When all the wheels of the Crossman Communications marketing machine are rolling in the same direction, we will have two or three requests for phone consultations coming in every week. We are a small company that delivers a highly customized service at a fairly solid price point. A larger company, and one that needs to sell massive numbers of their product or service, will want to be doing a multiple of that number (and there are ways to do that) but, for us, that’s a very good way to fill our marketing funnel. If you’re interested in that kind of a project, please let me know. Not all of the queries we or our clients get are perfectly well-qualified, and part of what happens in a telephone conversation is the determination of whether or not we are a good fit. I’m OK with that. But, guess what? Part of the reason we have consistent opportunities to speak with people who might want what we’re selling is that we have grown our community and we are regularly communicating with the members of it. This stuff works!

What about your email marketing? What should you be measuring there?

Open and Click-Through Rates for Email Marketing Campaigns

It’s important to measure both the open rates and the click-through rates of your email marketing campaigns.

The open rate quite simply measures the percentage of email recipients who saw your email in their inbox and opened it. You want this number to be above 18-20% if possible. There are benchmarks available online for different industries and you can check the average for your field and see how well you’re tracking against it. A lot of issues affect your open rate, including your subject line (again, simple is better), the day and time your email was sent, and the size and sourcing of your list.

The click-through rate measures the number of people who clicked a link in the email you sent them to go on and visit whatever online presence you selected. This is ideally a page of your website. We often set up specific landing pages to drive people to take an action we would like them to take – sign up for a free eBook, download a free audio, etc. You want your click-through rate to be as high as possible as well, but don’t expect massive numbers here – generally, we see rates in the neighbourhood of 1.5-4%, although it can be higher with a great offer and a well-defined list.

Most email marketing delivery systems will track both the open rate and the click-through rate for you so you can fine tune your efforts and get higher rates.

Click-through rates are not just applicable to emails, however. If you are doing any online PR or advertising you also want to measure your click-throughs.

Engagement

Are people engaging with your online content? For example, are people commenting on or sharing your blog posts? Or retweeting, favouriting or responding to your tweets? Are you getting lots of shares on your Facebook posts and Linked In updates? Expanding your engagement means extending your reach and the more people who hear what you have to say, the greater your potential for starting the conversations that might lead to a sale.

Stay tuned for our next blog on content marketing measurement where we will tie all this together with a word on your return on investment.