Email Tracking and a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

The measurement of how successful a sent campaign is depends on more than open and click through rates. In broad terms the response to your campaign will fall largely on how relevant, desirable and cost effective your product or service is. However you can get a rough idea on the kind of 'hidden' activity your campaign generates.

Delivery rate This is how many emails were successfully delivered to the recipients email server - not their actual computer. Think of it as the ability to follow a letter being sent all the way to the local sorting office of the recipient. From that point on it's all done behind closed doors! The reason why it's not always possible for you to attain 100% delivery rate is based on two factors:

1) Hard Bounces - This is when an email address becomes invalid, deleted, changed or has expired. Like the Elvis song, your server will declare 'return to sender, address unknown!

2) Soft Bounces - This is where the server at the other end was a bit tied up or the recipient has a full mailbox quota.

Sometimes this happens for no good reason. The good news is that sometimes the email will be successfully sent on a subsequent automatic resend. In any case, the industry accepted statistic is that an average of 10% of emails will bounce.

Open rate This is measured by how many readers opened your email and allowed images to be shown. You can measure the number of times a special marker image in your email is downloaded which tells you the minimum number of times the email was opened. This is important to understand because there will be far more opened emails that turn images off by default, or only accept plain text emails which don't download images. The current estimations worldwide are that a minimum of between 10 - 30% of emails are opened.

Click Through rate This is probably the most important figure to business customers as this will indicate the potential conversion to sales. Each link on your email should be routed through your servers before sending the recipient onto your website. This happens almost instantly and will provide you with an accurate amount of traffic being generated to your site. This figure should be combined with your phone, fax, email and postal responses to build up a true reflection of the success of your marketing strategy. Anything over 1% click through is considered a successful campaign. Over 10% would be like winning the lottery!

About the Author

James is a technical expert and Network Manager at Sprint Mail http://www.sprint-mail.co.uk