Judge the Success of Your Campaign

Analyzing the results of an email campaign is an essential step of the marketing process. (We like to say that it closes the “loop” in the eLoop system.) Without looking at the number of successful transmissions, open rates, conversion rates, click-through rates, and other available metrics, it’s impossible to know what works and what doesn’t. 

The mark of a successful campaign is the number of recipients that completed the action the message requested of them. The point of the message is to persuade them to buy a product or service, register for an event, or download an article. Linking the action requested to the number of people that completed gives the marketer a tangible result to measure.  

The best place to start when evaluating a campaign is to look at a summary of metrics provided by the email service provider (ESP).  These often include the metrics listed above. But, don’t rely only on these to give you a clear picture of the results because they can be misleading.  Open rates, for example, don’t always translate into transactions.  If the reader uses a preview pane, it will count as an “open” even though they may just delete the message.  

One suggestion to analyze what readers respond to is to use the split campaigns feature available in eLoop. This feature allows marketers to split their audience and create different messages with unique subject lines, images, and content, but the same call to action.  The results can help guide the development of future messages based on which message created the most significant results. 

Another tip is to be wary of industry averages for metrics.  The data may not come from a representative sample of industries and may only be a snapshot of one ESP’s client base.  With that being said, here are some different statistics on email metrics from The EmailStatCenter (www.emailstatecenter.com).  Please keep in mind that these stats are assuming a clean opt-in list.

Email marketing consultants consider an open rate of about 20% and a click-through rate of 4% to 5% to be a highly effective email campaign according to Internet Retailer (2006).

Nearly one-fifth of respondents reported that they do not know how their email marketing performs. (Internet Retailer, 2006)

18.7% don't know their open rates. (Internet Retailer, 2006)

16.7% don't know their click-through rates. (Internet Retailer, 2006)

23.3% don't know their conversion rates. (Internet Retailer, 2006)

29.6% don't know if their conversion rate has changed in the past year. (Internet Retailer, 2006)

Utilizing a professional company and/or their tools to test your image rendering across multiple email clients often helps to increase response up to as much as 87%. (Email Experience Council - Email Rendering Report, 2007)