A Very Important Factor Email Marketing: Email Analytics

As with all things digital marketing, tracking, analysing and optimising is key

to growth and success. Email tracking systems produce statistics in a user friendly

manner.

Key measurable for understanding the performance of email campaigns

include:

• Number of emails delivered.

• Number of bounces (and this should be separated into hard bounces

and soft bounces).

• Number of unique emails opened: an email can be delivered, but not

opened.

• Unsubscribes: significant or consistent loss in subscribers is a key

indication you are not meeting the needs of your subscribers.

• Pass on rate: high pass on rate (forwards) indicates that your list

values the content enough to constantly share with others. Putting

an easy “forward to a friend” link in every email can increase this.

You’ll want to measure this link specifically. Adding a sign-up link to

forwarded emails will organically grow the opt-in list.

• Click through rates and conversion: These measure the effectiveness

of an email via the links placed in the content. When a reader clicks

through to a web page, these can be easily measured as a percentage

against the number of delivered, opened or sent emails. It reveals

which content or promotion was the most enticing for the reader.

Some metrics are more useful than others. A good example of this is the

measure open rates. Emails are tracked using an image which gets downloaded,

but many email desktop clients block the downloading of images. This means

that people may be reading a text only version of your email.

What you should be interested in is what activity takes place based on an email.

So, you’ll need to track leads or actions. You can do this through link tagging

(appending tracking parameters to a URL in your newsletter). These parameters

are then identified by the Google Analytics of your website, registering that the

user has come to the site through your email. Google Analytics will then take

the information in the tag and store it in a cookie, from which it can track the

user’s interactions with the site after they arrived at the landing page.

Here is a link to the Quirk website as it might appear in a Quirk email campaign:

http://www.quirk.biz/?utm_source=dec01&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digital marketing2010

The tracking parameters are:

?utm_source=dec01&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digitalmarketing2010

These can then be used to report on traffic from that email using Google

Analytics.

Email benchmarks can be used as a guide to see how well your campaigns are

performing, but the best way to monitor performance is to benchmark your

own campaign.

Smaller lists tend to have a higher open rate, but this is most probably because

they’re more targeted. The overall average open rate is considered 11.2%,

while the overall click rate is considered 1.6%. Overall rates are quite low

due to far too many ignorant or lazy email marketers which bring down the

average. It’s best to look at the average open rate for your industry, rather than

the overall rates. You can do this by checking the Email Stat Centre website

(http://emailstatcenter.com/).

Once the reports have been generated, it is time to work out what the numbers

are revealing, and to then use this information to improve the next email sent

out.

With email marketing, split testing across a host of factors will enable

campaign optimisation. Some factors to test include:

• Open rates across different subject lines and delivery times.

• Optimal number of links in an email for clickthrough rates and

conversions.

• Different copy styles and copy length.

• The effect of video on delivery rates, open rates and conversions.

• Balance of text and image ratio.

Many email marketers neglect testing their campaigns, but in order to make

sure, your email marketing efforts are continually improving it’s important to

test variables in your campaign.

The most common form of email testing is to conduct an A/B split test. This

is a test that involves sending one version of your newsletter to a specified

percentage of your database, whilst sending a modified version to the remainder

of your database. By monitoring the results of each send you determine which

version yielded the desired results. You can, for instance, test variations of your

subject line to determine which is more effective in convincing subscribers to

open your email (i.e., which subject line delivers the highest open rate).

Examples of what to test:

• Subject lines

• Send times

• Best day to send

• Layout

• Text vs. button links

• Database segmentation

• Call to Action

Testing and monitoring your send statistics go hand in hand. It’s important to

analyse your results after sending to ensure you’re implementing the most

effective strategies for your database.