Email marketing systems offer measurement tools to track your efforts throughout your campaign. You are able to track who clicked on which links, se who unsubscribed and list which emails bounced. Using those metrics to track and using them as a foundation for decision making on your campaign can improve all areas of your marketing.
Important Email Marketing Metrics
- Open rates measure the number of recipients who opened your email.
- The click through rate (CTR) measures the number of contacts that responded to your email by following your call-to-action or clicking on various links within your email.
- Response rates include CTRs but also measure contacts that simply reply to your email.
- Bounce rate measures the number of emails that did not make it into an inbox. There are two types of bounce rates: a hard bounce is when the email address you are using does not exist; a soft bounce is when the receiving server is having technical difficulty delivering your email.
Email Metrics
A good email marketing system will help decrease your bounce rates over time with list management tools that help you clean, merge and segment your lists. If you clean your lists and keep having high bounce rates then you should review the quality of your lists. Bad lists slow down your delivery times and can damage your company’s email marketing reputation and some email system providers might think that your lists are not opted in lists and tag you as a potential spacer.
In terms of measurement, clean lists provide cleaner reports that help you better track your results and can be used to guide other marketing initiatives.
The system metrics should help you also measure new subscribers, unsubscribers, bounces and formal spam complaints. Spam complaints are an important thing to track because if you send an email from a standard email system and it generates spam complaints, you will never know about them and you could get blacklisted without knowing it, so signing to a system that reports spam complaints from your campaign can help you correct the strategy and improve your campaign. If you try to save a few dollars per month by not using a professional email system, then if your email is perceived as spam by ISPs, you risk having your entire corporate or business email server blocked.
The measurement tools from your email marketing system should generate reports that also feed other Internet marleting strategies and provide learning from the reactions and response from certain segments to different messages and promotions.
Come back tomorrow for our last post of this email marketing strategy series: Email Marketing Strategy: wrapping up with 10 email marketing best practices… Remember to follow @3emailmarketing on Twitter to be on top of frequent email marketing info.