You want to learn what does and does not work in your e-marketing, so that you can continue to improve your messages each time.
Think about including an exclusive special offer, deal, or competition. This will not only encourage people to read your e-newsletter, but also provide you with a way to track the response and conversion.
Monitor any unsubscribes and click-through rates – this will tell you if your newsletter has not been relevant. Your e-marketing software provider should have reporting; take time to explore this and create reports that will help you the most.
Most email software/distributions have built in metrics including:
- Open Rate: The percentage of the recipients who opened the e-newsletter (The industry standard is 17.70%)
- Click-through Rate: The number of individual (unique) links clicked, divided by the total number of e-mails successfully sent. This gives you an indication of how effective your content was at compelling readers to want to learn more (The industry standard is 2%)
- Bounce-backs: E-newsletters that were not successfully delivered to some subscribers. This usually occurs because a subscriber's e-mail address has been recorded incorrectly (it might include a typo), or no longer exists. Be sure to correct this information or remove the subscriber from your list. This will help keep your list "clean" and up to date, and will also help decrease the amount of time it takes to send out the e-newsletter. A more than 40% bounce-back rate is bad.
