Email marketing is one of the best ways to generate income from the web. It gives you the opportunity to create genuine relationships with your target customers that can result directly into sales. Like any other form of business activity, you have to have a set of performance indicators that will tell you how well you’re doing with your campaign.
Measuring success is essential if you want to improve the way you market your products or services. Email marketing success assessment entails more than just a big list and open rates. To help you gain more insight on what to look at when doing email marketing analytics, I’ve prepared a small list of items that you should be aware of. Here goes:
- New subscribers – This indicates the level of awareness and interest you currently have for your product or service. It also says a lot about your efforts to draw people into your landing page and how effective your squeeze page in converting visits to opt-ins. This is a crucial metric because if you stop getting new subscribers or you have very few to begin with, it simply means fewer people to market to and less opportunities to generate income.
- Lost subscribers – It’s but natural that some members of your mailing list will unsubscribe sooner or later. What you have to watch out for is unusually high unsubscribe rates and the timing that accompanies this phenomenon. For instance, getting a big group of people to unsubscribe to you after you send out an email indicates that there must be something wrong in the email that drove them away. If that happens, you may want to review the structure of your emails starting from the subject line and right down to the way you sign off. Look for things that look spammy or gimmicky and try to address them.
- Sent Emails – This is the metric that lets you know if you’re successfully hitting the inboxes of your subscribers. It also gives you more insight when checking the frequency of email blasts. Ultimately, it can be factored in when computing your mail blasting costs to give you an idea whether or not your campaign is actually making business sense.
- Opens – This indicates how effective your subject lines are in enticing your prospects to open your email. It also tells you how much trust you’ve gained from your list. Open rates can also be referenced with conversion rates to determine how effective your emails are in selling to people who do read them.
- Click-throughs – When you’re sending an offer in the form of an email message, you’re going to need to know how many people have clicked through that affiliate link or that link to your website or blog. Knowing how high or low your click through rates are can tell you a lot about your call to actions. Chances are, if you’ve got low click through rates, you’re going to need to have to adjust your CTAs.
- Bounce rates – Bounce rates indicate the number of messages that have not reached its intended recipient. While some bounces can imply technical problems for the email marketing service or maybe a wrong email address (hard bounce), or if an email recipient is blocking or filtering your emails. If you’re getting filtered out, the best areas to look out are subject line length and style, email file size and other elements that can be used to indicate spam.
Email marketing metrics can be tricky, but it’s all worth it if you want to give your prospects the best value they deserve. It’s something that’s good for both your future customers and for your business.
One thing you should always remember is to keep testing. It allows you to find out what components in your email marketing campaigns work and which ones don’t. Let me know what you think in the comments section.
Until then,
Andy Jenkins
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