Email Marketing Basics
Email Marketing has the highest ROI of any online marketing tool. Now that you're using email marketing for your business (hint, hint), let's begin the exploration of the 3 primary metrics in email marketing, Delivery Rate, Open Rate and Click-thru Rate.
Delivery Rates
Delivery rate is the percentage of subscribers that receive your message. This number is determined by the communication between your email marketing service provider (Constant Contact, Exact Target, MailChimp, etc..) and the service provider for your subscriber (Hotmail, Earthlink, AOL, your company's Exchange server, etc..).
You may hear Bounce Rate in place of Delivery Rate. Each is looking at the same data but from a different perspective. If your Delivery rate is 95%, your Bounce Rate is 5%.
Learn More about Delivery Rate
Open Rates
Open Rates tell you the number of subscribers that opened your email. This is determined by putting an invisible image in the message and keeping track of how many times that image is requested. Because of this, open rates can only be calculated for HTML based emails, not plain text emails. It also means that subscribers that disable images or reading on a device (say a Blackberry) that doesn't accept images, won't count as opens either.
This number isn't perfect, but it is still a number you should review and strive to increase with each message you send.
Click-thru Rates
Coming Soon!
