Section 3Measuring SuccessCreating good email marketing content requires combining creativity with good analysis. Measuring the success of an email campaign or a single email blast is straightforward if the database is set up properly to track the appropriate metrics. Open Rate = Emails Opened / Emails Delivered. Good open rates are crucial both for avoiding spam filters and for overall profitability. A company’s emails can’t increase sales if recipients do not view them. Open rates are a good indicator of the quality of the subject line. Open rates vary by industry, but an open rate of 20% is about average. Click-through Rate = Emails Clicked / Emails Delivered. A good measure of the quality of the email content is the percentage of readers who click on a part of the email. If a company’s goal is to sell product, it must induce a click to investigate the featured product before a sale can occur. If the goal is to generate visits to its media website, the company must induce a click on the email to take visitors there. As with subject lines, content can be tested by sending different bits of content to different random subsets of the email list. The subset with the highest click-through rate (CTR) received the best email content. CTR can be improved by using strong calls to action and good images that entice readers to visit the website. An average CTR is about 3.5%. (Note that the denominator is the number of delivered emails, not the number of emails opened.)Conversion Rate = Transactions / Sessions Generated via Email. Just generating a visit to the site is not helpful if none of those visits converts to a purchase (for an online retailer). In the end, what matters to an online retailer is sales, not visits. Some email content might have a high CTR but a low conversion rate or vice versa. A good email marketer will track both metrics to determine which content is more successful. A good retail site often has a conversion rate of 3% to 5%, but the conversion rate of email traffic, because the email recipients are already subscribed customers, can be higher.Average Order Value. An email featuring a special on furniture is almost sure to have a lower CTR and conversion rate than an email featuring some inexpensive fashion accessories, but selling one couch for $1000 is more profitable than selling 50 pairs of earrings for $5 each. By combining all four metrics—open rate, CTR, conversion rate, and average order value—an email marketer can easily track the success of the email campaign or of an individual email blast.List Churn. A company needs to be aware of how frequently its emails are causing people to unsubscribe. If the company is losing subscribers faster than it is gaining them, due to irrelevant content, email frequency, and so on, then its email marketing strategy isn’t sustainable and should be changed. A company can expect every email it sends to cause a certain percentage of its email list to unsubscribe, even if its content is good, which is why a good process for generating new email subscribers is needed.

Section 3Measuring SuccessCreating good email marketing content requires combining creativity with good analysis. Measuring the success of an email campaign or a single email blast is straightforward if the database is set up properly to track the appropriate metrics. Open Rate = Emails Opened / Emails Delivered. Good open rates are crucial both for avoiding spam filters and for overall profitability. A company’s emails can’t increase sales if recipients do not view them. Open rates are a good indicator of the quality of the subject line. Open rates vary by industry, but an open rate of 20% is about average. Click-through Rate = Emails Clicked / Emails Delivered. A good measure of the quality of the email content is the percentage of readers who click on a part of the email. If a company’s goal is to sell product, it must induce a click to investigate the featured product before a sale can occur. If the goal is to generate visits to its media website, the company must induce a click on the email to take visitors there. As with subject lines, content can be tested by sending different bits of content to different random subsets of the email list. The subset with the highest click-through rate (CTR) received the best email content. CTR can be improved by using strong calls to action and good images that entice readers to visit the website. An average CTR is about 3.5%. (Note that the denominator is the number of delivered emails, not the number of emails opened.)Conversion Rate = Transactions / Sessions Generated via Email. Just generating a visit to the site is not helpful if none of those visits converts to a purchase (for an online retailer). In the end, what matters to an online retailer is sales, not visits. Some email content might have a high CTR but a low conversion rate or vice versa. A good email marketer will track both metrics to determine which content is more successful. A good retail site often has a conversion rate of 3% to 5%, but the conversion rate of email traffic, because the email recipients are already subscribed customers, can be higher.Average Order Value. An email featuring a special on furniture is almost sure to have a lower CTR and conversion rate than an email featuring some inexpensive fashion accessories, but selling one couch for $1000 is more profitable than selling 50 pairs of earrings for$5 each. By combining all four metrics—open rate, CTR, conversion rate, and average order value—an email marketer can easily track the success of the email campaign or of an individual email blast.List Churn. A company needs to be aware of how frequently its emails are causing people to unsubscribe. If the company is losing subscribers faster than it is gaining them, due to irrelevant content, email frequency, and so on, then its email marketing strategy isn’t sustainable and should be changed. A company can expect every email it sends to cause a certain percentage of its email list to unsubscribe, even if its content is good, which is why a good process for generating new email subscribers is needed.