Under-Appreciated Benefits Of Tracking E-Mail Marketing Campaigns

Every email marketing campaign has a goal; whether it is to generate more leads, to grow your subscriber database, or to convert more existing leads into paying customers. You can have more than one goal, but whatever you decide, it’s important to determine which metrics you need to track early on in order to evaluate how well your campaign is progressing towards your goals.

Some of the commonly tracked metrics for email marketing include:

• Click Through Rate (CTR)
  It is the most basic email marketing metric that lets you assess the performance of each and every email you send individually, and gives you an insight of how many people on your email list are engaging with your content
• Conversion Rate
  An important metric that allows you to determine how many email recipients take the intended action based on your call-to-action.
• Bounce rate
  Determines the percentage of total emails sent that do not get delivered due to an invalid address or a temporary problem like a full inbox.
• List growth rate
  Your current email list is expected to decline by 25 percent per year (unsubscribe), so you need to focus on growing your subscriber list
• Email forwarding/sharing rate
  It helps to determine how many of your email recipients forward your email to others, and can help you grow your contacts list.
• Overall return on investment (ROI)
  Helps you determine how many leads you generate through email marketing, and how that relates to potential revenue and actual revenue

You don’t need to track all these metrics, but you should prioritise one or two of them based on your goals. The metrics that you choose to measure should help you:

1. Measure the success of your campaign in regard to your CTA
A successful campaign does not necessarily have to target the overall goals of the organisation (making a sale), but perhaps a narrower objective like getting people to visit your website as a way to spread information. A metric that helps you determine traffic from your email campaigns (by clicking the CTA button) can be helpful.

2. To compare the results of direct-email marketing against other essential metrics
You can create advanced filters that allow you to view data in your reports from different types of visitors, such as those from search or from email. The metrics let you see the actual numbers of people visiting your website via email campaigns against your usual metrics, like page views, page views per session, average time spent on the website, and the bounce rate, among others.

3. Determine the impact of email campaigns compared to your overall marketing efforts
With the different strategies outlined earlier for tracking your email campaign, you can compare that data to virtually any report in your Analytics to establish the impact of email marketing on the overall numbers. There are four reports that can be useful in this regard:

• The real-time report
  Send an email campaign and track the activities of the traffic in real-time
• The overview report
  To view how much traffic is generated via email campaigns and compare it to your overall traffic
• The campaign report
  To view the bottom line of all your marketing campaigns and evaluate them against each other
• The behaviour flow report
  To tell you what your email traffic does once they land on your website, and the point at which they leave

You need to be smart about the metrics you choose to track, and ensure that you can effectively measure your progress towards achieving your goals.