close rates between the two groups
Calculate: (Closed Won deals with email engagement) / (Total deals with email engagement) vs. (Closed Won deals without) / (Total deals without). Also compare average deal size and days-to-close.
- 5Account for sales emails separately
In HubSpot, open each deal and check the activity timeline for tracked sales emails. Count opens and replies. These are different from marketing emails and may have a different impact on close rates.
Total time: 2-4 hours. You need exports from both your email platform and CRM, spreadsheet skills for matching, and enough deal volume to make the comparison meaningful (at least 30-40 deals).
What it takes to measure this every month
Measuring email impact once is a research project. Doing it monthly turns it into ongoing work:
- Re-export campaign data from Mailchimp every month.
- Re-export deal data from HubSpot and re-run the match.
- Track whether the correlation is getting stronger or weaker over time.
- Separate the effect of marketing emails vs. sales emails vs. automated sequences.
In practice, this analysis gets done once as a one-off project and then never again. The manual overhead is too high to sustain monthly.
Or see the email-to-revenue connection automatically
Bottomline connects to both your email platform (Mailchimp, HubSpot) and your CRM. Every month, it matches email engagement to deal outcomes and shows you whether email-engaged contacts close at higher rates.
Email-engaged deals also close 8 days faster on average.
No spreadsheet matching. No manual exports. You see whether email is actually contributing to revenue, every month, with enough data to make decisions about where to invest your time.