Would you like to find out what those-in-the-know have to

say about tracking? The information in the article below

comes straight from well-informed experts with special

knowledge about tracking.

Most of this information comes straight from the list building

pros. Careful reading to the end virtually guarantees that

you'll know what they know.

After deploying several campaigns, you will have generated

a mountain of response information that reveals invaluable

data enabling you to create new and more effective

approaches and offers. There are many software tools easily

available that track, record and analyze all data pertaining

to your email marketing campaign.

Once you have the capability to track the vital statistics of your

email marketing campaigns, the inevitable question becomes: how

well are my mailings doing? Here are some guidelines on what

information to gather and how to measure the performance of your

campaign from the gathered information.

There are a number of different pieces of information that can be

gathered when using any reasonably good email broadcasting service.

The five primary measurements are: the totals each of messages sent,

message opens, click-throughs, bounces, and opt-out requests.

Total number of items sent must be accurately counted, based on

reaching each individual email address only once. Opens measure the

number of people who actually view the message using their email

program.

"Unique" opens, so that if a recipient views a message in

their preview window, then opens it into a full size window,

that this only counts as a single open instead of two opens.

Clickthroughs are recipients that respond to your offer by

clicking on a link in the email. Bounces are messages that

are undeliverable to the recipient. They could be "soft bounces"

due to temporary issues such as a full mailbox or "hard bounces"

from an invalid email account, but for our purposes here it means

people on your list who did not receive your message". And last,

opt-out requests are recipients who request to no longer receive

email.

There are a wide range of results that can be measured for email

campaigns, such as:

• How accurate is the list (how many bounces out of total

sent)

• How active is the list (how many opens out of total sent)

• How positive was the reaction to the offer itself (number of

click-throughs out of total opens)

• How negative was the reaction to the offer itself (number of

opt-outs out of total opens)

The actual number of responses on any particular campaign can

vary quite a bit. A newsletter whose primary job is to inform will not

achieve the same click-through rate as a promotion, which is intended

to get a specific response. The differing levels of permission within

your list of recipients will also affect results. Until a list has been

"cleaned" of bad addresses and those who are not interested, you may

see far different data. Pruning these from your lists will help you

improve your results considerably.

In order to account for these wide variations in factors, I suggest some

general "baseline" ratios that should be achieved on any particular

mailing. There should be more opens than bounces, or else the list is

probably out of date. Also, there should be more click-throughs than

opt-outs, otherwise the offer is poorly targeted or the list is of

questionable origin.

In order to get the optimum response you will need to send two

or three multiples of your email marketing campaign, each time using

a variation of the original offer. If they haven't responded by 3

attempts, it’s time to change your approach.

The typical response pattern is that mailings 1 and 2 will have a

similar response, with number 2 often having slightly fewer clickthroughs

than number 1. Number 3 picks up the stragglers and

undecided recipients, so the response will be much lower, but usually

significant enough to justify the mailing. Please note that you shouldn’t

necessarily just blast out three mailings one after another. For

example, you might piggyback your first offer onto a monthly

newsletter, send the second offer separately as a special promotional

mailing two weeks later, then finish the series with the final offer in

the next month’s newsletter.

It is useful to understand how the size of your lists is changing

over time. By viewing how many people sign up for your lists each

day, you can attempt to correlate list growth with other marketing

activities that you may be conducting. It is also important to consider

how many people are signing up for your lists versus how many are

opting out of them. If your lists have been cleaned, and the overall list

size is still shrinking, you need to reevaluate both your list acquisition

strategy and the content relevancy of your mailings.

Testing is critical to optimizing your email marketing campaigns. But in

order to test, you have to measure first. Make sure you have a way to

collect detailed information about your mailings, preferably in an

automatic way. Careful analysis of the actual metrics will give you the

information you need to take your email campaigns to the next level.

As your knowledge about list building continues to grow, you will

begin to see how list building fits into the overall scheme of things.

Knowing how something relates to the rest of the world is important too.