List Building Basics – How to Measure The Success of Your Email Marketing Campaign

With the implementation of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, permission-based list building has become a norm. For this reason, entrepreneurs spare no effort to make their email marketing campaign reliable, effective, lawful and profitable. However, one thing that most business owners tend to forget is that email marketing is not all about creating and delivering messages laden with invaluable information and attractive offers.

In fact, the entire purpose of an email marketing campaign is to perform the following tasks:

• To project you as an expert in your field of business.
• To create an environment of trust and confidence.
• To persuade your prospects to join your list.
• To help you to build a strong relationship with your subscribers.
• Finally, to convince your patrons to buy your products or services.

When a sizable percentage of your subscriber base starts reading your emails and begin taking the desired actions, you should consider your email marketing campaign to be successful. The big question that comes to the fore at this point of time is how to determine whether the email has been opened or not. Well, there are several methods to gauge the success rate of an email marketing campaign. Let’s take a look at them.

Open Rate

Open rate is the ratio of the number of subscribers who open your email as a percentage of number of emails delivered. It is the most commonly used metric to measure the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. Apart from analyzing the interest level of the subscribers, open rate assesses the efficiency of “subject” line and “from” line, the overall relevance of your message, and the strength of your relationship with your subscribers.

Open rate is recorded by inserting a small piece of code in every email that is sent out. Whenever the subscriber opens the email, the code triggers the download of a tiny, invisible image from the sender’s server. Each download, which means that the email has been opened, is recorded to calculate the open rate.

There are a few instances when it is becomes impossible to record the open rates. Let’s try to find out what they are:

• When you’re sending text-only messages
• When your mail is automatically displayed in a preview pane
• When your email client doesn’t download images in HTML messages
• When the email bounces back

For the above reasons, it would be worthwhile not to take open rate as a hard and fast number.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of subscribers who take the action prescribed in your email. The action can be anything from purchasing products and subscribing to your newsletter to acquiring new memberships and paying a visit to your website. Conversion rate greatly depends upon the interest level of the subscriber, which in its turn depends upon the attractiveness of the offer and ease of the process.

The interest level of the subscriber can be maximized by matching his needs at the right time, in the right place. Conversion rate can be easily computed by the means of online or offline software. You can also hire an expert to calculate the conversion rate of your email marketing campaign.

Click Through Rate

If you are sending text messages or if the email clients are regularly blocking the images in your HTML messages, then click through rate is the best method to measure the success rate of your email marketing campaign. Basically, click through rate is the percentage of subscribers who clicked one or more links in your emails divided by the total number of emails delivered. This metric clearly indicates that the interest of the subscriber is in the subject matter of your email.

The factors that drive the click through rate are as follows:

Value of the offer - People tend to weigh the value or benefit of the proposition before clicking the link. Hence, a strong, lucrative and compelling offer would certainly increase the response rate.

Audience desirability - Click through rate increases remarkably, if your offer amicably fulfills the current needs of your audience.

Suitable information - Click through rate is also affected by the kind of information you are providing in your emails. The appropriateness of information enhances the click through rates drastically.

Quality of the list - A high quality list means that all your subscribers are thoroughly interested in your offers, products and services. This in turn also means high click through rates. On the other hand, if you purchase a list or use a rented list, then its quality wouldn’t be that high and your click through rate would also be adversely affected.

Click-to-Open Rate

Click-to-open rate measures the number of unique clicks as a percentage of the number of emails actually opened. There is a slight difference between click through rate and click-to-open rate. In the former case, the number of emails delivered is taken into account, while in the latter case, the number of emails actually opened is accounted for. Click-to-open rate is considered to be a superlative diagnostic tool. It is capable of evaluating the following aspects of your message:

• Effectiveness of email layout and design
• Relevance of the contents
• Attractiveness of the offers and incentives
• Suitability of the links
• Value of your brand

Additionally, this metric also allows you to weigh up the behavioral and demographic differences that can significantly affect your email marketing campaign.

til next time…

Tagged with: click through rate • click to open rate • conversion rate • email marketing • email marketing campaign • high quality list • List Building • list building basics • open rate

Filed under: Internet Marketing • List Building

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