How Important Is Tracking Email Results???

You wouldn’t try dieting without regularly stepping on the scale or taking out the old tape measure or looking in the mirror once in a while would would you. The same is true with email marketing.

Measuring your results is more important than the results you actually get. With accurate statistics about your email marketing campaigns, you are armed to successfully improve your campaigns. And improvement is the name of the game. Let’s look at what type of things you can track and what each statistic means for your campaigns.

Open Rate
What is it: The percentage of people who open your message.

What is a normal open rate: Varies on the quality and targeting of your list. Industry average is around 2-5%, while some very targeted campaigns can reach 40% or more!

What it means: The open rate is directly affected by the quality of your subject and the “from” address. These two things are the only things a recipient can see before they open the email. This is where split-testing (A/B testing) comes in handy. Write an email with two different subjects and compare their open rates.

You should be able to see a statistically significant difference after a couple hundred emails go out. Throw away the subject with the worst performance and create a new subject in an attempt to beat the score of your other subject. Also users are more likely to open your emails if it is from an email address or person they trust. You might be an authority on a topic that they are interested about or you have contacted them before so they know who you are. Usually open rates improve simply by keeping in contact with your list.

Click Through Rate (CTR)
What is it: The percentage of recipients who opened your email that clicked on a link in your email.

What is a normal CTR: Varies depending on the message content.

What it means: Your message text might be geared towards calling the recipient to click on your link to your page or it might not. I assume for the sake of this article that you are interested in having your contacts click on your links. To determine the best place to put your links, you will have to use split-testing again. Set up two different variations of your message and place links in each. Where you place the link, the link text, and the surrounding content all affect the CTR of your message.

Links above the fold (visible without users having to scroll their screen) are more likely to be clicked than those lower on the page. Links that have compelling content with a call to action to click on the link are more effective as well. The anchor text of your links has a large affect as well. Links that simply say “click here” will likely not perform as well as links that offer more information like, “view our latest blog post about gardening.” You will have to test different strategies to determine which is best for your audience.

Conversion Rate
What is it: The percentage of people who clicked through to your site who end up registering on your site, making a purchase, or other desired goal.

What is a normal conversion rate: Depends on how well you have targeted your list as well as what goal you are hoping they reach.

What it means: Your conversion rate has just as much to do with your landing page and your website as it does with your emails that get them there in the first place. If your emails are works of art and drive thousands of users to your site but your site doesn’t fulfill the promise of your emails, your conversion rate will suffer.

To solve this problem, use the same strategy you have been using in your email campaigns. Keep your landing pages consistent and deliver on the expectations of your users. Optimizing landing pages and websites is way outside the scope of this post, but the same mantra will help you here, too.

Never Settle for What You Have
There is always room for improvement. As long as you keep a close eye on your results, you will always have a clear indication of can be improved. And once you successfully improve it, guess what? Now you have another bar to raise.

Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat

– Dan