Exploring the Metrics of Email Marketing

Note: Folks…say hello to David Lindop from Setfire Media. He’s here with E-MoneyMarketing’s first ever guest post. Glad to have his input. And hope you guys enjoy his article on email marketing – Jag 

Email marketing gets a bad rep these days.

What has the potential to be a powerful customer retention and sales tool has been used and abused to the extent where it has to justify itself as legitimate communication the second a customer opens their inbox: guilty until proven innocent.

Learning how to better understand your email marketing campaign is the first step to making it work harder; delivering more positive reception, more sales, and of course, more revenue. There’s a slew of email marketing metrics and it’s vital you are confident in cutting through to the metrics that matter most, and how to use them to improve your email campaign performance.

Delivery Rate

Simple Yet Lucrative Business Model

Membership marketing is one of the most lucrative business model in online marketing.

Here’s why…

• Easier to grow a large membership who are automatically affiliates than growing a list and finding affiliates
• Member love the information, services and community you provide. And they will tell their friends
• Regular steady income regardless of seasonality
• Continuity programs are the most profitable long term
• Make the sale once, but the income recurs every month after month…year after year…
• Better buyers – People who buy from you once are far more likely to purchase something else from you
• Ability to sell on backend where a lot of income will be derived from.
• Newsletter can get them back to the membership area.
• Fresh content are generated when members participate on the members’ forum. Search engine loves regularly updated site. Members will also come back again and again with little or no work on our part
• Membership sites are ideal for extra Adsense income, and affiliate sales

There loads of good membership software you can use such as Amember or Launch Formula Marketing.

How To Improve Your Email Open Rate and Click Through Rate By 7.8% and 8.4% Respectively

I’ve been fiddling around with email optimization in the past week.

Thinking to myself…how can I improve my open and click-through rate to my list?

Yes I’m always thinking of improving these email metrics.

Because any small increase in conversion can mean a significant increase in profitability.

This is especially true if you use email marketing as a sales channel.

Anyway…I thought I do a split test. Or more specifically split broadcast in this case.

I will spare you all the details and dive straight into the methods I used to improve my open and click through rates (the results you see in my post title is based on just 2 tests).

Improving Open Rate:

Personalize your email subject headline with your subscriber’s name. That’s it.

I found that a name-personalized email headline generally outperforms one that doesn’t.

You will need a good email marketing solution for this. I’m using Aweber and it performs brilliantly for me.

Improving Click Through Rate:

Keep the email as short and focused as possible.

And have the same link repeated twice.

How To Improve Your Email Confirmation Rate

A lot of email marketers will often ask – “how big is your list?”

A valid question. However, I prefer to ask this – “how targeted and responsive is your list?”

For me, quality of the list take precedence over quantity.

Quality first and then quality…and then finally quantity. Everyone can buy a whole database of leads but how many percent of that will actually convert into your subscribers or customers?

Now, if you want to ensure your prospects are really targeted and responsive to you, get them to double opt in.

In that way, you can be sure they really do want your information.

“What!…Double opt in???….But you will get a far bigger list with single opt in!”…as many will tell you.

True. But do you consider the following scenarios such as…

• People keying in email addresses with typo errors…
• People keying in bogus email addresses…
• People keying in other people’s email addresses without permission instead of their own…

Do you? Do you think such leads you will get are quality? Not a chance.

How To Optimize Your Email Subject Title For Better Email Open Rate

For us email marketers, one of the key metrics we track is the open rate.

How do we define open rate?

Say you send out an email to 100 people. If 1 of those open up your email, it is an open rate of 1%.

The open rate gives you a good indication of how well your email campaign is going. And how your subscribers are responding to you.

There are many ways to increase your open rate, but today I’m gonna talk about how to optimize your email subject title – probably one of the single most important elements that drives open rates – as one of the ways.

Truth be told, these techniques I’m about to reveal to you are so simple, you might laugh and say these are nothing new.

But remember – simple works.

Let’s go in details…

1. Include the word ‘you’ in the title if you can…

2. Incorporate ‘benefit’ and ‘curiosity’ element in your subject headline

Talk in terms of everyone favorite radio station – WIIFM – “What’s In It For Me”. And invoke their curiosity enough to prompt their itchy finger to click through.