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A while ago I wrote a post on Measuring Online Display Advertising . Continuing the theme, in this post I am describing 23 metrics for measuring email marketing. Get this article as an eBook at Global Analytics Academy . Sent: The numbers of emails (generally unique email address) that were sent. This number excludes any suppressions that occurs due to business rules, privacy compliance etc. Your email service provider (ESP) will have these number as a standard metrics in their reports. This is a raw metrics that is used to calculate other email performance metrics and is generally of low value by itself so should not be used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) . A trending of this metric overtime can provide you a view into the health of your marketing list. Delivered is a count of emails that made their way into the recipient inbox. If an email was rejected by the recipients email provide then it is not counted as delivered. If an email shows up in junk folder, it is still counte...

Struggling to drive conversions?  The issue might be with customer experience. After having worked with several brands, big and small, I can assure you that you don't have to make sweeping changes to drive better results. Many times even small changes and little bit process can lead to happy customers and big impacts. In this post I have complied 11 tips that you can use today. If you need help then don't hesitate to reach out to me. Easy to fill forms  – How many times have you come across a form field where you don’t remember what the field was about?  Many designers/developers use the default text in the form filed as the filed label. Once you tab into that field, the default text is gone and now you can’t figure out what that field was about.  That is a very bad design which will likely cause customer frustration and kill conversions. No more unnecessary form field formatting and validations - Other than Captcha validation, you are likely using form field valida...

Email list growth is the foundation of email marketing program. Unless you keep care in protecting and growing that list you will end up non functional email marketing program. Recently, I wrote a post on  23 Metrics for Email Marketing Metrics  that you should know about, in this post I am taking 3 metrics from that list and adding one more to call out the 4 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the email list growth.  Here are the four KPIs: Email Complaint Rate/Spam Complaint Rate  – SPAM complaints can kill your marketing program. This KPIs allows you to see if SPAM complains are becoming an issues, you goal should be to minimize this KPI. Spam complaint rate is measures as the percentage of your email recipients who marked your emails as Spam. Looking at this number campaign by campaign and then aggregated over month will show you if you are annoying your subscribers to a point where they consider your email as spam. This number is readily available in mo...

I am a big believer in targeting and personalization and have written extensively about it in this blog. However, targeting and personalization is not “set it and forget it” strategy. It needs to be continually tested to make sure that it is working and driving value. Sometimes you have to test and see if “no-personalization” will yield better results than personalization. To make my point, let’s take an example: I get a weekly promotional email from a prominent marketing company. They personalize the email subject line (good so far). Here are few subject lines How [XYZ Company] Should Kickoff New Clients  Ensure that [XYZ Company] delivers great PPC campaign The rules of online branding that [XYZ Company] needs to know Note: Instead of [XYZ Company] they use the name of the company I used to work with. However there is an issue with the way they do personalization. Do you see the issue? The issue is that they use the name of the company I USED TO WORK FOR . I left that c...

In all the effort to drives conversions marketers often forget to measure “Unsubscribe” metrics and their impact on the email marketing.  As I mentioned in my post “ Number One Email Marketing Mistake ”, email marketers, in order to maximize short term conversions,  often bombard irrelevant emails in subscribers inbox However this short term mentality results in erosion of long term viability of their email marketing, due to increase in unsubscribes causing depletion of email lists. Getting an unsubscribe is easy, however getting more people to subscribe is very difficult and expensive. Email marketers need to have a long term view and protect the subscribers they have. They need to treat reducing the unsubscribes as critical, if not more, as driving people to subscribe. I have come across some cases where the list situation is so bad that the unsubscribes will completely wipe out the marketers ability to do emailing marketing in next few year.   In order to ensure t...

Email open rates and click through rate have both declined over recent month as reported by eMarketer (Avg. Open rate is 11.2% while Avg. CTR is 1.6%). This seems like a bad news for emails. What is going on? Is Social Media responsible for this decline or are there other reasons? Who knows what the future holds for email marketing but for now email is alive and marketers can improve both the open rates and click-through rates by just doing a little bit more than they are currently doing. The key to email success is giving customer what they want and in a format that they want. Nothing revolutionary but something that’s often forgotten in email marketing. All this boils down to Segmentation and Personalization Testing To address the first point, read my blog post “ 7 Ways to Create Relevancy in Emails . In this post I am addressing the 2nd point i.e. Testing. Below are 15 things that you should test in your email campaign. Open Rate Improvement Below are the 5 things to test to i...

Email sign-ups are a very common ways for businesses to capture a potential lead. Visitors who are interested in your product or services will likely take a step towards providing their email address to you. Your job as a marketer in not complete when a visitor gives you’re your email address. You need to make sure that you provide proper scent (links, messages etc.) for them to engage with your site/content/brand etc. Almost every contact with a potential customer provides a conversion opportunity i.e. an opportunity to engage them to view more content, products and /or sell. If you do not take advantage of that opportunity then you might miss out on many conversions that you could have had. Email sign-up confirmation page is one such opportunity that is so often forgotten by the marketers. The main reason for that seems to be the use of 3rd party to manage your email subscription list. Often the small details are missed in a hurry to get the system live. I hope you are not making t...

People are bombarded with hundreds of email messages each day. However a majority of the emails end up in the trash because of their irrelevance to the recipients. On Oct 30th, 2008 I write a blog post on relevancy and emails . To state my point I showed an example of an email that John Song received from Nordstrom. John, who had never purchased any women products from Nordstrom, was receiving emails promoting women products. During our conversation John said that he was a big fan of Nordstrom and was ok with receiving and ignoring irrelevant emails but he wished that they would send him relevant products/offers though. No matter how big a fan a person is of brand, eventually the patience runs out. Guess what happened recently? John got so tired of the irrelevant emails that he finally hit the small “unsubscribe” link on the email he recently received. Done. Gone. Here is what John wrote on his Facebook status (came via his Twitter update). Companies work very hard to get people t...