Measuring Email Effectiveness
Last week on his blog Gene Carr of Patron Technology wrote about email open rates. He concluded that while open rates are important, marketers should also measure “cumulative average open rate.” This is a measure of how many recipients open emails consistently, how many open sometimes, and how many don’t open at all.
I think both of these metrics are very important and would like to suggest an additional way to measure the effectiveness of your emails – by tagging them with Google Analytics tracking code. Tagging all of the links in your email allows you to see how these visitors behave once they click through to your site.
You can obtain incredibly rich data such as how many dollars your emails are generating*, how these users behaved on your site compared to users from other sources, what these users purchased and innumerable other statistics.
Using this simple tool you can append tags on your email that your users will never notice. There is a small learning curve to this but once you pick it up you can say things like “My last email generated $5,000 worth of sales.” Hard numbers in dollars and cents, that’s powerful insight into your email effectiveness.
*if you have ecommerce set up on your analytics account
