Are you tracking the right stats and metrics that matter in your email marketing campaigns? We hear questions from users about how to increase opens, clicks, deliverability, and more. These questions usually surround one point: how effective are their email marketing campaigns?

Email marketing effectiveness can be measured in a variety of ways. Here are five ways to size up your email marketing effectiveness along with why they matter.

1. Open and Click-through Rates – These numbers combined help you see if your email messages are relevant to subscribers. Essentially, this is asking, “When our message is in front of you, do you open and click on it?”
2. List Retention per Broadcast – Monitoring your list retention with each broadcast should indicate the loyalty your subscribers have with your list. This is easy to track, simply calculate the net number of “marketable” subscribers after each broadcast. (This excludes opt-outs and bounces.)
3. Email Clicks to Conversion – Is email the right medium to close sales? Take an inventory of any sales that were directly associated with an email broadcast. This will suggest that your email campaigns are driving revenue for the business and there’s meaningful ROI from email marketing.
4. Revenue per Subscriber (Recipient) – Another way to look at the success of your email marketing is the revenue gained per subscriber. In other words, are you marketing to profitable prospects? Do you have dead-weight on your list? With segmented email marketing, you will experience higher revenue per subscriber.
5. Long-Term Customer Value – Okay, so if traditional email stats dictate that your campaign was poor, look at the long-term customer value such as upsell opportunities, retention, referrals and overall “quality” of the sale. Calculating the Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) down to the campaign level, you will be able to discover the real value of your email campaigns, regardless of open rates or click-throughs.

The point of these tips isn’t to say that basic email marketing metrics are wrong. Rather, it was to help you think about different ways to arrive at defining email marketing “success” beyond the standard-issue stats like opens, clicks and bounces.

What uncommon ways do you measure success in your email marketing campaigns?

[Image credit: horiavarlan]

Over the past week, we shared a number of best practices and advice to help small businesses improve their email marketing. Here’s a recap of what you may have missed.

Assuming Permission: A Sure-fire Way to Damage Your Email Reputation
Email reputation is so important and many marketers are making a big gamble with theirs by assuming. Learn about email reputation and how to build it up.

How and Why Spam Complaints Hurt Email Senders
Spam complaints are serious business. Discover what typically happens when email marketers incur spam complaints.

Is Email Marketing Dying?
Social media is on the rise, but does that mean email marketing is on the way out? Read about some surprising stats that show that email marketing is the preferred channel to send promotions to prospects and customers.

Two Ways to Triple Your Open Rates
Uncover two strategies that will boost your email open and engagement rates, based on two live examples of Infusionsoft users. It’s so simple, anyone can do it!

7 Email Marketing Campaigns to Generate More Leads
Businesses use email marketing to attract more leads and generate more sales. Here are seven email marketing campaign ideas that small businesses can implement to generate more leads.

How to Get Back in Touch with Old Contacts on Your List
Check out this live example of an automotive retailer touching base along with a number of solid suggestions to effectively get back in touch with old contacts on your list.

5 Practical Tips to Improve Your Inbox Placement
Email deliverability is a top concern on the minds of marketers. Despite this, nearly 1 in 5 emails don’t actually make it to the inbox. Here are some helpful tips to have the advantage over your competitors.

When Do Leads Become Liabilities?
Are all leads the same? Compare two different businesses with different lead nurturing campaigns and how they follow up with warm leads and choose to let inactive ones perish.

5 Email Marketing Tips Inspired from Groupon
Groupon, the leading daily deal provider, has several helpful tips for today’s small businesses that engage in email marketing. As Groupon’s business matured, so has their email marketing strategy. Improve your email marketing effectiveness and response with these helpful tips.

I hope everyone found these email marketing posts valuable. We had many great comments and questions shared by you and we addressed them. We look forward to continuing to help you grow your business with smart, personalized and automated email marketing!

Ask anyone about ‘daily deal’ sites and the first company they think of is Groupon. They’ve rapidly become leader in the “group deals” or “daily deals” niche of email marketing for small businesses. Here are five Groupon-inspired email marketing tips that today’s small businesses can use to give their email marketing a boost.

Groupon has been so successful they’ve even incurred some feedback from businesses who were pummeled by the flood of new customers wanting to cash in Groupon offers. While their surge of popularity appears to be cooling off, their email marketing strategy still works.

1. Always Be Segmenting & Targeting

Remember when you received a daily email from Groupon? I did. From spray-on tans to hair treatments to waxing, their offers sent to me at one point were poorly targeted. (Maybe not the waxing, but I digress…)

I may not have been alone. The cost of poorly targeted emails is lack of engagement, loss of attention and ultimately, decreased response. Not even the greatest email marketing copy in the world can save them from an offer that’s irrelevant to the reader. Their business was built on the engagement of readers. Not just the opens, but the primal excitement of getting a good deal and passing it along to their friends. Thus, the element of a group deal, not a solo deal.

Takeaway: Always learn about your audience. You can do this through surveys and the actions they take with previous emails. Did recipients click on product B? Deliver them relevant messages specific to Product B. Take them out of product A and C’s campaigns.

2. Extend the Reach of the Brand with Sub-Brands

After Groupon passed on the acquisition offer from Google and enraged some people with their Super Bowl TV ad, they expanded their business from region-specific deals to travel and instant deals. They accomplished this through different lead-generation campaigns.

They recently introduced ‘Getaways’ and ‘Now Deals.’ This expands their reach because I know people who would love to get away to a resort, but are fine passing up on the offer to join a gym. Now deals target the people on the go who want a deal based on their physical location. Not only do the deals rake in higher margins; it enables their audience to receive these that are more relevant to them.

Takeaway: Using specific landing pages coupled with highly targeted email campaigns, you can discover new opportunities in your business. For instance, if you offer marketing coaching, consider creating a membership site or digital download product used to attract different types of leads to the business. You might actually stumble into a new profitable business idea!

3. Target Deals When People are in a Buying Mood

I know on Monday morning, I’m not exactly in a mood to buy. I noticed that recently I’ve been receiving emails for Groupons on Friday. It makes sense because I’m thinking of the weekend and recreation.

Takeaway: Consider adjusting the time and date when you typically send your emails. Not only will this adjust when it’s  opened, but it will affect when recipients take action on your message. A quick experiment is to track your next email campaign with Google Analytics and discover the time of day most people hit your site from your email message. My point is 8AM may not work as well as 1PM or 4PM.

4. Use a Consistent and Well-Recognized Format

Groupon is all about brand awareness, trust and conversion. They’ve made such an impact on the niche-deals industry, everyone has copied their look and feel. It works. People want to read big headlines, vivid pictures, sub-headlines, details on the offer and compelling copy. This formula they coined took the industry by storm.

Takeaway: Earn the trust of your contacts by using a professional – but not impersonal—look and feel to your emails. If the purpose of the message is to engage in a transaction, address all the questions in the mind of a buyer. Here are a few examples that we’ve created.

5. Always Follow Up With Leads, Even at a Loss

Businesses that use Groupon for attracting customers are missing a big opportunity. Following up. The industry has often stated that with Groupon offers, the business actually takes a loss on these new customers. Right or wrong as the deal-takers may be (such as only tipping on the discount amount, not the full price), the business needs to follow-up and educate people about the value they provide. Data suggests that simply following up increases sales by nearly 400%!

Takeaway: Encourage new customers to sign up on your email list. Then nurture them with a thoughtful variety of polls, educational insights about your business that they didn’t know or even invite them to come back. Read this blog post for seven more lead-generation ideas.

On another note, I’ve received fewer Groupon offers to my email. (Perhaps you have, too?) It’s not because they’re short on deals, it’s because they are becoming more targeted with them. I open up the ones offering discount oil changes, unlimited car washes and automotive tint. This increases my awareness and response.

I don’t think the experience and excitement with daily deal sites or even “flash sales” is exclusive to Groupon. I feel that businesses with a well-planned email marketing strategy coupled with a loyal list of prospects and customers could actually pull these off without a daily deal site’s assistance. (And keep 100% of the revenue for themselves.)

[Image credit: © Groupon, Inc.]

As the Email Compliance Account Manager at Infusionsoft, I’m often asked questions about email marketing best practices and email marketing effectiveness. One of the common themes in the questions people have asked me is, “When does a lead stop being a lead and become a person who is one email away from marking an email as spam?”

I’ll use two examples that answers this question.

Leads Going Stale
Tool Company A sells tools for electricians. They have a great website and several lead magnets that receives heavy traffic through their website, which generates hundreds of leads per day. After several months, they have 5000 people in their email follow-up sequences. They are doing a bi-monthly newsletter and a marketing email during the off weeks. In other words, they are mailing their list once a week. Since they are setting the expectation regarding the frequency of the emails, they aren’t expecting many spam complaints.

Much to their surprise, the spam complaints three times above the industry-accepted threshold at 0.41% despite the fact that people opted-in and were told the frequency before they signed up. They decided to take a closer look at their plan. When someone signs up, they are added to the newsletter sequence. That sequence includes newsletters and marketing emails. It starts when the lead sign up and stops when they opt-out.

Leads Staying Fresh
Tool Company B also sells tools for electricians. They also have a great website and several lead magnets that get heavy traffic, which generates hundreds of leads per day. After several months, they have 3000 people in their follow-up sequences. They are also doing a bi-monthly newsletter and a marketing email during the off weeks. Since they are setting the expectation regarding the frequency of emails, they aren’t expecting many spam complaints.

During a review of their plan, they are excited to see their spam complaints are below the acceptable industry rate (0.08%). They developed a strategy to keep the quality leads and get rid of those who don’t participate in their marketing. They are tracking what action their leads are performing once they open their emails. This allows the company to target their marketing to their leads based on what they are clicking on in the ads and newsletter. Just as important; however, they are able to see if their leads are doing anything when they read the newsletter and marketing. Using a tagging system, they have made the decision to stop sending email to leads if they don’t perform any action after their first seven emails.

Think about it. When someone initially signed up for a report, whitepaper, or newsletter, they were excited enough to give you their personal information.  If after 2-3 months they haven’t clicked on a single link in your email, how much potential do they have as a customer? Are they a lead at this point, or just a liability waiting to report you for spam when they finally get tired of getting your email?

In other words, the goal isn’t only to get the email delivered. The goal is to create a sense of relevance, urgency and a call to action. Today, marketers have advanced email marketing tools to track these data points closely. If the lead isn’t going to act, then it might be time to cut them loose and focus on the people who do engage with you.

[Image credit: benzado]

In an email deliverability study published by ReturnPath, it was discovered that only 81 percent of messages actually reach the inbox sent by commercial email senders. This means that approximately 2 out of 10 messages either land in the spam folder or go missing. While this statistic remains an industry average, there are several tips to help your messages reach the inbox regularly.

The 2011 study was conducted by email reputation provider, ReturnPath. They concluded that inbox placement remains a challenge for marketers across the globe and only marginally improved from 2009. The report also reveals that B2B messages have a slight disadvantage over B2C messages. It’s alright, all is not lost, yet. Read the full report from ReturnPath, which includes international results and best practices.

2011 Email Deliverability Report, Source: ReturnPath

Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic “formula” for hitting the inbox because email providers utilize many factors to determine how they handle incoming messages. However, there are practical tips that will help your messages appear in the inbox more frequently than your competitors.

1. Use Reputable Domains for Links

If your email contains untrusted links, it may result in being flagged by spam filters and placed in the junk folder. Practically, this means avoiding untrusted links generated from link shortening services (Bit.ly, TinyURL, t.co, etc). Spammers frequently abuse these services and ISPs will look twice when they see these links. Trusted link sources include the links generated from email service providers such as Automation Links in Infusionsoft.

2. Segment Your List & Send Less

With careful discipline to not send to everyone on an email list, the sender is able to deliver targeted messages to people who are truly expecting it. Response rates increase, subscribers are happy and so is the business. Narrow segments give the marketers more liberties to take with recipients. For instance, if we have a customer event in Dallas, TX, we would have higher response to emailing recipients in Texas versus the other 49 states. The takeaway is to send responsibly.

3. Encourage Recipient Engagement

In simple terms, this means enticing recipients to show images, whitelist the email sender, click the links and frequently open the emails sent to them. ISPs track these actions to judge whether people want your email and in turn, places messages in the inbox or the junk folder accordingly.

4. Limit Emailing Fatigued or Old Recipients

In the same way ISPs look at engagement, they also score the reputation of senders negatively based on how often they hit old, unresponsive or false inboxes. This is a sign of a ‘dirty’ list and irresponsible sending practices. If an ISP hasn’t seen a steady stream of good emails, a message will more than likely hit the junk folder or at the very least, throttle the sender down. The practical advice here is to stop emailing people who have not responded in several months. An old email list is a risk waiting to happen and could lower your reputation as a responsible email sender.

5. Write Clean Email Content

Many marketers often focus too much on their words and content when it comes to hoping to hit the inbox. Too much focus means changing words from “free” to “f.r.e.e.” This isn’t a wise or proven practice – and will hurt inbox placement. (These email marketing tips are better.) Write your emails for humans by making them to the point and look like a reputable email. To assess email content, try using a tool based on industry-accepted SpamAssassin as it will score an email based on the image-text ratio, links and thousands of additional criteria. Infusionsoft users get this technology built into their email editor, but a free solution is available for Windows users to test their email messages, too.

The only question on the minds of our readers is this: How can a marketer determine their inbox placement? The truth is, we’ve found inbox placement is less than reliable when performed en-masse. People’s customized spam filters determine whether an email lands in the inbox or not. However, a simple test is to create a few accounts on all the large ISPs (Google, AOL, Yahoo, Live) and send your email as a broadcast to these and look for where your messages arrive. If it makes it to the inbox, you can be assured that most people, by default, will receive your messages just fine.

These five tips will help improve inbox placement. It is entirely possible that someone’s spam filters are just cranked up too high. Encourage recipients to double-check their junk filters the first time you email them and to whitelist future messages to the inbox. Modern spam filters adapt to users and do their best to keep messages they want in the inbox and keep the rest out.

[Image credit: scfiasco]