Measuring the success of your email marketing
“Once your system is in place, there's always room for improvement — but only if you know which numbers to analyze. Our seventh clinic explains what you should measure and why…”
Ronen Yaari, OpenMoves
Questions? Drop me an email or call!
Your email marketing system is now complete. Your strategy is in place, and your emails are on their way to a list of waiting addresses. It’s time to check the results.
But what “results” should you be measuring to give you the insight needed to refine your system?
Think about your end goals
There are two types of results you need to track:
- The numbers unique to your strategy. These describe how well you’ve met your goals.
- The numbers unique to email. These describe how people interact with your system.
In most cases, you want people to take an action involving your website: visit a page, buy a product, request more information, etc. You can measure these actions through your website analytics and e-commerce packages.
It’s easier to directly relate website activity to your email efforts if you apply the concept of landing pages we talked about in our clinic on copywriting (#4).
The links in your email should point to Web pages specifically built for people arriving via an email link. And, ideally, these pages should be inaccessible to normal website visitors.
This way, you know that any visits to that page are entirely due to your email.
If you send email newsletters to build better brand and customer relationships, it can be hard to measure success directly. Here are some ideas:
- Monitor reader feedback to understand the impact of your emails.
- Survey your readership to understand how they perceive your efforts.
- Check your records and compare the long-term sales activity of newsletter subscribers with those of nonsubscribers.
However you define email marketing success, it always depends on how people interact with your emails.
If, as we recommend, you use an outsourced email marketing list management and delivery service (an email service provider, or ESP), each email campaign you send out will return a report containing details of those interactions.
Let’s see how the primary report numbers can help you refine your system.
Look at your subscriber losses
Some people eventually decide to leave your list (unsubscribe). But many just delete unwanted emails or mark them as spam for filtering into a junk folder.
So an absence of unsubscribes does not mean everyone else still wants your emails. However, an unusual spike in list desertions tells you that the email in question resonated badly this time. Wrong topic? Poor offer?
Check whether the addresses leaving the list share any common characteristics. Perhaps they all signed up at the same trade show, suggesting you should reassess how you set about building your list and reaching the right audience.
Evaluate your open rates
When your ESP sends out each email, it includes a tiny invisible image for tracking purposes. When the recipient's screen displays the email, it calls up this image and the ESP records an “open.”
So the open rate (the number of opens recorded as a percentage of the total emails delivered) gives you an indication of how many people looked at your email.
Sort of.
In isolation, that number, frankly, is meaningless. As you learned in our clinic on email design (#5), many email software packages and Web mail services block images from displaying. So people might call up the email and not trigger this open.
More confusingly, a recorded “open” simply means a tracking image was triggered. It says nothing about whether the recipient actually read, or even properly looked at, your email.
But open rates come into their own when you compare them between successive emails, or between different versions of the same email.
Which emails produce the best open rates for you? Is there a trend in which particular offers, topics, or subject lines always seem to get higher rates?
Equally, unusually low open rates suggest you have a problem. Was it a bad subject line with a poor topic choice or uninteresting offer? Or did a chunk of your list never get your email?
A closer look might reveal that all your readers with an @yahoo.com address never opened the email. Then you can bug your ESP about delivery problems at Yahoo.
Check the clicks
Your ESP reports also tell you how many recipients (and which recipients) clicked on links in your email (and on which links!).
The clickthrough rate (CTR), for example, typically tells you what percentage of “delivered” emails produced at least one click.
Like open rates, CTRs can give you a general understanding of how well your email is doing compared with previous or alternative messages.
Dig a little deeper and see exactly which links are clicked.
Say you send a business advice email with links to two pages — one promoting sales training, the other promoting leadership training.
Knowing the overall CTR is great, but isn’t it more interesting to know exactly which training type proved more popular with readers?
Armed with this information, you can tailor future emails and promotions accordingly. Or you can send one email to those who clicked on the sales link and another to those who clicked on the leadership link.
What people click on tells you a lot about their needs and preferences. The more you know about those needs and preferences, the better you can adjust your email content to satisfy them.
So now you really do have a complete system in place. In theory, at least. Our final clinic will discuss your planning time frame and budget requirements.
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