An Email Marketing Program and Understanding Stats

There are many misconceptions about email marketing software data. The following article will help clear the air. Knowing more about your email marketing statistics, will ensure that you start reaching the potential that a powerful marketing tool like email marketing software can provide for your business.

If you have become accustomed to attributing your email marketing software success by the amount of ‘delivered’ emails your campaigns produce, it’s time to take a closer look at what a ‘delivered’ email actually means. Your statistics on ‘delivered’ emails do not take into account emails that get deleted without being opened or emails that get sent to ‘junk’ or ’spam’ folders.

The only way to get real statistics on the delivery of your emails you’ll need to look for some of the services offered that monitor in detail the delivery of your emails.

As strange as it sounds, your data has a lot of hidden meanings. Taking a magnifying glass to them will certainly show you how your emails can be even more successful.

The numbers that you get back from your email marketing reports are generally the numbers returned from your entire contact list. If you are not taking a closer look, you might miss some significant differences as to WHY different contacts have varying reactions to your campaigns. With a more concentrated focus on the data, you might see that a large portion of emails from Yahoo or Gmail are not being opened. In this case you can easily determine that there is a problem with the delivery of the emails. Moreover, you now know how to solve the problem, where before you weren’t even considering there was one!

Make sure that you are closely analyzing your ‘open’ rates to get a better conception of how many of your contacts are consistently reading your emails. Looking in reverse at your open rates from different campaigns and comparing them, will likely elicit a string of numbers that look similar: 25%, 24%, 26%, 22%, 25%, 27%, 26%…etc.

It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to determine just by looking at that line of numbers that the average number of people opening your email per campaign is 25%. It is certainly possible that this number reflects your readership. However, what is more often true is that your contacts are opening your email at an inconsistent rate. This means it is better to look back at which of your contacts are opening your email over a period of a month, or over the last three email blasts. You’ll find that your number of consistent readers is 1) higher and 2) more accurate.

This is because your contacts might no necessarily open the email EACH time you send it. It is far more reasonable to conclude that they might be busy sometimes, or on vacation. In other words they might not have time to read the email one week, but have plenty the next.

It can also pertain to the variation in your contact’s wants and needs, and can give you vital clues as to how you might split up your list to better target this audience. If one bunch of addresses only ever opens when your promotions about a certain product and another only when you promote a different one, then it’s time to separate the lists and only send them the content you know generates a response.

Knowing what your email marketing solutions data means is largely about making a deeper analysis of the numbers provided, to determine under what circumstance your contacts are responding. Knowing their wants and needs will provide you with much greater email marketing solutions success.

Rudy Barell is a Senior Business Development Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing software used by businesses around the globe. Experience how easy it is to build your mailing list, create eye-catching emails and track your success using detailed reports with the complete email marketing program. Try it free!

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