Email Marketing Statistics and Measuring Tools

Article from July, 16th, 2003.

Tracking results of your current e-mail campaigns is crucial to how successful your future marketing attempts will be. There are several different measurements that can quantify the results. The raw one is ROI - return on investment. This value is very easy to measure. Let's say you invested $100 and got $120 back. Your return on investment is 20%. Once again, this is a very raw measurement and it just tells you how much you put in and how much you get. Any person with common sense understands that you have to get more then you invest, otherwise you will just go bankrupt.

The second measure is percentage of emails read by your viewers. This is how technical part of it is done - you place a link to a one pixel image inside your e-mail. If the email is read, the website logs this. So you get to know what percent of your e-mails is actually read. This can be very valuable information, especially if you are experimenting with the subject line of your e-mails. Over the long term, this data tells you whether interest to your e-mails is growing or waning.

Another important number is how many leads you get. For example, you sent out 1000 emails, and received 70 replies from prospective customers. That is 7%. Is this good or bad? It depends on what you are trying to sell. If you combine all of the measurements mentioned above, you get the information that lets you work with the most important value - so called "per e-mail average". This is also a very simple value. You got $1000 after sending out 1000 e-mails. Your average is $1 per e-mail. Let's say your list is old and only 500 people read your e-mail. Then your average per "opened" message is $2. If out of 500 people who read your e-mail, 50 contacted you, then your lead average is $20. Finally, if only 10 people bought $1000 worth of your product, your per sale average is $100.

If you keep statistics, then you have the information that tells you what you should do to stimulate people to read your e-mails or to make more sales. Another important issue is "scaling up." You may be making $500 from a mailing list that contains 1000 addresses. Supposedly, if you get 10000 addresses (with the same targeting), you will make $5000. Right? Wrong! Read the next week newsletter about this and about latest trends in e-mail marketing.

Relevant links:

    • Generating a new and fresh targeted mailing list
    • Clean up your mailing list and remove invalid e-mail addresses
    • Bulk Email Marketing. The Whys and Hows.
    • Send mass mail

Next week: Latest Trends in Email Marketing
Prev week: Building a successful newsletter. Part II (Integrating newsletter with other advertising methods)

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