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Email Metrics 101
People generally become interested in email metrics once they've hit the send button. Metrics, or the measuring/analysing of your mailing results, should be a routine part of your email marketing campaigns. The information can be used to improve response levels on your future mailings.
Here is an overview of the more common metric terms* used in email marketing:
Open rate: Calculated as the percentage of subscribers who were recorded opening the email you sent. The open rate is considered a key metric for judging an email campaign's success, though there are several factors which can affect it.
What can affect the 'open rate'?
- Percentage of what? - A reported open rate may be calculated as a percentage of emails sent or of emails delivered. For your own mailings, keeping a clean list and calculating open rate as a percentage of emails delivered makes the most sense.
- HTML emails only - email marketing systems typically record an email 'open' when a subscriber opens the HTML version of the mailing, downloading a uniquely coded image in the process. The opening of a text email can't be detected by this mechanism.
- Anti-spam measures - increasingly, email clients are first displaying HTML messages without downloading associated images. Outlook 2003, Outlook Express (post Win XP Service Pack 2), and the recent Mozilla Thunderbird releases are examples. Unless the reader chooses to download images, a message open will not be recorded.
Identified Subscribers: Calculated as the total number of subscribers recorded interacting with an email campaign. Includes both those detected opening the email and clicking on links (where an open wasn't detected for the reasons above). Calculating the Open Rate as Identified Subscribers divided by Emails Delivered gives a better metric of subscriber activity than using opens alone.
Click-Through & Click-Through Tracking: A click-through occurs when a recipient clicks on a link in the email. Click-Through Tracking refers to the data collected about each Click-Through link, such as how many people clicked it, how many clicks resulted in desired actions such as sales, forwards or subscriptions.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Total number of clicks on all email link(s) in the email, divided by the number of emails sent or delivered. Includes multiple clicks by a unique user. Some email broadcast vendors or tracking programs define CTR differently, in that they are measuring 'unique' CTR, meaning that each individual user is only counted once - no matter how many times they click on a link.
Conversion: When an email recipient performs a desired action based on a mailing you have sent. A conversion could be a monetary transaction, such as a purchase made after clicking a link. It could also include a voluntary act such as registering at a website, downloading a white paper, signing up for a Web seminar or opting in to an email newsletter.
* (Visit MarketingSherpa's The Ultimate Email Glossary: 178 Common Terms Defined for a complete overview.)
Gathering Email Statistics
Jeanne Jennings of the Jennings Report suggests these sources for gathering statistical data and B2B/B2C metrics:
- Personal experience - Archive statistics of all your mailings, even if they were not successful - you can learn from them and create your own benchmarks to measure against.
- Case studies - A good source of metrics. Heidi Anderson writes a weekly case studies column for ClickZ.
- Research reports - It's important to use current research - older stats are less relevant. Double Click publishes a quarterly US Email Trend Report, as well as a European version. Just out are the results of MarketingSherpa's third annual E-mail Metrics Survey.
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