Using email marketing for your business is a fantastic way to build a loyal following and promote your products or services.  However, how you do measure just how effective a campaign or even a single email has been?

The way to do this is by paying attention to your email metrics, which are the measurable data that your email autoresponder service will have available for you, in the back office of your account.

The first piece of data you want to be aware of is your bounce rate. This is basically any email which was ‘bounced’ back to your autoresponder service as not being delivered. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as the email address no longer being valid, a server filtering the email or simply that the subscriber’s mailbox quota had reached its limit and could not receive any more emails.

If you are getting a lot of bounced emails from the same email addresses, it may be worth simply deleting them from your list of subscribers. Autoresponder services don’t like to see a lot of bounced email as they think it may indicate scraped email lists with lots of defunct addresses. The other consideration here is, if your monthly fee is based on the number of email subscribers you have, you don’t want to be paying a higher fee for email addresses that don’t exist.

The next important metric is the open rate. This is a measure of how many recipients of your email actually opened it. One of the factors that will influence this is how good a relationship you have built with your subscribers. If it is a good one, thanks to you previously sending useful and interesting emails in the past, your open rate will be higher than if you just send sales pitches every time.

Open rates will also be heavily influenced by how good your subject line is. Although the subject line is only a few words it should have as much attention paid to it in order to make it effective, as your main email does.

The third and very important metric is your click through rate or CTR. This is a measure of how many of those people who opened your email clicked on any links contained within it. These links can be to sales pages, your website or any other site. Where they link to in terms of the metric is not important, it’s whether they get clicked that matters.

It is essential to take action to see whether you can improve your CTR if it is not high enough. You could try changing the email copy within the emails that you are sending, or place the links in different places within the email. Another question to ask is whether or not you are making a clear and bold enough call to action, so that the person reading your email knows what they need to do.