Ways to Measure Email Success April 02, 2020, | Posted by Guest

When it comes to email marketing, brands have a lot of goals in mind when they use the medium. Each campaign often has a different specific desired result. It can, however, be difficult to determine whether the campaign has succeeded and to what degree; some goals are more easily measured than others, some data points can be murky to examine. Site Impact, as you know, is all about the data. Understanding how you can measure the success of your campaigns comes down to knowing not just what your goals are but how the data can give you insights into how close you are to achieving the goal--or how far astray you’ve gone. By looking at the two crucial factors side by side, you can get a much better understanding of where your email budget is going, and you can also make tweaks to get the most out of your spend. 

Know your goal

What your goal should be is a question only you can answer; email marketing can accomplish several different objectives--sometimes many at once. Knowing what your specific goal is the first step towards measuring the success of your campaigns. A short-term goal would be something along the lines of opens and clicks; long-term, increased engagement is a common goal, if a little vague. Other long-term goals can include outcomes such as increased sales in a specific area of your business, increased revenue overall, and more. For nonprofit organizations, goals can include outcomes such as increased donations, shares, or other non-commercial objectives. The goal you choose will depend on what industry you’re in, how big your company is, and other factors, but having a specific, actionable goal is the first step towards making your email marketing program successful--and also in measuring your success in email.

Know how to measure

Once you’ve got a specific goal in mind, the second step is to know how best to measure how your campaign performs. This in a large part means knowing which metrics are useful and which aren’t. Now, of course at Site Impact, we can find a reason to track just about any behavior--they’re all useful for different things. But when thinking about a specific goal, and monitoring performance along those lines, certain metrics will illustrate trends much better than others. For example: while open rate and click-through are both valuable metrics for engagement, they tend to indicate performance in different areas. Then, too, if you’re looking to determine the return on your investment, it’s important to look at specific metrics: the amount of spend on conversions from your emails compared to the amount you’re spending on the campaign. To determine how to measure your progress towards your goals, it’s important to look at what each metric captures and how that relates to behaviors you’re trying to track. 

When it comes to the success of your email marketing campaigns, you need to start from the position of knowing just what you want your campaign to accomplish, and then figure out which metrics best indicate the behaviors that match your objective. From there, you can track your campaigns both individually and over time, and improve your marketing performance--getting a better return on your investment with every campaign. Contact Site Impact to learn how we make it easy to keep track of your performance.