In reviewing the success of your email marketing campaigns, there are several data points that provide valuable insight. These are the things that you should be tracking. They include:

• Delivery rate – percentage of individuals that receive the message (delivered divided by sent)
• Open rate – percentage of individuals that open the message (unique opens divided by delivered)
• Open to click rate – percentage of individuals who opened the message that clicked on a link (unique clicks divided by unique opens)
• Conversion rate – percentage of people who clicked on a link that converted on the landing page

While most email marketing suites provide some of these numbers as part of their reporting, it is important to note that our definition and value of what we track is slightly different. For example, typical click through rates are measured as the percentage of clicks to the number of messages sent. But if a recipient does not open the message, how can they produce a click? This typical measurement of the “click through rate” doesn’t tell us much.  By measuring the percent of clicks to opens (click to open rate), we are able to determine how effective the message is at producing action (clicks).

The goal is to evaluate the success of the campaign along each step of the following process:

Send -> Deliver -> Open -> Click -> Convert

Setting benchmarks and measuring the success of each step allows us to determine where the areas for improvement are in the email marketing process.

Here are some things to look at for poor performance at each step of the email marketing process:

• Low deliver rate - how clean/up to date is the list? how are messages being sent out? is there a server issue? are you on block lists?
  
• Low open rate - are your subject lines compelling? is your from name/email recognizable? are messages being caught in SPAM or bulk folders?
• Low open to click rate - is your message compelling? is the creative and copy engaging and focused on actionable items? are images being blocked? are the messages targeted to specific market segments?
• Low conversion rate - how compelling is your landing page? do you even have a landing page?

Constant fine tuning at each step of the process can help to improve the overall results of your email marketing campaign.