Part 1: Targeting | Part 2: Email Design | Part 3: Ensuring Delivery | Part 4: Tracking & Monitoring

Part 4: Tracking & Monitoring

You should always monitor the effectiveness of your email marketing to make sure you're getting value from the time and effort you're spending on it, helping you to improve future campaigns. Fortunately, email marketing is easier to track than most other forms of marketing, especially offline alternatives.

In Part 4 of the Email Marketing Guide, we take a look how to track responses of an email campaign and how to plan for the results.

Response Rates

Most email software - including the one we use - tracks the amount of recipients who open your emails and click on the links within. Ideally, you should create customised 'landing' pages which are tailored to reflect the email. This also makes it easier to track people who have actually got in touch with you after reading your email.

By reviewing who has read, clicked and responded to your emails, you can start to build a picture of which segment was the most responsive. If you have sent out customised emails to different sectors, it can help you decide on which market to go after.

So what is a good response rate? A 5% rate is generally accepted as strong for email marketing, while 3-4% is the average (Source: Business Link). For a highly targeted email, you may get closer to 10%.

If your response rates are low, the most common culprits are:

		Out of Date Email Lists If the percentage of emails bounced back is high, your email list can't be very up-to-date! Regularly 'clean' your own email lists or use a legitimate, established company to rent regularly updated email lists.
		Poor Timing Sending a Christmas special offer in Summer isn't particularly clever and seems obvious, but its often surprising the times people choose to send out emails. Work out what time zone your target market is in, ensuring it as at time of day where your email won't be lost within hundreds of others! Keep in mind any Bank Holidays or busy times of year (school holidays etc.).
		Frequency and Repetitiveness The more regularly you send the same email, the higher the chance of the email being ignored entirely. This is especially so if the email uses the same subject line. Try to make subsequent emails at least a little different, perhaps with a different opening statement, fact or testimonial.
		Poorly Constructed Email Some recipients have strict spam filters which don't allow image based HTML emails through, or ones judged to have 'spammy' content. Trigger words such as 'free' may put your email in a spam folder. When it comes to design, if your email isn't particularly attractive and doesn't display correctly in the majority of email programs, people simply won't read it.

Handling Response

Hopefully, your email marketing campaign will be successful. If it is, have you planned how you will deal with it? If you send an email to 10,000 people, with a 5% response rate that makes 500 people to deal with, are your sales and support staff prepared for this? Will you be able to deliver a service within an agreed timescale? Email marketing may be one of the cheaper forms of marketing your organisation's product or services, but don't make it wasted. Plan how you will handle the response of a campaign to ensure no one is let down.

This article was written by Webtacular, the online marketing service from Sixth Sense ESP. We're dedicated to helping organisation's to get the most out of Email Marketing. We can help with everything from email list sourcing, to email to design, to managing unsubscriptions.