Email marketing - getting the metrics right

So, you've got a brand new website, you've done your SEO and you're ready to do some email marketing campaigns to drive more business online....that's a great start, but have you thought about what you want from your campaigns , ROI and how you're going to measure results?
It's all well and good to want to generate some leads, but your efforts will be wasted if you don't know how effective your marketing is, and while it may sound really boring to some people, reporting is vital.

Here are some of the metrics you should analyse when doing email marketing, whether it is for in-house created campaigns or sponsored campaigns:

• Campaign name
• Date sent
• Distribution / total emails sent
• Bounce back rate:
  bounce backs/total emails sent (BB/Sent)*100
  If you want to go more granular (my favourite buzz word at the moment :) ) you can break down bounce backs by soft and hard bounces -
  soft bounce=out of office message, inbox full
  hard bounce=spam, email address does not exist, contact has moved
  
• Receipt rate:
  Total emails received/Total sent (received/sent)*100
• Open rate:
  Opened emails/Total sent (opened/sent)*100
  One point to remember here is that this number may include people who have the automatic preview pane activated in their email client, so this should not be used as a 100% accurate number but more as a trend.
• Unsubscribe rate:
  Unsubscribe requests/Total sent (unsubscribe/sent)*100
• Click through rate (CTR):
  Number of click within the email/Total emails received (clicks/received)*100
  You can apply a CTR to all clicks within an email or to each individual link if you have the ability to track them as this will help refine the content in future campaigns
• Conversion rate:
  Conversions/Total emails received (conversions/received)*100
  Once again you can do this as an overall number for the email or go link specific. Conversions can be any goal you've set for your website, whether it is a newsletter subscription, a sale or a request for information/quote
• Cost per acquisition (CPA):
  Conversions/Cost of the campaign (conversions/cost)*100
  This shouldallow you to target your campaigns more effectively going forward and make sure you get the best ROI for your activities
  

Some of these metrics will only be available to you if you've set up some web analytics tool, but most email marketing software will give you essential information straight out of the box.
This should help you get started with your campaigns but as ever if you need help or would like to see some templates, contact me.
Have a great weekend.