The beauty of e-mail is that when done right, those who interact with you through e-mail are even more likely to become long-term, loyal customers.
The success of your online business depends on building relationships with your customers. So let’s give some of those e-mail metrics the once-over because they’re what’s going to help you do it right.
E-MAIL LIST METRICS
You’ll need a handle on the size of your list, its rate of growth, and the nature of attrition. Your basic data should include:
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Total number of subscribers. The number of people currently on your list who have agreed to receive mailings from you.
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New Subscribers. The number of people who have opted-in to your list since your last mailing.
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Unsubscribes. The number of people who have asked to be removed from your list since the last mailing (and whom you have dutifully and graciously removed).
Ideally, your list is growing by leaps and bounds — an indication that you’re bringing in suitable traffic and engaging interest. However, Unsubscribe rates that keep growing indicate you’re not meeting your readers’ needs — in which case, it’s back to the drawing board.
Nervous though you might get over Unsubscribes, it’s important to determine if opt- outers were recent subscribers or people who’ve been around for a while. You’ll want to consider some possibilities:
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Is your list suffering from burn-out?
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Are you targeting appropriately?
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Have you made significant changes recently?
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Were the unsubscribers long-term, active customers?
Until you get answers to these questions, you won’t really know if the loss was detrimental. It’s quality, not quantity, that counts. If you lose 10% of your readership by changing your newsletter, but your impact and influence on the remaining 90% has improved tremendously, then the loss is a welcome one.
THE BASIC E-MAIL CAMPAIGN METRICS
These are the basic numbers that you want to identify for your mailings. The last two tell you the most about your conversion efforts:
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Number sent: The total number of e-mails you sent. This could be different from your total number of subscribers if you’re segmenting your list for testing purposes.
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Number received: The total number of e-mails that were delivered. Calculate this by subtracting the number that bounced back from the total number sent.
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Bounce Back: The total number of e-mails that were rejected and not delivered. e-mail can be rejected because the e-mail address is no longer valid, because a server filtered it out, or possibly because the receiver’s mailbox was full and over quota (this often happens when you send e-mail over the weekend to free e-mail accounts, such as Hotmail and Yahoo).
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Response Rate: The percentage of unique readers who clicked on unique links embedded in the e-mail. You can calculate a response rate for a unique link in several ways: The number of people clicking on the link divided by the number of e-mails opened, delivered, or sent. You can also calculate response rate on a global level using the number of individuals who clicked on any link. The way in which you calculate these metrics is less important than calculating them the same way every time.
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Open Rate: The total number of e-mails that were opened divided by the total number of e-mails delivered. These results are only accurate with HTML e-mails.
THE VENERABLE OPEN RATE
Open rates get lots of press, but do you know what your open rate is really telling you? The number basically measures how many of your HTML e-mails registered as opened. Does it mean the opened e-mail was read? No. Does it indicate that the recipient even skimmed the first line of the opened e-mail? No. If we continue in this vein, all we can say for certain is that all e-mails that were read were opened. Who needed a number to tell us that?
Look at it from the conversion point of view. Every good e-mail communication should start by focusing on one action: Persuading the recipient to open it. When the recipient opens that e-mail, you have your first successful conversion. And once the mail is opened, the recipient is primed to move to the next micro-action in the conversion process.
Here are some of the factors — all of which the recipient evaluates before committing to that very first click — that affect open rates:
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Does the recipient recognize the sender?
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Does the recipient acknowledge a relationship with the sender?
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Is this relationship valuable to the recipient?
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To whom is the e-mail addressed?
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To which e-mail account is the e-mail sent?
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Does the recipient recognize where the sender got the address?
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Is the e-mail personalized in a way the recipient understands and accepts?
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Does the subject line matter to the context of the relationship?
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Does the subject line tell them something they need to know?
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Does the subject line arouse their curiosity?
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Does the subject line speak to an emotions-based need?
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Has the mail been sent at the best time?
Everything that goes into getting a recipient to open an e-mail constitutes a first test for the successful implementation of AIDA: Did you grab Attention, arouse an Interest, stimulate Desire, and provide a call for Action? If the e-mail isn’t opened, you know that the answer is no.