Running a successful newsletter campaign requires you to constantly track, monitor, and assess various key metrics, which can all be used to show whether a specific campaign is doing really well or would require tweaking. Admailr and Emercury, as email service providers, provides a wide variety of reporting tools that help you assess the performance of your newsletter campaigns based on the following metrics:
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Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the metric that gauges the percentage of emails that were not delivered to the recipient’s inbox. Basically, they’re emails that “bounced” back. Monitoring the bounce rate is important because it will help you distinguish between the two kinds: soft bounces and hard bounces.
Soft bounces are caused by temporary problems such as the recipient’s server temporarily holding the emails before delivering them all at once on a regular schedule, or minor problems causing their mail server to go down – etc. With soft bounces, the emails usually go through once the problem has been solved.
Hard bounces, on the other hand, are more serious as they’re emails that will never reach the recipient at all because of a problem, either because the email account is already inactive or the recipient’s server has blocked your emails.
Being able to distinguish between the two is very important because of the different approaches they require. Soft bounces should be left alone unless there is a specific request to resend the emails (otherwise, you could be flagged for spamming.) Emails with hard bounces, on the other hand, should be removed completely from your list in order to avoid being flagged by ISPs.
Minimizing bounce rates is crucial because both email service providers and ISPs take them into account when deciding whether you are a spammer or a legitimate newsletter service. Admailr and Emercury both want its customers to minimize bounce rates because that will also reflect badly on them as the ESPs.
Delivery Rate
The number of emails that were received successfully is called the delivery rate, and is computed by taking the total number of emails sent substracting the bounces. The delivery rate plays a big role in measuring the success of a newsletter campaign because it gauges how many emails actually reach your subscribers. After all, an email that doesn’t even reach the inbox will never be read and whatever profit it could bring is negated. A delivery rate that is falling is a sign of problems that need to be addressed, as it could be the result of ISPs blocking your emails or your list growing stale.
List Growth Rate
As the name implies, the list growth rate basically measures the rate at which your list grows. Maintaining a steady growth rate is important, because there is a thing called “list decay” that affects all lists regardless of how good it is. People change their interests, lose their email accounts, go bankrupt, or change jobs all the time. A contact that buys or clicks regularly might go inactive in the future, so you always need to find new contacts that can replace them.
Click Through Rate
The Click Through Rate (CTR) measures the percentage of the recipients who clicked on links in the emails. The CTR is one of the most important metrics in email marketing because it will show whether the emails were relevant enough and effective enough to encourage subscribers to follow the links. Admailr and Emercury calculates the CTR either by dividing unique clicks by the number of emails delivered or by dividing total clicks (including those done by the same recipient) by the total number of emails delivered.
Forward/Share Rate
This metric measures the percentage of recipients who forwarded the email or clicked on a “Share This” link in order to forward the email to a social network or a friend. Like the CTR, this also allows newsletter owners to determine if their content is engaging and effective enough to convince recipients to do something.
Conversion Rate
Simply put, the Conversion Rate measures the percentage of users who complete an action or “converted.” This may include anything from filling out a form or purchasing a product. This is arguably the biggest metric to measure as it not only measures the effectiveness of your emails, but it’s also the metric that’s nearest to ROI. A healthy conversion rate ensures that you have a profitable list, assuming that you’ve worked out a way to monetize the list.
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