What's the best way to track the effectiveness of my email marketing efforts?
I send out quarterly newsletters and then periodic updates, but I am not sure how to track the effectiveness of my efforts. I understand that the open rate and click through rates are important, but what are good rates?
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Oct 14, 2014
Either use a CRM like sales force or Sugar or use an online email service like mailchimp or constant contact.
Oct 14, 2014
It look like there are quite a few opinions out there, but really, a good rate should be the standard that you set. An industry average may be a good benchmark, but it says nothing about whether your campaign was profitable. You might want to determine the ROI you want and then back into goals for your campaign. A useful tool that may help over time is at senderscore.org. There you will find tools to see if your IP or domain has a spammy email reputation. Companies use senderscore.org scores to filter emails. So, the better your senderscore rating, the better your chances of not getting filtered and the more people that will actually see your email.
Oct 10, 2014
Good rates are all relative to your needs. I would say 30% is a great Open Rate but you need to measure your Conversion Rate and that is trial and error. What ever you decide to do, measure every thing you can. Email metrics can be very misleading and complicated. Use a simple program like Mail Chimp.
Oct 8, 2014
I found that using an email program such as Constant Contact or Mail Chimp give me analytic results. I personally use Mail Chimp and in the analytics report give you an open and click comparison to your industry.
Oct 8, 2014
Ultimately, you will want to know if your newsletters contributed to the growth of the business, so sales are going to be a key metric. From sales, you can track back to each stage of the purchase process and see how your email campaigns affected the numbers. You'll need to have in place tools to do so, such as Google Analytics (tied to sales) and HubSpot.
Oct 8, 2014
The "ideal" rate themselves will vary across industries as the reader demographics and expectations shift.
More importantly, your goals should not be defined by some pie-in-the-sky number you pull from a Google search or Mosaic answer. The REAL goal of analytics and reporting is incremental improvements. Who cares what others are seeing in results - focus on your results and how you want to see them change.
The minute you start letting other companies drive your business' objectives, you've hopped on the train to ruin.
Oct 14, 2014
Having industry benchmarks are a red herring. Case in point: Look at the auto industry. The trend was consistantly managed by all the big auto companies- but it also lead to their crushing implosion that they're just starting to pull out of now.
Had any one of them decided to focus on their internal mentrics and their immediate customer base, rather than measure their performance agqainst competition, they'd have come out farther ahead. Tesla, as an example, cut their own path and was the only auto company to enjoy year after year growth despite the collapsing giants around it.
The argument of what other companies are doing right and wrong (i.e. competitor analysis) are a completely different and altogether separate topic from what's posted here. Carrie was looking for external benchmarks to measure her own performance.
You can measure yourself internally whilst still analysing competition. Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster.
Oct 14, 2014
Patrick ... We'll have to agree to disagree because benchmarking (industry, competition, non-industry leaders) is and will continue to be critical to one's success. How you use it is up to the individual and business.
Oct 8, 2014
IMHO the short answer is track what meets your goals. Is your goal to get them to read the newsletter, or to get affiliates, or sales.
Every email system and process has different stats you can reference but what is really important is Your goals.
1) If you want to grow your list then some social media stats will be more relevant
2) If you want sales then conversions will be more important.
Anyone elses rates are not the real test - the real test is are your rates improving in the areas that meet your goals. If not then how to make them increase.
Oct 7, 2014
Either with a CTA or I prefer HubSpot as a way to monitor. You want to have over a 1% CTR, as well as a 50% open rate.
Oct 7, 2014
One Very Simple Answer! Add in coupons that are specific to the campaign only. Coupons can not be found anywhere else. They MUST have value. If the coupon does not have value the coupon will not be used. If the coupon has value, then it will be used and you will know how effective your email campaigns really are. The rest is pure BS that sounds good. You want to see the end results right? This is how you see the end results.
Oct 7, 2014
Hi Carrie,
Although email marketing has been one of the ancient methods in internet space, but the reality is everyone will give you different advice and they all are right.
You did not mention if you're sending out emails from a specialized email marketing tool like mailchimp or something similar. If you are, you are already getting some basic metrices. Like open,bounce, spam, link clicks etc.
Open rate depends on various factors, major ones are following:
- subject line - how triggering it is.
- Industry
- how those emails were collected, or they were purchased? Make sure you earned the email list for maximum open rate.
- time of the day, day of the week etc.
- frequency of email.
Working/monitoring these factors can greatly improve your open rate.
But the next important question, what happens after the email is opened? There may be various reasons, recipient might not take any action as suggested in email. They might just be lazy or forget.
There is an email marketing/scheduling service, that lets you know when exactly the recipient opened your emails. This gives you a great advantage as you get notified every moment a recipient opens the email. You can simply call them after a few minutes as the information/message is still fresh in their minds. They are most likely to take a decision right then. The service is called http://www.Listboom.com, its a newzealand based start-up.
I can personally guarantee the service is awesome as me and my team were commissioned to develop this complete tool for them.
Hope the information is helpful. Let me know if you need any further information. I will be happy to help.
Best Regards,
Deepak Chauhan
Patrick ... You're right a business' marketing strategy, tactics and metrics should be aligned with that business' goals and situation. However, having industry-specific benchmarks are necessary to compare where a business is at today to what other companies in their industry are currently achieving so that they can determine what they are doing right and wrong and take corrective action.