The delivery rate gives you an indication of the quality of your list. Clearly a list that has not been maintained, kept up to date or had poor data collection procedures will achieve a high bounce rate. Lists with a bounce rate of fewer than 10% can be considered to be accurate. If your bounce rate is over 20% start analysing the bounces and check whether any ISP’s are blacklisting you.

2) Open rate

Open rate is affected by the ‘From name’ and the subject line. Emails that are landing in your junk mail folder will also have an impact on your open rate as recipients are less likely to open these.

If your open rate is less than 40% try experimenting with the subject line and ‘From’ name. Trust and relevance are the two reasons people will open your email – ensure that you are portraying these in the ‘From’ address and subject line.

3) Click-thru’s

A high click-thru rate demonstrates an emails relevance to the customer. A 10% click-thru rate is typical for an email newsletter while expect 1-2% for a standard ‘cold’ email to a rented list.

4) Opens vs. Click-thru’s

A further indication of how relevant your recipients perceive the email to be is the ratio of people clicking on a link after opening the email. You may have a click-thru rate of only 5% but a high proportion of those opening the email are clicking on links. The low overall click-thru rate is actually a result of your emails not being opened. If your recipients are not opening the email you will never achieve a satisfactory click-thru rate.

5) Unsubscribes

Unsubscribes are a good indication of how successful you are in engaging with your recipients. Unsubscribe rates have fallen over the last year and unsubscribe rate of 0.5%-1% is typical. If the rate is higher than this then you are simply not providing content, news or offers that appeal to your customers or you are sending too many emails.

6) Unique and multiple click-thru’s and opens

Members of your list opening or clicking on your links multiple times may skew your tracking information. If your open rate is measured only against the total number of opens then it will provide you with an inaccurate indication of campaign success. The actual number of total opens can be around 3 to 4 times the amount of unique opens.

Advanced email campaign management solutions such as Maxemail will provide you with unique opens and click-thru stats so you can be confident of an accurate picture of campaign success.

7) Click-thru distribution

Identifying which of the links in your email are most popular will enable you to continually improve on the call-to-actions used. You can also try creating different types of emails with different call-to-action placement to see which one works best in generating click-thru’s.