Improving Results with Email Marketing Metrics

by | Aug 4, 2014 | Email Marketing, Videos | 0 comments

Improving Results with Email Marketing Metrics

by | Aug 4, 2014 | Email Marketing, Videos

Email Marketing for Business Series Part 4

In this episode, Kerry and I discuss your email marketing metrics and how you can set up your emails to improve measurability and how you can use results to improve your results.

For those of you that know me you will know that I am crazy about measuring everything and it’s the same for email marketing. If you don’t measure you won’t know how to improve. You can use the resources that are available to you such as checking your click-through rates, your open rates, what content is performing well.

So Kelly, when you set a campaign what is your first marketing metric you check out and how does it help you improve your campaigns in the future?

Personally, I have a bit of a pre-send ritual so before I send an email I go through a little checklist in my head of things I just double check just to make sure there are no mistakes and there are no errors. Then when I finally press “send” I like to do a little something to reward myself and it’s just something really small but I just like to make a nice cup of tea maybe get a nice biscuit or something and then to sit down and I love to watch the live reporting as its happening. I love to see people opening my emails and seeing the numbers go up and seeing people click through, but that’s a very self-indulgent metric to watch because it does take about three days for your email marketing metric reports to settle because we know that the majority of emails are opened within three days. After about the three-day mark has been you can go back and get a really good idea about how your email marketing has performed and I couldn’t pick just one metric that I look at they are all really important. I settle on the top three, the first thing that I look at is my open rates and how many people have opened my emails because that will give me a very good indication as to how my subject line has performed and if I need to be clicking subject lines to get more opens or if I found a recipe that really works for me. So subject lines are the best thing then of course click through rates because that tells you more about customers finding their edging? and the content they are getting the most value from so that I can include that in future emails or similar things in future emails. Finally a metric that’s really important to watch is your unsubscribes because if you see these numbers going up you know you have done something that you need to have a look at and further optimise your emails to make sure that you are not having a really big spike in unsubscribes.

I think when you layout your emails just bear in the back of your mind what you want to measure. If you write a really long blog post many people just tend to choose to stick that straight into their email and send it. I really recommend breaking your content into chunks and leading it through to your website so by having your introductory paragraph to your blog and then read more button. That will enable you to see what contents they are clicking on and that inform what topics they are interested in for your future campaigns. So it’s a really simple trick but just remember to measure every single piece of content that’s in your email.

That’s a really good point and on the topic of content we have seen a huge number of people reading emails on mobile devises so that through mobile phones and your iPads and things like that and the thing is that when they read email on those devices they are not reading huge amounts of content, what they are doing they are generally either skimming or clicking through to the next step, so we certainly recommend keeping your content to a minimum because we know that people generally look at their phones 150 times a day on their phones. They are not reading huge long emails on their phones but they are looking at their emails and now of course and clicking through to read more if that is spiking their interest.

That mobile readership statistics really just shows us the importance of having a mobile friendly website to support your email campaigns. It’s no good reading a fantastic email and then clicking through and having a website that is impossible to navigate but that is a topic for another day.

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