Email marketing is effective. According to different studies, the ROI ranges from 350-3800%. That ROI is amazing, but it doesn’t even tell the entire picture.  Email marketing can make every part of your marketing and sales campaign MORE effective. Email adds to your telemarketing campaign. Email can make a failed direct mail campaign a complete success. Email helps monetize social media, pay per click programs, and other online efforts.

Email marketing can also be a dud. The trick to email marketing is getting your emails opened and getting people to act.

How do you do this? You focus on your numbers.

Email metrics help you determine whether you are getting it right or not with email. Testing many different parts of the email including the messaging, images, send day/time, subject and more.

Below are a few key metrics to use:

Deliverability rate is a great test of how clean your list is.  Deliverability rate is the number of delivered emails divided by the number sent. This should be as close to 100% as possible.  Ways to increase your deliverability rate include:

1. Clean your list – Remove emails that are hard bounces or have several soft bounces, adjust your list based on auto replies, remove people that have not engaged over a certain period.
2. Congruence – Make sure the name and email you use for the from fields, the subject, and the preheader match up to your email.
3. Segment your list – Segmenting your list is about putting certain types of people in different ‘segments.’ You may categorize people by demographics (male/female, age, etc.), psychographics (interests, personality, lifestyle) or geographic (location).
4. Check for spam traps. Spam traps are often created by mailbox providers. They are emails that are often acquired by bots ‘scraping’ website for emails.
5. Check blacklists. Internet Service providers often create a database of identified IP addresses and /or domains that are known to send spam.
6. Keep spam low by following good email rules. Practice good email etiquette like using opt in email address, include easy-to-find unsubscribe links, and keep your list clean.
7. Keep frequency consistent

Open rate is the number of people that open your email divided by the total sent.  These are unique opens (i.e. if Joe Bob opens the same email 5 times, it still only counts once). Ways to increase your open rate include:

1. Subject line
2. From name/email
3. Preheaders
4. Timing of email
5. Relevance of email (through segmentation and clean lists)
6. Mobile friendly

Click to open rate is the number of unique clicks over the number of unique opens.  Click to open tells you many different things but mainly the effectiveness of your body copy.  Ways to improve click to open rate includes:

1. Improve email content
2. Improve messaging (relevant, interesting, social proof)
3. Segment list
4. Personalize
5. Consistent messaging
6. Quality CTA – button, action, relevant to the recipient, descriptive link text
7. Sense of urgency
8. TEST