One of the great benefits of email marketing is that it delivers measurable metrics. To run a successful email marketing campaign, you need to monitor and understand email statistics such as Open Rate, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Bounce Back rate etc. Understanding these metrics will allow you to improve your email marketing campaign and achieve better results.

1. Basic Email Metrics you should evaluate in each email campaign:

Open Rate - that is the total number of emails opened (in HTML format) divided by total emails delivered/distributed.

Click-Thru Rate (CTR) - calculated as the number of unique clicks on links in the email divided by the number of emails opened. It basically means how many people interacted with your email.

Bounce Rate - represents the total number of emails that were not delivered and bounced back. There are several reason why the email was rejected such as the email address is no longer valid, a server filtered the email out, or the recipient’s mailbox was full and over quota.

Based on your unique email marketing campaigns objectives, you can measure more advanced statistics such as:

- Number of Emails Open based on Region/Country
- Number of Click-Thru based on Region/Country
- Number of Sales based on Region/Country/referring URL
- Conversion (Click to Action) Rate
- Total Revenue per campaign
- Return on Investment (ROI) per campaign

2. What metrics you should focus on?

Well, this really depends on your campaigns objectives. Open Rate is a very important indicator to some extent however to get a better picture of your campaign performance, it should be analyzed in combination with other metrics - such as Click Through Rate (CTR) and Click To Action Rate (Conversion Rate).

Why is that? Because CTR and Conversion Rate are able to tell you how many recipients took an action you wanted them to take, such as purchased your product, signed up to your newsletter, downloaded the whitepaper etc. Whereas the open rate will only tell you how many people read your email. So in order to measure the effectiveness of your message, you need to go beyond the open rate down to the action level.

3. How to boost the Click-Through Rate (CTR)?

Savvy email marketers not only want to get the email opened and read but also want to know how many people clicked through (measured by CTR) and they want this number to be as high as possible. There are few key points in each email you should review because they critically influence the open rate and CTR. Those are:

Subject Line and Greeting: Make you subject line attractive. Subject line is one of the most important factors that may affect your email campaign results. However, please do not over “optimize” your subject line otherwise it may look like spam email and the client could delete it without opening it. Keep the subject line short and specific, and if possible address the subscriber by his/her name.

Compelling Offer:

It should be obvious from the first paragraph what you offer as well as why the offer is important to the recipient and how he/she can benefit from it. The first paragraph should grab the attention so don’t write it too long. Include your offer on top of your email and make your offer attractive to the recipient (discount and free offers usually make users to click).

Call-To-Action: Always include a “Call-To-Action” button or link that clearly instructs the reader to "click" for more details.

Spam issue: “Spam” issue may affect your successful open rate tremendously. Most of the ISP(Internet Service Provider)and hosting companies have implemented “spam filters” that can filter out suspected spam emails. Please try to avoid using any common suspected spam words such as “free offer”, “money”, “30 day guarantee”, “free trial”. All of your emails will be run through a "Spam-o-meter" that will tell you the liklihood of the message being flagged as spam. You can then make edits as needed.

Message Design and Structure: Use same colors and images in your emails. This will help build your "brand recognition". People will begin to recognize your emails and message. When you have a lengthy message, try to include interactive links so people can access more information through your website.

Also, very few people read emails word for word. Most readers will scan the email to quickly find out "What’s In It For Me". So tell them quickly and succinctly jsut that. We structure your emails using brief headlines, short sentences/paragraphs and bullet points so that your customer can quickly and easily understand and act on your message. We strongly recommend using a "One email - One message - One Call to Action" philosophy in every communication with your list.

Your customers are busy people. Most will take just few seconds to decide whether to read your message or delete it. We specialize in writing emails that get to the point quickly and simply.

We specialize in getting your message read and acted upon!