The Importance of Email Marketing Metrics

One of the great benefits of email marketing is that it
delivers measurable metrics. To run a successful email
marketing campaign, you need to monitor and understand
email statistics such as Open Rate, Click-Through Rate
(CTR), Bounce Back rate etc. Understanding these metrics
will allow you to improve your email marketing campaign and
achieve better results.

1. Basic Email Metrics you should evaluate in each email
campaign:

Open Rate – that is the total number of emails opened
(in HTML format) divided by total emails
delivered/distributed.

Click-Thru Rate (CTR) – calculated as the number of
unique clicks on links in the email divided by the number
of emails opened. It basically means how many people
interacted with your email.

Bounce Rate – represents the total number of emails that
were not delivered and bounced back. There are several
reason why the email was rejected such as the email address
is no longer valid, a server filtered the email out, or the
recipient’s mailbox was full and over quota.

Based on your unique email marketing campaigns
objectives, you can measure more advanced statistics such
as:

- Number of Emails Open based on Region/Country – Number
of Click-Thru 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 metrics you should focus on?

Well, this really depends on your campaigns objectives.
Open rate is a very important indicator to some extent
however to get a better picture of your campaign
performance, it should be analyzed in combination with
other metrics – such as click through rate (CTR) and click
to action rate (conversion rate).

Why is that? Because CTR and conversion rate are able to
tell you how many recipients took an action you wanted them
to take, such as purchased your product, signed up to your
newsletter, downloaded the whitepaper etc. Whereas the open
rate will only tell you how many people read your email. So
in order to measure the effectiveness of your message, you
need to go beyond the open rate down to the action
level.

3. How to boost the Click-Through Rate (CTR)?

Savvy email marketers not only want to get the email
opened and read but also want to know how many people
clicked through (measured by CTR) and they want this number
to be as high as possible. There are few key points in each
email you should review because they critically influence
the open rate and CTR. Those are:

Subject Line and Greeting: Make you subject line
attractive. Subject line is one of the most important
factors that may affect your email campaign results.
However, please do not over “optimize” your subject line
otherwise it may look like spam email and the client could
delete it without opening it. Keep the subject line short
and specific, and if possible address the subscriber by
his/her name.

Compelling Offer:

It should be obvious from the first paragraph what you
offer as well as why the offer is important to the
recipient and how he/she can benefit from it. The first
paragraph should grab the attention so don’t write it too
long. Include your offer on top of your email and make your
offer attractive to the recipient (discount and free offers
usually make users to click).

Call-for-action: Always include “call-for-action” button
or link to instruct the user to click for more details.

Spam issue: “Spam” issue may affect your successful open
rate tremendously. Most of the ISP and hosting companies
have implemented the “spam filter” that can filter out
suspected spam emails. Please try to avoid using any common
suspected spam words such as “free offer”, “money”, “30 day
guarantee”, “free trial”.

Message Design and Structure: Use same colors and images
in your emails; this will help people recognize your brand.
When you have a lengthy message, try to include interactive
links so people can access more information through your
website. Also, very few people read the email word by word,
most of readers just scanning the message to quickly find
out what’s in it for them. Keep this in mind and structure
your email – include headings to separate the message and
use bullets so the reader can easily see listed features or
benefits.

Today’s readers are busy people and it usually takes
them just few seconds to decide whether to read your
message or delete it. So construct your message carefully
and monitor your email statistics to find out what works
best for your business.

About the Author

Ivana Giardi is Marketing Director at Apex Pacific, the
leading developer of Internet Marketing and Web Promotion
solutions. Apex Pacific helps organizations of all sizes
increase their online marketing presence leading to
stronger business results. If you would like to learn how
to improve your website performance, visit Apex Pacific at
http://www.apexpacific.com.

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