Analytics Help You Understand Your Effectiveness and Reach

It is reported that nearly 20% of email marketers do not know how well their email marketing campaigns are working simply because they do not track them. The importance of reviewing and analyzing the metrics of your email or e-newsletter campaigns is a major component of knowing whether or not what you are doing is effective or is providing you with any return on your investment.

Here are the major components of the metrics of any email marketing campaign.

Delivery Rate: The delivery rate is simply the total number of email that were actually delivered to the intended inbox. Delivery rate percentages are determined by taking the total number of emails that bounced (undeliverable) by the number of emails sent. Spam filters and other issues can cause an email to be bounced. You can reduce the chances of having your email bounce by asking the recipients to white-list your email.

Open rate: This is the number or percentage of total delivered emails that were actually opened by the recipients. There is some debate about how accurate this number is and whether it is reliable. However, it is still an important number to be aware especially as you send out multiple emails and if you are seeing any drastic change in your open rates over time. Industry research estimates the average open rate is 30%. If your rate is lower than this, you may want to research and evaluate how effective your emails are to the target audience.

Click-Through Rate: This tracks the number of times a link in your email was clicked-through by the recipients. JupiterResearch estimates that the average unique click-throughs is about 12 percent. The key here is to keep your content relevant, simple, direct and targeted.

Unsubscribe Rate: This is the number people who choose to unsubscribe to your email or e-newsletter from a specific message. The rate is determined by dividing the total number of unsubscribes by the total number of delivered emails. The number of unsubscribes are often an overall indicator of email list health or freshness. If you are using a list of emails collected greater than six months, then you may experience a high unsubscribe rate as the list is no longer considered fresh. If the list is fresh or the email subscribers are all recent or having been receiving email from you for a period time and you experience a high unsubscribe rate, then you will want to review the relevancy of your content to your audience.

Reviewing and understanding these numbers from any email campaign are an integral part of determining the effectiveness of your campaign as well as understanding the return on your overall investment in using email as a marketing or outreach tool.

I use iContact as my email campaign tool which provides me with all of these data and more to help me effectively track my email campaigns as well as the email campaigns of my clients. If you would like some help with determining the effectiveness of your email campaign, do not hesitate to contact me for a free consultation.

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