Measurement mantra: 6 ways to judge your email campaign

6 ways to judge your email campaign

If you’re late to the game in establishing an email marketing program, here are a few answers to your questions.

Yes, it’s still important for your business to have an email marketing campaign in today’s business world. Yes, there are probably a few exceptions to that rule depending on the segment in which you operate.  And no, even if you weren’t an early adopter it’s not too late to get started making it work for you.

Creating a strong email campaign is well worth your time and energy. It can be a low-cost, relatively easy way to reinforce your brand; in a recent survey, 73 percent of marketers called such campaigns core to their business and 20 percent linked them to their business’ primary revenue source.

Whether you’re improving an existing program or starting a new one, your first step should be setting specific goals toward improving aspects of your business. Do you wish to grow email subscriptions? Generate or concert more sales leads? Drive traffic to your website or brick and mortar?

Simple online tools, or assistance from email marketing firms, can help you gather and interpret data from such campaigns so you can continually customize strategy. Metrics providing the most insight might include:

  1. Click-through rate: This is the percentage of recipients who click on links in your emails (after opening the emails themselves) compared to the number of emails sent. It reflects how many are interested in learning more about your brand and the email content, and is often used in A/B testing of different email content strategies. In April most industries worldwide achieved click-through rates between 2 and 4 percent, according to one study. Many experts consider click-through more important than open rates, which don’t count the emails opened without downloaded images.
  2. Conversion rate: This refers to the percentage of recipients who click on a link and then complete a call to action such as making a purchase, subscribing to an email newsletter, downloading an e-book or filing a lead-generation form. For many campaigns, conversion is the primary goal. 
  3. Bounce rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of emails not successfully delivered, usually due to invalid addresses, full inboxes or server issues. Permanently problematic addresses (i.e. hard bounces) need to be removed from your list so your internet service provider doesn’t perceive you as a spammer. The aforementioned study notes most industries in April logged hard bounce rates of less than 1 percent.
  4. Growth rate: The growth rate is the number of email addresses on your list, indicating the reach of your messages. Note that it’s routine to lose some 22.5 percent of your list each year, and that means constant expansion is a good idea. Creative ideas for generating more subscribers can be found here.
  5. Email-forwarding rate: This indicates the percentage of recipients interested enough in your content to pass it on to others. Simply put, it’s helpful to pay attention to what your audience likes to read so you can provide more content like it in the future.
  6. Overall ROI: Subtract money invested in your campaign from money generated by additional sales, and then divide that by the first figure to determine your overall ROI. Understanding the value of your leads can help in estimating the sales figure.  

Contact Dial800 for help coordinating your email campaign with an effective pay-per call campaign.

 

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