Once you have the capability to track the vital statistics of your email marketing campaigns, the inevitable question becomes: how well are my mailings doing? Here are some guidelines on what information to gather and how to measure the performance of your campaign from the gathered information. There are a number of different pieces of information that can be gathered when using any reasonably good email broadcasting service. The five primary measurements are: the totals each of messages sent, message opens, click-throughs, bounces, and opt-out requests. Total number of items sent must be accurately counted, based on reaching each individual email address only once.

Opens measure the number of people who actually view the message using their email program. I prefer to use “unique” opens, so that if a recipient views a message in their preview window, then opens it into a full size window, that this only counts as a single open instead of two opens. Click through are recipients that respond to your offer by clicking on a link in the email. Bounces are messages that are undeliverable to the recipient. They could be “soft bounces” due to temporary issues such as a full mailbox or “hard bounces” from an invalid email account, but for our purposes here it means “people on your list who did not receive your message”.
And last, opt-out requests are recipients who request to no longer receive email. There are a wide range of results that can be measured for email campaigns, such as:

How accurate is the list
(how many bounces out of total sent)
How active is the list (how many opens out of total sent)
How positive was the reaction to the offer itself (number of click-through out of total opens) How negative was the reaction to the offer itself (number of opt-outs out of total opens)

The actual number of responses on any particular campaign can vary quite a bit. A newsletter whose primary job is to inform will not achieve the same click-through rate as a promotion, which is intended to get a specific response. The differing levels of permission within your list of recipients will also affect results.
Until a list has been "cleaned" of bad addresses and those who are not interested, you may see far different data. Pruning these from your lists will help you improve your results considerably. In order to account for these wide variations in factors, I suggest some general "baseline" ratios that should be achieved on any particular mailing.
There should be more opens than bounces, or else the list is probably out of date. Also, there should be more click-throughs than opt-outs, otherwise the offer is poorly targeted or the list is of questionable origin. In order to get the optimum response you will need to send two or three multiples of your email marketing campaign, each time using a variation of the original offer.

If they haven't responded by 3 attempts, it’s time to change your approach. The typical response pattern is that mailings 1 and 2 will have a similar response, with number 2 often having slightly fewer click through than number 1. Number 3 picks up the stragglers and undecided recipients, so the response will be much lower, but usually significant enough to justify the mailing. Please note that you shouldn’t necessarily just blast out three mailings one after another. For example, you might piggyback your first offer onto a monthly newsletter, send the second offer separately as a special promotional mailing two weeks later, then finish the series with the final offer in the next month’s newsletter. It is useful to understand how the size of your lists is changing over time. By viewing how many people sign up for your lists each day, you can attempt to correlate list growth with other marketing activities that you may be conducting.

It is also important to consider how many people are signing up for your lists versus how many are opting out of them. If your lists have been cleaned, and the overall list size is still shrinking, you need to reevaluate both your list acquisition strategy and the content relevancy of your mailings. Testing is critical to optimizing your email marketing campaigns. But in order to test, you have to measure first. Make sure you have a way to collect detailed information about your mailings, preferably in an automatic way. Careful analysis of the actual metrics will give you the information you need to take your email campaigns to the next level.

Enhancing Email Response
The process of email marketing may not always bear the kind of results that you expect. In fact, even after doing all the basics right the response rates may fall way short of expectations.
The good news is that email responses can be enhanced with a little bit of analysis and research. We’ve discussed the importance of gathering statistical data during email campaigns. With this information now available and a few creative segmentation strategies, email response can be improved a great deal. Your emails may reach three sets of readers:

Those who deleted the email without even opening it
Those who opened the email but did not read it or click on the offer made
Those who read the email, clicked on the link provided but did not accept your offer

The set which represents readers who never opened your email is probably the biggest. In fact, it’s possible that at least 50% of readers discarded your email as junk.
To boost response rates of such readers, you should segment these as a group and change the subject line of the email or the sender’s name and address. Chances are good that you’ll find some of the changes work better than others, and that some of the non-openers to the first message have opened up the new message based on a single and possibly simple change. Perhaps this change lies in a new appeal in the subject line, or perhaps it's due to the message coming from a living person instead of an impersonal company. Record and save those variables and continue to test and fine-tune them with each subsequent campaign. The next segment is comprised of readers who read the email but were not interested enough to click on the offer and land on your website.

This segment may be pretty big as well. It is very likely that most of these readers may have read a couple of lines at the beginning of the mail and deleted it. The best possible remedy in such cases is to analyze that section of your promotion. Does it say enough to make people want to read further? If not, reformatting and/or reworking the introductory copy and headline may be all it takes to increase your clicks.

Finally, we have the last segment comprised of readers who actually read the email and were interested enough to click through and reach your website. However, once they got there, their interest faded and they chose not to follow through with the transaction. This segment of people will normally be much smaller when compared with the above two segments. In such cases it’s best to take a hard, objective look at the landing page. Something is clearly missing or is not being communicated effectively.

Does the offer remain clear? Is the form too cumbersome or too long? Can you revise the form, and perhaps also revise some of the required form fields within it, for purposes of having these potential customers complete their first transaction? Sometimes it may pay to instill a little humor in your email. There have been many instances when potential clients were so moved by a humorous gesture in the email so they immediately decided to do some business with the marketer.

Make some assumptions and apply them to your next campaign. It's all about getting potential customers to feel good about you and what you have to offer. Considerable time and effort may be required to improve the email responses you get. That said, the fruits such a process can bear over a period of time can be well worth it.

Should the message trick the reader or be honest?
Often, companies try to trick people into opening an email to start a relationship with a prospective customer. From the customer’s point of view, this is certainly not the most brilliant idea.
Almost all potential customers would prefer not to do business with someone who deceives them, no matter how good a product or service they offer. As a marketer you must approach your direct mail and email marketing messages with the attitude that this may be the one and only opportunity to start a relationship with a new customer. Considering this, the tips below will be helpful: Messages should be honest and reflect the company’s credibility - Take the high road with your ads. Tell people who you really are and what you really do. Be clear and concise with the offer - Don’t make it difficult for the reader of your message to figure out what you are promoting. Test your message - Try your message out and ask for feedback. This is a good way to assure that you are not misleading your prospect.

Know your audience - The shotgun approach to marketing does not work with direct mail or email. Sending your message to the wrong audience is a wasteful way to spend your advertising dollars. Remember your message is a reflection of your brand, product or service and employees. Make sure your message is something you can stand behind with pride no matter how it is delivered.