Only six out of every ten email marketers ever review extremely basic metrics such as click-throughs and opens, thus failing to take into consideration the critical aspect of prospect engagement. Due to this oversight, many email marketers have reached the limit of what the basic metrics of email tracking can tell them about their campaigns. A complete understanding of your marketing efficiencies, your ROI, and how your entire audience is reacting to your emails can only be achieved through meticulous monitoring of the more sophisticated engagement metrics.

Select a Small Set of Relevant Metrics & Focus on Them

This diligent process doesn’t mean agonizing over every single scrap of data, but rather selecting a relatively small set of measurements that you believe has the highest impact. Concentrate on how your campaigns are performing on those parameters instead. You should be wary of applying a focus that is overly narrow as much as overly wide, so don’t make a snap decision based on your first glimpse of the data. By taking a more holistic perspective you will be able to best determine:

  • How these specific metrics are trending over months and years
  • The modifications that can be implemented to improve response and ROI
  • The ramifications of anomalous results and various outliers

Email Effective Rate is a Major Indicator

One of the most important metrics that many email marketers pay little attention to is the effective rate of the campaign: the percentage of prospects who actually click once they’ve opened the email. This data provides significant insight into how your loyalty-based and retention processes are being received by your audience. If you see that your emails’ effective rates are elevated, then it translates into your readers determining that the content was of direct relevance to their needs. On the other hand, if your rate is low, it’s a huge red flag warning that the recipients are not finding your content to be sufficiently relevant and targeted.

Spam Reports Reflect on Your Entire Brand’s Reputation

Spam reports are pivotal metrics, as they represent measurements of how your brand and its emails are being received at the very outset by the reader. Your spam reports should be steadily dropping, or flatlining at the worst. If your spam reports have been trending upwards, it is an indication that your reputation out there is floundering. The reason for this stumble may be brand related and not specifically triggered by your email campaigns, but it deserves immediate and deliberate action nonetheless.

Many Email Marketers Accept Conversion Rates That Are Too Low

Another critical engagement metric is conversions, and it is one where many email marketers unwittingly accept a far lower rate than they could easily achieve. Although there is no hard and fast rule as to what the conversion rate should be in any given campaign, there is usually ample room for improvement, which can be gauged by thoroughly and honestly answering these questions:

  • Is your call to action as prominent and lucid as it can possibly be?
  • Have you ensured that your design is clear, obvious and readable in both HTML and plain text?
  • Are there any aspects of your emails that “smell of spam?”
  • Are your landing pages laser-focused and firmly tied in to your email’s leitmotif?
  • Are your forms fully prepopulated with the respondent’s data?

Failing to take these key email marketing engagement metrics into consideration may be blinding you to the fundamental insights that can result in stronger results across the board. Vigilance is called for in not only fully comprehending what this data says about your campaigns, but also on how to administer effective strategies to fix what’s broken.

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by Hal Licino

Hal Licino is a leading blogger on HubPages, one of the Alexa Top 120 websites in the USA. Hal has written 2,500 HubPage articles on a wide range of topics, some of which have attracted upwards of 135,000 page views a day. His blogs are influential to the point where Hal single-handedly forced Apple to retract a national network iPhone TV commercial and has even mythbusted one of the Mythbusters. He has also written for major sites as Tripology, WebTVWire, and TripScoop.