(This tip is provided to you from the e-book, “5 Steps to Successful E-mail Marketing,” available for download now.)
Marketing activities often lack a good way to measure results. So much of it seems like trial and error —which can get expensive. That’s one reason I keep banging the drum for e-mail marketing.
Most e-mail marketing services — including the E-Mail Marketing feature of Office Live Small Business – give you access to reports that track the details of e-mail marketing campaigns. These reports are typically a table of information that show when the e-mail campaign was sent, how many e-mails could not be delivered, how many recipients clicked a link in the e-mail, and so on. Report data studied over time serves as a helpful, do-it-yourself tool to figure out what’s working in your campaigns, and what isn’t, and to fine-tune your promotions accordingly.
For instance, let’s say you operate a bike shop and you just got in a new type of bike seat (we cyclists like to call them “saddles”). You want to send an e-mail announcement to customers who signed up to receive your e-mail cycling promotions. You’ve heard that Tuesdays are the best time to send out promotions, so you send the promotion to 25 customers on Tuesday. As a test, you decide to send the promotion to the other 25 on the following Saturday.
After both messages have been sent, you view the report associated with each mailing and compare how many people clicked a link (to your Web site or Web store) in the first e-mail versus how many clicked a link in the second mailing. Though you may want to test other times for sending, this simple use of reports can yield some good insight on the best time to mail out bike promotions.
Reports can help you test the effectiveness of other aspects of e-mail campaigns, too, such as design elements, calls-to-action (CTAs) and subject lines. Our free e-book, “5 Steps to Successful E-mail Marketing,” (which I’ve plugged numerous times) has a great section on using reports to measure the success of your e-mail campaigns and about setting strategic goals for e-mail campaigns.
You might also check out our Resource Center article, “Create strategic e-mail marketing campaigns,” which also talks about how to use and interpret reports data.
Office Live Small Business customers can click here to try E-Mail Marketing for free.
And if you’re an e-mail marketing user who’s familiar with using reports, please click Add a comment and share any insights you’ve gained with the rest of us.
David Alexander