Measure Your Campaign Success Over Time

The technological aspect of email marketing is very necessary in constructing a successful email marketing plan, however it’s only half the battle. In order to manage your marketing plan in the best way possible, you must stay up-to-date on its success by periodically measuring a variety of your campaigns’ statistics. This data includes open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and remove-from-list rates.

How to measure CTO

These statistics are the base of every email marketing campaign, and you should definitely know how to work with them. Here a few good ways to start:

Total Sent Campaign

Send only one campaign to each user in order to keep your data as pure as possible, and to avoid flooding your subscribers’ inbox.

Open Rate

This number indicates the number of people that opened up your campaign. While this statistic is a bit problematic, it can give you an idea of how many users actually took a look at your campaigns.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the number of campaigns that were returned to you. A campaign can bounce for a few reasons: the user’s inbox is full, problems with the server, or an inactivated email address. Unless the user’s email address is no longer active, the take home message from a bounced campaign is that the recipient never received it.

Remove-From-List Requests

This is the saddest of the rates, the rate of users that request to stop receiving your campaigns. Grab a box of tissues when you measure this statistic.

Click-Through Rate

The click-through rate represents the number of recipients that not only opened your campaign, but also clicked on a link in order to check out either your products or your website content.

It’s all relative

The aforementioned statistics are only helpful when you analyze them together, rather than on their own.

Number of Campaigns Sent / Bounce Rate

The relationship between the number of campaigns that were sent out and the number that returned tells you a little something about your mailing lists. If 20 percent of your campaigns are bouncing right back, then you’re mailing list isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be and something needs to be done about it.

Number of Campaigns that Arrived at Their Destination / Open Rate

The number of campaigns that arrived safely in your recipients’ inboxes divided by the number of campaigns that were actually opened, helps you to measure your recipients’ participation. If your open rate is relatively high, you’re most likely sending out campaigns that interest your destination audience. If, however, your open rate is lower than you expected, then your message isn’t reaching enough of your recipients. If this is the case, you should think twice about the different aspects of your campaign. For example, tweaking your subject lines might help raise your open rates, allowing your message to reach more potential customers.

Open Rate / Click-Through Rate

The relationship between the number of opened campaigns and the number of users that clicked through to your website or landing pages represents your users’ feedback to the campaign. If most of the people that opened up your campaign also clicked through to your website, then they most likely liked what they saw, and you should give yourself a pat on the back. On the other hand, if most of the people that opened up the campaign did not click on any links, then you have some work ahead of you in the campaign design realm. For example, it might be a good idea to play with the different ways to include your links: positioning, color, font size, etc.

Open Rate / Remove-From-List Rate

Sometimes not only does your marketing message not work, but even stirs up a bit of antagonism. There are many different reasons that someone might request to be removed from a mailing list – flooding of campaigns, irrelevant content, etc. At the end of the day, if the number of people that request to be removed from your list constitutes a large chunk of those that opened up your campaign, then your message is receiving some negative responses.

I recommend that you check these statistics on a continuous basis. If your bounce rates grew, then your mailing list has become outdated, losing its relevance; if your remove-from-list rate grew, then your newsletter just might not interest your recipients anymore.

Following these basic criteria can tell you a lot about your audience, and just how successful you are in communicating with them. If you listen to your users, they just might listen back.

With all of these statistics to follow you have enough on your hands. That’s why you should read up on our automatic email sender. It allows you to pre-set personalized emails to your recipients to be automatically sent out on their birthday, after signing up for your newsletter, before their account becomes dormant, etc. It’s a great way to stay in touch with your customers without having to live in the office!