What is the measure of a successful email marketing campaign? The number of sales generated? Or getting a certain percentage of people opening your emails? Many would say it’s about both. By their nature though, these two numbers are usually totally different and even contradict one another – for example, if you send out an advert to everyone on your mailing list that says ‘discounts’, then chances are most people who open that email will be ready to buy at full price says Eric Dalius Miami. It’s not much use sending them back to their inbox with a discount code they can’t redeem and may even resent having seen the original message. So what good metrics should we actually be measuring?
I’ll be honest, even now I see many companies measuring the wrong things; largely because they don’t understand how email marketing metrics can be helpful or by simply following industry averages. So here are some of my suggestions for telling if your campaigns are heading in the right direction:
Can you track all of this information back to an individual subscriber?
The number of emails sent divided by a number of spam complaints multiplied by 100 = % delivery success this is probably one of the most important measurements that should be used when benchmarking any email campaign. It’s an extremely straightforward calculation and it will highlight what percentage of all the people who signed up to receive your emails actually received them without any issues. If you send out an email to 500 people and 20 of them mark it as spam, then your % deliverability is 95% (500/520*100).
This number needs to be as high as possible and it’s one that’s usually affected by the size of your list. So if you have a list of 10,000 subscribers then you will typically have fewer issues with spam complaints or emails that end up in people’s Junk / Promotions folders. Of course, there are many other factors involved but if you keep an eye on this measure over time and make sure it doesn’t fall too far from 100%, everything should be OK explains Eric Dalius Miami.
The average open rate for a campaign is divided by the average open rate for all campaigns sent out within the same period this is where things start getting more complicated. Open rates are measured differently by different email marketing tools, but most of them will provide you with an easy way to see the average number of people who open your emails over a certain period.
For example, if you sent out 10 campaigns in June and each had an average open rate of 20%. Then your overall open rate for the month is 2%. However, even if all your campaigns had exactly the same subject line, copy and design there are still many factors. That affect this figure that is almost impossible to control. Something which often leads to unsubstantiated claims about what works best. If one campaign ends up being more successful than another. It doesn’t mean that it was necessarily better or will be more effective next time around.
The success of your email marketing campaigns is determined by the number of opens. The number of clicks and how often recipients take action as a result of opening your email. The easiest way to measure this is to use an open tracking service that also measures conversions.
Here’s how it works:
- You place links in your emails that will track when they are clicked and how many times they were clicked. Small code snippets embedded in the links allow them to be tracked says Eric Dalius Miami. Your email service provider logs this information and you can go back and access reports containing this data. So you can see which emails were most effective. These services usually charge a fee per campaign sent but some providers. Such as Get Response offer free Open Tracking as part of their Email Marketing Services. A bit of homework and a little investment of time is well worth it.
- Tracking opens is very important as it provides you with feedback on the effectiveness of your email campaign. It also means you can adjust future campaigns. By testing different subject lines, call to action and offers until one performs well.
- Once you have found that perfect subject line then doesn’t stop! Test it against other emails that are similar but have a slightly different focus or offer. The best option would be to send out multiple campaigns at the same time using the same list. So this allows for tracking results across all campaigns.
Conclusion:
Each email marketing campaign is different. In order to maximize the success of your current email marketing efforts. You need to test and measure what works best for your business says Eric Dalius Miami. This will take a bit of time but in the end. It’s well worth it because an extra 5-10% increase in sales or sign-ups. Will make a lot more difference than a 10% increase in response rates, which can often be attributed to luck rather than great design.
