Here’s how it goes, you spend days and weeks writing out your emails, starting from your welcome email to the follow-up emails. You add beautiful images to improve the visual appeal, and then you send your emails out to your subscribers. Phew, you breathe a sigh of relief, all done. Well not quite.

Sending out emails is just one part of your Email Marketing Campaigns, you have to monitor the emails you send out to see how your subscribers interact with them. Ideally, you want your subscribers to read your emails and click the links to your website or offer. If your emails are not getting read, you have to find out why so you can fix it, and you can know what’s working and what’s not. For you to do this, you need Email Analytics. Email Analytics is a very important aspect of your Email Marketing Campaigns, but it is mostly overlooked.

Email Analytics are the reports gathered by your Email Service Provider that shows how your subscribers interact with your email. It shows that you emails get opened, links in the emails get clicked and that traffic is generated to your site through your emails. Email Analytics can help improve your content and provide more value to your subscribers. You can measure Email Analytics for your Campaign as a whole and for each email. Here are some metrics to look at when analysing your Email Campaigns.

Sales Rate

The ultimate purpose of creating an email list is to make more money when you sell your product. To figure out how much revenue you generate from your emails, you need to track the clicks in the email to your sales page. If you use an Email Marketing service that has CRM integrated into it like Active Campaign, sales would be a lot easier to track. To improve sales, take a look at your email content, make sure your content addresses the needs of your subscribers, and always look for new ways to pique their interest.

Open Rate

For people to know the great offers you have in your Emails, they have to open your emails. Let me blow your mind with some stats. Billions of marketing emails are sent out each day, and on the average, each person receives over 147 marketing emails daily. Do you know:

Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.

Adding social sharing buttons to email messages an increase click-through rates by more than 150%.

59% of companies are integrating email and social channels together.

Source – Consumer Insight Group

For people to notice your emails, you have to stand out and grab attention, starting with the subject line. The subject line should be interesting and should make the reader want to open the email. Send great content and send out emails at the best time or day, research puts the best time about 3 – 5 pm in your recipient’s time zone. Test several times of the day to figure out what works best for your subscribers.

Click Rate

Click rate measures the number of times the links in your email is clicked. Email Service Providers measure overall clicks and unique clicks. Overall clicks are the total clicks, taking into consideration when people click the same link more than once. Unique click tracks a single click. Focus more on unique clicks. To improve click rates, make links easy to spot, you can place links in strategic places in your email, at the top, in the middle and at the end.

Unsubscribe Rate

It can be discouraging when people unsubscribe from your email list but that happens to everyone, even the gurus. What you want to do to reduce your unsubscribe rate is to first find out why they are leaving. Most Email Service Providers have a form the subscriber fills out stating the reason why they are leaving, make sure that form is set in all campaigns. Use double opt in, get your respondent to confirm that they want to be on your list first before they join your list. Send content that is of value to your subscribers. Always look for ways to attract new subscribers to your list on a regular basis.

Now you know the stats to look out for to ensure your Email Marketing Campaigns succeed, add a schedule in your calendar to review your stats.