If you are running an email marketing campaign but do not apply and analyze metrics or measurements, you are losing one of the great benefits of email marketing that makes it far superior to any other forms of advertising.

Understanding key email marketing metrics like Open Rate, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Bounce Back rate etc. is crucial to running a successful email marketing campaign and these metrics will help you improve your marketing to achieve better results.

1. Basic Email Metrics you should always evaluate:

There are many different email metrics that you can use but here are few basic ones.

Open Rate - this is simply the total number of emails opened divided by total emails delivered.  Normally, this can be only measured if you are sending out HTML formatted emails.

Click-Thru Rate (CTR) - this measures how many people responded by clicking on the links mentioned in your email.  It is calculated as the number of unique clicks in the email divided by the number of emails actually opened. 

Bounce Rate - this metric tells you how 'real' the size of your customer database is.  When an email has 'bounced', it means that the emails were not delivered or rejected due to a variety of reasons like the email address is no longer valid, or a server filtered the email out, or the recipient’s mailbox was full and over quota.

Once you begin measuring these basic email metrics, you can start to consider other more advanced measurements, depending on your unique marketing requirements or objectives. 

Some of these measurements are:

• Number of Emails Open based on Region/Country
• Number of Click-Thrus based on Region/Country
• Number of Sales based on Region/Country/referring URL
• Conversion (Click to Sales) Rate
• Total Revenue per campaign
• Return on Investment (ROI) per campaign

2. What are some the key metrics you should focus on?

It all depends on your marketing objectives.

Open rate is obviously very important.  But in order to get a better picture of how well your campaign is performing, it has to be analyzed in combination with other metrics such as click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (i.e. clicks to a desired outcome).

When business presence first appeared on the internet, many businesses were focused on raw numbers like number of visitors coming to their site.  Some have hundreds of thousands of visitors but none of these converted and took an action that the website owners wanted them to take.

These actions could be as simple as whether the visitor purchased your product, signed up to your newsletter or downloaded the free whitepaper etc.

It is the same for email marketing.  The open rate only tells you how many people bothered to open up your emails (although that may be misleading because many people now use email programs with preview windows.  So in order to really measure the effectiveness of your email campaign, you want to go beyond the open rate and see what action your readers took.

3. Boosting the Click-Through Rate (CTR)

So the goal of effective email marketers is not to only get their emails opened but also for as many people as possible to click through (measured by CTR) to perform the action that they want them to do.

Here are some booster tips to influence the open rate and CTR:

Subject Line and Greeting:

What first attracts you to even consider reading an email?

The subject line.  So make sure it is attractive but do not go overboard or else it may look like spam mail and your clients just simply delete it without reading.

Keep it short and specific.  Make it interesting... like a cliffhanger so that people want to read more.

And in your greetings, it is best to address the subscriber by his or her name.  This personalization builds up trust.

Make a Compelling Offer:

Most people are bombarded with tons of emails each day so it is very important to capture them with something compelling right from the first paragraph. 

They should be able to see why the offer is important to them and how they can benefit from it immediately from the first few sentences. 

Grab their attention and this can be easily done by including your offer right on the top of your email and make it even more attractive by offering discounts or free coupons etc.

Call-for-action:

This is one thing that many email marketers do not do.  They do not tell the reader what they want them to do.

Always include at least one “call-for-action” button or link to tell the reader to click on the link to complete the action you want them to take.

Don't assume the customer knows what to do.  Tell them!

Spam issue:

No one likes to receive "Spam" emails and this may affect your successful open rate tremendously as many hosting companies and internet service providers have strict "spam filters". 

Avoid the use of common spam words like "free offer" or "make money".  However, this is a constantly changing game and you would always have to monitor your emails to see if new "spam" words are filtered out.

The Design and Structure of Your Message:

Decide on a common design and structure for your emails to your clients or prospects. 

The use of same colors, images, layout in your emails will help people to identify you immediately. 

People like convenience and if you refer to parts of your website with information, always include 'live' hyperlinks to it so that they can access the information easily.

Use headers, subheads and bullets liberally.  Most people scan emails as they simply do not have the time to read every thing and these help them to quickly see what are the listed benefits, features or offer that is available quickly.

You Cannot Improve Unless You Measure

Although email marketing may seem very easy and affordable to do, unless you are measuring the effectives of your email marketing campaigns, it is as good as throwing money down the drain.

You have to construct your message carefully and measure your email campaigns properly to see what works best for your business and see what areas you can improve it.

At Alchemy Response, we offer a free initial email marketing consultancy service to help you implement measurable email marketing campaigns that can boost your business tremendously.  We even offer a free trial to see how the service can work for you.  To sign up, just look for details on the left of this article.