Stay updated on our latest
articles with RSS
Tracking and analyzing the actions of your customers and
prospects is critical to your success.
Would you like to find out what those-in-the-know have to
say about tracking? The information in the article below
comes straight from well-informed experts with special
knowledge about tracking.
Most of this information comes straight from the list building
pros. Careful reading to the end virtually guarantees that
you'll know what they know.
After deploying several campaigns, you will have generated
a mountain of response information that reveals invaluable
data enabling you to create new and more effective
approaches and offers. There are many software tools easily
available that track, record and analyze all data pertaining
to your email marketing campaign.
Once you have the capability to track the vital statistics of your
email marketing campaigns, the inevitable question becomes: how
well are my mailings doing? Here are some guidelines on what
information to gather and how to measure the performance of your
campaign from the gathered information.
There are a number of different pieces of information that can be
gathered when using any reasonably good email broadcasting service.
The five primary measurements are: the totals each of messages sent,
message opens, click-throughs, bounces, and opt-out requests.
Total number of items sent must be accurately counted, based on
reaching each individual email address only once. Opens measure the
number of people who actually view the message using their email
program.
“Unique” opens, so that if a recipient views a message in
their preview window, then opens it into a full size window,
that this only counts as a single open instead of two opens.
Clickthroughs are recipients that respond to your offer by
clicking on a link in the email. Bounces are messages that
are undeliverable to the recipient. They could be “soft bounces”
due to temporary issues such as a full mailbox or “hard bounces”
from an invalid email account, but for our purposes here it means
people on your list who did not receive your message”. And last,
opt-out requests are recipients who request to no longer receive
email.
There are a wide range of results that can be measured for email
campaigns, such as:
- How accurate is the list (how many bounces out of total
sent)
- How active is the list (how many opens out of total sent)
- How positive was the reaction to the offer itself (number of
click-throughs out of total opens)
- How negative was the reaction to the offer itself (number of
opt-outs out of total opens)
The actual number of responses on any particular campaign can
vary quite a bit. A newsletter whose primary job is to inform will not
achieve the same click-through rate as a promotion, which is intended
to get a specific response. The differing levels of permission within
your list of recipients will also affect results. Until a list has been
"cleaned" of bad addresses and those who are not interested, you may
see far different data. Pruning these from your lists will help you
improve your results considerably.
In order to account for these wide variations in factors, I suggest some
general "baseline" ratios that should be achieved on any particular
mailing. There should be more opens than bounces, or else the list is
probably out of date. Also, there should be more click-throughs than
opt-outs, otherwise the offer is poorly targeted or the list is of
questionable origin.
In order to get the optimum response you will need to send two
or three multiples of your email marketing campaign, each time using
a variation of the original offer. If they haven't responded by 3
attempts, it’s time to change your approach.
The typical response pattern is that mailings 1 and 2 will have a
similar response, with number 2 often having slightly fewer clickthroughs
than number 1. Number 3 picks up the stragglers and
undecided recipients, so the response will be much lower, but usually
significant enough to justify the mailing. Please note that you shouldn’t
necessarily just blast out three mailings one after another. For
example, you might piggyback your first offer onto a monthly
newsletter, send the second offer separately as a special promotional
mailing two weeks later, then finish the series with the final offer in
the next month’s newsletter.
It is useful to understand how the size of your lists is changing
over time. By viewing how many people sign up for your lists each
day, you can attempt to correlate list growth with other marketing
activities that you may be conducting. It is also important to consider
how many people are signing up for your lists versus how many are
opting out of them. If your lists have been cleaned, and the overall list
size is still shrinking, you need to reevaluate both your list acquisition
strategy and the content relevancy of your mailings.
Testing is critical to optimizing your email marketing campaigns. But in
order to test, you have to measure first. Make sure you have a way to
collect detailed information about your mailings, preferably in an
automatic way. Careful analysis of the actual metrics will give you the
information you need to take your email campaigns to the next level.
As your knowledge about list building continues to grow, you will
begin to see how list building fits into the overall scheme of things.
Knowing how something relates to the rest of the world is important too.
Eugenijus Sakalauskas publisher
"List Building Newsletter"
Subscribe to my exclusive 12 lessons e-Course
" Every Business Needs Opt-In Email Marketing "
and learn how to start building your own optin list
http://ezine.pluginnetproefit.com/