Tutorial 4.3: Measuring the performance of your email campaign

This is a step-by-step explanation to interpreting the results of your email campaign and also some actions you can take to improve future campaigns.

Viewing The Results of Your Email Campaign

You can only view the Reports and Performance for email campaigns that have already been delivered for one-off email campaigns. For on-going anniversary or loyalty campaigns, you will be able to view the results after the first email has been delivered with the report results changing for each subsequent email that gets sent. To open the results:

1. Click on 'Marketing' at the top and choose the 'Email Campaigns' option
2. Click on the Email Campaign you want to view the results for
3. The email campaign should automatically open up on the Reports and Performance page, if not, you can find the option at the bottom of the wizard.

Campaign Summary and Actions Taken

The campaign summary gives you an executive overview of your email campaign. Please keep in mind that this level of reporting is only available for emails sent in HTML format. You will see:

• Total Recipients: This was the number of email addresses that the system attempted to send the email to (from the mailing list)
• Customer Opens: This is the number unique customers who have clicked on your email within their email client
• Customer Actions: Number of actions that were a direct result of receiving this email and clicking on a link within the email. Actions include making an online purchase, filling out a webform, making a booking etc a customer can make more than 1 action
• Bounces: This is the number of email addresses that rejected your email
• Unsubscribes: In accordance with CAN-SPAM, your email you continue an 'Unsubscribe' link and your Online Business measures how many people unsubcribe from receiving further email communications from you as a result of this email.

There are also a number of reports linked to your email and you can click on any of these to open them in a new window. These continue detailed listings for all the statistics described above.

Beneath the campaign summary you'll see graphical representations of your statistics for your email campaign rates and customer actions.

Open Rates, Bounce Rates, Top 10 Links, Top 10 Actions

At the bottom of the page you'll see some more statistics. Click on any of the 4 graph types beneath the graph to see the data:

• Opened Rate - shows how many people open your email on different days. This is particularly useful for on-going loyalty and anniversary email campaigns. For one-off emails, most recipients will open within the first 3 days.
• Bounced Rate - shows when emails are being rejected. Again this is only useful for on-going loyalty and anniversary email campaigns.
• Top 10 Links - if you put hyperlinks within the content of your email campaign this shows which ones are generating the most clicks.
• Top 10 Actions - the system is also able to tell you what users are doing on your site when they are referred there by links within your email (hint: always make sure you have a link to your site from your email campaign)

Cleaning Up Your Bounced Email Addresses

After every email campaign, you should clean up your bounced email addresses from your mailing list. It's important to do this on a regular basis as bounced emails arise from:

• misspelled or bad domains
• 'spam' email addresses being used to sign up for your email campaigns
• incorrectly entered email addresses and
• inactive email addresses

ISPs are looking for emails being sent to these addresses and could block your emails (blacklist your domain) if you have too many bounced email addresses. To unsubscribe all those emails click on the 'Email Addresses That Bounced' report which will show you all the addresses and the reasons why they bounced. You'll need to tick the checkbox for the email address you want to unsubscribe or tick 'select-all', then under the 'Actions' drop down menu, you can click unsubscribe.

Detailed Listing of Customer Actions

Another report that you should look at is the Actions Customers Took, this is the most direct measure of the ROI your email campaigns are producing. You can see who's made online purchases, you can follow up with people who've made an inquiry knowing they've read the content in your email.

Using Feedback to Improve Your Email Campaigns

All of this reporting is designed to help you improve your email campaigns. Open rates can tell us alot about the 'Subject' and 'From' fields in your email. Is it clear who the email was sent from and the was subject enticing enough to open? For people who sign up for a monthly email newsletter without purchasing a product we find that good open rates range from 20-30%. For people who've previously bought a high value from your shop before open rates can range up to 70%.

If you find the Actions-to-Opens too low, you should be looking at the calls-to-action within your email. Do you have links to lead people back to your site? Is there something compelling that they should be clicking on to go to a landing page?

Unsubcribe rate is high? This warrants a closer look at the content you're sending out. Is it spammy? Is it too laden with sales cliches? A lot of material has been written on email marketing on the web, your Online Business is about providing you the tools to send email campaigns and the tools to measure the performance so you can improve in subsequent email campaigns.

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