Ideas for measuring email marketing success

Latest posts | Feed | | By Mark Brownlow

calculating statsYou can tell an industry is maturing when people start worrying about measurement issues. A couple of suggestions on what numbers you can use to tell if your emails are working for you or not:

The Bronto blog picks up on three benchmarks that go beyond the standard ones you get in campaign reports.

And Brian McFadden's reader letter at MediaPost has some excellent suggestions for newsletters selling ads, but which are equally valuable for other kinds of marketing emails.

Take particular note of his ideas for calculating reach and adjusting open rates to compensate for blocked images. Calculating the former can be a real eye opener.

Warning! The adjusted open rate calculation is a great suggestion. It uses the number of people who click but don't open as a measure of how many emails likely displayed without images.

For it to work though, your email software or service must not automatically report everyone who clicks as an open. (Some reports assume that if someone clicked, they must have opened the email, even if the tracking image wasn't activated.)

Also, the equation Brian uses assumes the clickthrough rate is the same for an email, irrespective of whether or not images display.

In most cases, the clickthrough rate on emails with no images showing should be lower than when images show up (otherwise why are the images there?) So the adjusted rate gives you a better feel for the real number of "opens," but may still underestimate it slightly.

All of this taken together with BrightWave's EmailStatCenter.com adds up to a good couple of weeks for number lovers.

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[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | April 17, 2007 | 0 comment(s)
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