You may know from your own personal e-mail that everyone these days is getting a lot more non-personal mail in their e-mail inboxes. This can make things very difficult for e-mail marketers especially when it comes to the effectiveness of ad campaigns done through e-mail marketing. E-mail marketers therefore will have to track their e-mail campaigns for effectiveness using analytics and a variety of metrics systems. In this article we will look into some of the metrics systems to track for success with e-mail marketing.

The easiest way to track e-mail metrics is using the Google analytics system. You can enable various event tracking in the HTML tags within your e-mails and instantly have access to all of the metrics you will need through the Google analytics platform. You can find instructions for setting up a new idea in tracking on the Google analytics website.

The main metrics to track:

1. The rate at which e-mails are being opened:  this is really the main indication of how effective your e-mail marketing list is. Most of the time e-mails are sent out from your bulk list and you can check through Google analytics to see roughly how many of the e-mails you sent out are being opened. Most would suggest that a good opening rates for marketing e-mails should be between 15 and 25% of the total e-mails sent out. Track these numbers readily and adjust your strategy or mailing list if these numbers start to fall below 15%.

2. The rate at which e-mails are being received: this is otherwise called as a bounce rate and this can occur when an e-mail is no longer valid, and e-mail inbox is full or when you are given a false e-mail address. Most of the time you will be given some type of delivery status notification failure in the event that an e-mail has bounced. You can track the bounce rate on your e-mail list to gauge the effectiveness of your contact list. A high bounce rate could mean it’s time to adjust your strategy for building e-mail lists.

3. Link click rate: when you insert links into your e-mails you will need to know how often users are responding to your call to action by following through and actually clicking your link. If you have a high click rate this could mean that you have generated successful copy but if you aren’t seeing this represented in sales numbers there could be a problem on your sales page or something on your main webpage that’s causing people to change their minds.

4. Sales conversion rates: sales conversion rates take into account click through’s as well as sales. When your conversion rates are close to your click rate this means that you are producing effective copy and have an effective webpage. Tracking your conversion rates and adjusting your e-mail copy can help you to be more effective with e-mail marketing.

Use these metrics to find more success with your e-mail campaigns.