3 Steps to Successful Email Marketing Tracking

Email marketing tracking isn’t always the easiest task. After all, the metrics that you should use aren’t even consistent across the board and the best ones to use are changing as the Internet continues to evolve itself. However, it’s not an impossible task and you’ll soon be able to get quite good at understanding how your emails are faring. It takes some practice and you’ll have to follow these 3 steps to successful email marketing tracking to get started.

1. Make sure you can track – What I mean by that is that there are some email marketing systems that do not come with accurate tracking tools. Of course, if you’re still manually sending out your emails via Microsoft Outlook then you’re stuck relying on read receipts. Additionally, if you’re still using Outlook than trust me, that’s the least of your problems, so good luck with all of that.

Sign up with one of the reputable email marketing companies that provide a full range of tracking and statistics to get started.

2. Learn which stats to rely on – One of the biggest problems that people have with email marketing tracking is that they don’t know what to make of the statistics. The most commonly used statistic is the ubiquitous open rate. However, an email campaign’s open rate can be extremely misleading.

An open rate is reliant upon a tiny image that’s automatically inserted into all of your emails. If a recipient has images turned off for their emails – and an increasingly large number of people do – than they could open the email 12 times and read it for hours and it wouldn’t show up in your open rate. Additionally, if an email is viewed in a preview pane, sometimes that won’t even count as being opened.

Therefore, you want to stop worrying about open rates for everything besides simple comparisons between your emails to see which is performing better given the flaws of the statistic.

Instead you want to pay attention to the click through rate, or CTR. The email click through rate is the percentage of people that clicked on a link. Most email marketing systems will let you break that down to see all of the different link percentages if there was more than one link clicked.

Also, keep in mind that some programs may calculate click through rate as people who clicked / people who opened. Since you know that the open rate is flawed, if this is how your CTR is calculated, than perform your own simple math by taking the raw number of people who clicked / people you sent the email to.

3. Compare, tweak & improve – Participating in email marketing tracking is fine in and of itself, but if you don’t use the process to make improvements in your email campaigns than what’s the point? Change up your tactics to see which methods or calls to action produce better results. You can even segment your list and send different groups different versions of the same email to see which converts better.

If you follow these 3 steps you’ll be successfully email marketing tracking in no time!

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