Email marketing may be an effective low cost direct marketing channel, but, let’s face it: Even though we take great care to ensure creating and sending your campaigns are quick and easy, you still put a lot of thought, time and effort into your email marketing.
How do you know if it’s working? How do you improve?

By monitoring your email marketing campaigns!

In fact, you’ve probably got the basics down already.   There must have been moments when - while contemplating which design is just right for your product, wondering how exactly to structure the content or deciding on a attention-grabbing subject line - you’ve wondered: “Is anyone even really going to read that? Won’t many of my subscribers just delete this?”
Those questions are the first step in monitoring your email campaigns.

Most email services can provide you with reports on every campaign you send – GraphicMail clients receive these free of charge.  Here’s what you can track with your comprehensive email marketing report:

•    How many of the emails you sent were delivered successfully
•    How many weren’t delivered and why these deliveries failed
•    How many people opened the email
•    Of those who opened, how many clicked on a link, how many unsubscribed and how many thought the email was spam
 
These are the basics, anyway.  You can delve into the report much deeper and even view what actions individual subscribers took. 

Once you know what your rates are, you can try to improve on them and enhance your email marketing.   You can do this by experimenting with different designs, subject lines or content for your newsletter.  (Conducting an A/B split test before every send is a good way of measuring what appeals most to your subscribers and making sure that you send out only the most effective version of your newsletter.)  By experimenting and comparing statistics you’ll begin to understand what appeals most to your subscribers – it’s a valuable way of researching your consumers and their habits.  Click-through rates also give you an indication of how much traffic your email directed to your website, or of how many subscribers were interested in the product, event or promotion you emailed them about.

Now here’s a helpful hint:  Once you’ve come to grips with your own statistics, you may want a clearer picture of “normal” statistics, or even just more insight into statistics from the email marketing industry.  You can read this article by guru Mark Bronlow (author of the blog www.email-marketing-reports.com) that explains more about industry metrics and where to find them.

We continually give you tips and features to enhance your email marketing campaigns, but undoubtedly these blog articles are often met with the reaction: “Sure, but does that work in practice?”

So, we found this great case study through Marketing Sherpa that documents how a TV network managed to maximize their email marketing with the help of four basic changes to their newsletter:

“SUMMARY:  Even without a major email redesign, there are always small changes that can be made to your existing template to improve performance.

See how the marketing team at a major media company optimized their weekly entertainment email with a series of small changes that made incremental lifts in key metrics. Includes four tactics aimed at simplifying thetemplate and clarifying calls-to-action.” 

Read the full article here.

Fancast implemented the following changes:

•    They reduced the number of content features in their newsletter.
•    They moved their images and calls to action to display above the email fold.
•    They added a navigation bar to the top of their newsletter.
•    They used A/B split testing to test the effectiveness of different subject lines against each other.

You can read how they implemented these changes and the results it yielded for their campaign here – and then why not try implementing some changes of your own with GraphicMail’s tools and features?  For some ideas and inspiration, also try the following:

•    Conduct A/B split tests
•    Read a blog article on forward-thinking email design
•    Create a call to action by adding social widgets
•    Learn how to turn into an email marketing pro

When e-mail marketing emerged ten years ago with the popularization of online communication, it was a vastly different entity. Back then, mass emails were the way to go, but were easily sequestered to the spam folder. Send the message to as many people as possible and surely someone will respond, right? Well, no. After ten years of trial and error message-based marketing has become more efficient. Potential customers are now more likely to respond and do so in a thoughtful way. Email marketing has become a valuable means of reaching consumers.

Wendy Roth shares some valuable insights on changes in the email marketing industry.  Read her full article here and follow these ten tips based on lessons learned from the past ten years and see big results.

1.    Measure success by how active your mailing list is instead of worrying about number of subscribers. Consider how productive, not how long, your list is.

2.    Messages should be personal. Recipients respond to personal messages, so use targeted e-mails to encourage further action. Invite feedback, then act on that feedback to create a conversation with your clients.

3.    Respect the wishes of internet service providers. Be responsible with your e-mailing: honor recipient requests, act on complaints, obtain addresses fairly. If you do these things, ISP are more likely to cooperate with your email marketing campaigns.

4.    Consider that there are many different ways of viewing email…different users have different browsers, each with personalized settings. Some don’t allow graphics, some use preview panes, some disable HTML. Keep this in mind when designing and delivering a message.

5.    Many people have taken advantage of Smartphones and now are able to check their e-mail from virtually anywhere. Remember that mobile phones download and display messages different from computers. Design e-mails accordingly.

6.    Before sending a message, think about what you are trying to achieve. What is the purpose of the message? Show subscribers the value of belonging to the mailing list.

7.    Target your customers! Gather data on e-mail recipients then tailor messages to fit their preferences.

8.    Measure success not by how many people have read your message, but by how they react after reading. Do they simply delete the message, or do they click over to the website? Engaging recipients is key.

9.    Engage in social media? You should...but to be productive give your followers some incentive.  What is their reason for following on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook? Give discounts, coupons, special offers or breaking news to those who show their loyalty through social media.

10.    Make sure that all marketing channels are cooperating. The best marketing departments are well-oiled machines with all e-mail, web, print and broadcast marketers working together. Coordination leads to capitalization!

Are you experiencing deliverability problems?  Often, you can learn more about these problems by having a closer look at your email header - it’s basically a tracker unit that tells you exactly which route the email travelled to get from the sender to the inbox.

Just like postal letters, emails need to go through various stopping points before they reach our inboxes.  Email headers reveal details about these stops, as well as details on the sender and the recipient/s.  You can even learn more about the different ISPs through the information they choose to include in the header. 

Every email that manages to reach an inbox has a header.  Now, I bet you’re wondering why it is you haven’t seen one?  That’s because every email client (that’s any services or programs people use to open their emails, such as Outlook, Gmail or Hotmail) has their own way of hiding these headers.  They tuck them away because, unless you’re an email marketer who wants to know all about your email deliverability, you’re probably not interested in reading through the header.
So headers can be tricky to find, which is why we thought we’d ask our deliverability guru, Shaun Swanepoel, to help you find them.  He pointed out this guide to finding the headers in popular email services, clients or programs. 

If you’re still in the dark as to what deliverability is or how it works, you can watch our YouTube video.