Email Marketing Metrics

Email marketing delivers measurable metrics, but in order to run a successful and profitable email marketing campaign, it's important to understand and track your statistics and conversions such as your open rate, and click-through rate (CTR). By becoming familiar with email metrics, you'll improve your email marketing campaigns and yield higher profits.

Basic Email Metrics and Common Terms

Open Rate - The open rate is your total # of opened emails (must be in HTML format) divided by the total # of delivered emails. Open rates will give you a general picture of your campaign performance. To improve open rates, you'll need to test at least two different versions of your email and offer.

Click-Thru Rate (CTR) - Your CTR is how many people opened your email and clicked through to your offer. CTR's can tell you how many people took an action such as making a purchase or signing up to your newsletter, etc.

Bounce Rate - Your bounce rate is the emails that weren't delivered and "bounced back". This could be caused by a number of things such as invalid email addresses, filters, and even full mail boxes.

Increasing Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Not only do you want your emails to get opened and read but you also want your CTR's as high as possible. These key points will critically influence your open rate's and CTR's.

Your Subject Line and Greeting

Subject lines should create attention, interest, and curiosity. If your email is never opened nothing else matters so they have to be well-planned and targeted. However, you want to write to your audience just like a friend or family member would. If you look like every other business begging for attention and sales, you'll fall flat on your face. Keep it short, simple, and specifically addressed to the senders name.

Your Offer

In order to get the best conversions for your offers, it's important to keep the "friend or family member" frame of mind. For example, when a friend or family member sends you an email about a product or service they'll always tell you a story about a problem that existed and how this really cool thing solved it.

Address your customers problems and offer them a solution while educating them. They'll absolutely love you for it.

Your customers are smart and they can smell an offer a mile away so never ever send your customers a blatant advertisement unless they're already hanging on your every word. You'll need to build a strong bond with your customers before you can successfully do this.

Your first sentence should always give your prospect the benefit of reading the email. Grab their attention, build interest and use a strong call-to-action button or link instructing the user to click it to in order to solve this problem.

Addressing Spam Issues

ISP and hosting companies use a “spam filter” filtering out even "suspected" spam emails. Avoid using common spam terms like “free”, “money”, “guarantee”, or “trial”. If you follow the "friend or family member" mind frame, your emails will never be seen as spam since friends and family don't send offers like this.

Message Design and Structure

Keep it simple, using the same colors and images and simple and short click able links for more info. It only takes your readers a second or two to decide whether they should read your message or delete it. Offer valuable content and solutions to their problems, desires, needs, and wants. Then, just track and monitor everything and you'll find out what works best for your business.