Back to the Basics: Analyzing Email Campaign Results

Even after the final email has been sent, email marketers still have work to do. When the email campaign is over, it’s time to analyze the results and review what worked—and what didn’t—so that you can improve your future campaigns. Before beginning subsequent email outreach, assess the following:

Time of day
If you sent messages at different times or on different days throughout the course of the campaign, check to see if a certain time or day performed well. Compare the results to past campaigns to look for a trend of when people were most engaged with your message. If you don’t have adequate past results or you are unable to find a trend, check this graphic for suggested send times.

Bounce Rate
Your goal should be to keep hard bounces, or permanent invalid email addresses, to less than one percent. Clean your list regularly to keep this number low. If a high volume of emails soft bounce, stop sending and check the reply emails for a possible cause; it could be that one of the major IPs doesn’t like your content. Take a look at the content of your email and make sure your offer doesn’t sound like spam.

Click Rate
Determine how many people who opened your emails clicked a link; a good goal is to get at least 20% of opens to click. If this number is below 20% or has dropped recently, make sure the email has a clear call to action. Also check to see if there could be a disconnect with respect to the subject line—is it misleading, or is the offer presented differently within the email?

While the open rate depends on a number of factors, the click rate is based solely on your email’s content and design. Is the design aesthetically pleasing? Did the first few lines grab and keep the reader’s attention? Compare the click rates of more than one campaign and try to replicate what you did well; even better, send the same offer in two different formats and determine which one performed better.

Performance by domain
Look at how your email campaign performed with recipients with different domains. If Yahoo, for example, had poor performance compared to the rest, your email could be getting caught up in spam filters. Talk to your email service provider about how to improve your deliverability.

John Murphy is president of ReachMail.