#emailstatistics

Email Marketing – The Most Important Statistics

Your autoresponder gives you metrics on which to base important decisions in your email marketing. These metrics are essential because they provide hard, objective data about your list's tastes and preferences. Any good autoresponder will offer you a variety of statistics. Here are the most essential to pay attention to. Open Rate The open rate tells you how many people opened a certain message. It's important, but you should also take it with a grain of salt. There are many reasons a message might not have been opened. It could've been pitched into a spam folder or deleted accidentally. To get the most out of your open rate, lower your spam rating and send text-formatted emails instead of HTML messages. Autoresponders offer a spam rating to give you an idea of how likely your message will be identified as spam. Also, some email clients don't accept messages with HTML, so removing HTML ensures that more messages are delivered. On the other hand, good HTML can increase open rates in many cases.  You’ll have to measure your rates to see what works best for your list. Assuming your messages are getting delivered, your open rate tells you that your subject line was good enough to get your subscriber to read the message. There is a good practice to keep in mind - it is important to manage your list and weed out those who haven't responded to your emails (i.e. haven't opened your emails) for 6 months, as an example. If you leave these inactive subscribers in your list, your open rate will be impacted and your 'score' with the search engines and ISPs will not be as good as it could be if you keep your email list pruned of inactive subscribers. Click-Through Rate Click-through rate is a more accurate statistic. It tells you how many people clicked the links in your email. It means they had to receive and open the email. If a subscriber clicked the link, it's a good indication that your subject line was good, your email was well-written, the offer was enticing, and the call-to-action worked. FYI...when you have a call-to-action link in your email, you will want to repeat it at least two times, with one of the replicated links included in the P.S. of your email. How Successful Is Your Email Marketing? Before you decide which metrics to track, you need to identify the goal of your email marketing. Do you want to turn people into leads? Do you want them to buy directly through your email list? Are you trying to build a better relationship with your list? Once you've identified your goal, you can figure out exactly which metrics to track. Tracking metrics give you the feedback you need to determine whether or not you're reaching this goal.