by Wikus Engelbrecht - GraphicMail Marketing Team
25. aprile 2010 21.42
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.
