Email Marketing, E-Newsletters, Email Newsletters, Effective Email Marketing

Evaluating the impact of your email marketing efforts on business sales

Have you ever considered whether you are getting a sizeable return on your investment in your email marketing efforts? Do you know what kind of metrics to use to judge the effectiveness of email promotions and newsletters? Click-through rates can signal short-term effectiveness, but what about your long-term objectives and ultimate sales goals?

Calculating newsletter ROI is a far from self-evident, since newsletter costs are immediate and relatively easy to measure, whereas the benefits are long-term and difficult to measure.

It is essential to assess the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts, because you may not be reaching the members of your target audience, or your subscribers might be construing your emails as spam, despite your best intentions. Don’t make the fatal mistake of not ensuring your email distribution list features recipients who are genuinely interested in the products or services you offer, or failing to check that your recipients are actually opening and reading your emails.

Evaluating your email marketing efforts may be formal or informal in nature. You can solicit feedback directly from your customers by asking them a series of questions, but your results will be nothing more than anecdotal. Another approach is to calculate the revenue produced by subscribers before and after they subscribed, and compare this with a group of non-subscribers. But this kind of study can be hard to set up unless you have easy access to your subscribers’ purchasing data.

The most reliable and cost-effective way to build up this kind of purchasing picture is through the use of email marketing software that manages all your email campaigns using statistical tracking, time sensitive auto-responders, custom subscription forms, personalised mailings, and real time graphical reporting.