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Checklist for Top-tier Email Performance
Consider your current email marketing efforts. Have your previous email marketing efforts yielded greater returns than your recent efforts? We know you work very hard to develop your email marketing programs, but, as you achieve success, your attention turns to the improvement of other marketing activities and they drop in priority. Contraty to popular belief, a one-size-fits-all approach will not work for today\'s successful email marketing campaigns. Customer factors such as a ?mailbox full,? change of titles, customer trust, brand loyalty, purchase cycles, and buyer interest greatly impact a campaign?s performance.

To ensure a successful campaign, you should constantly evaluate your campaigns and assess their metrics.

There are six critical factors in assessing email marketing campaign performance. Here is a checklist to help you analyze your current email marketing efforts.

Define Email Marketing Goals
Prior to crafting your message, call to action, and imagery ask: What do you want to accomplish with your email marketing campaign? This is an essential question that must be answered. If your group?s focus is lead generation as opposed to sales conversion, then the preferred tactics used in your campaign may differ greatly. By defining your goals, you will be able to determine the metrics by which to gauge campaign performance. In addition, take time to finely tune landing experiences that drive toward your specific goal.
Email marketing goals include:
? Direct Selling
? Driving traffic to a Web site
? Driving traffic to an offline store or location
? Branding
? Brand Involvement
? Building Relationships

Assess Metrics to Benchmark
Once you?ve defined the goal of your campaign, you must identify the metrics that you will trend to evaluate performance. Are you currently tracking metrics? What are they? Are they actionable, i.e. met?rics that offer you leverage in optimizing the campaign?
Metrics can include:
? Deliverability
? Spam Rate
? Acquisition Rate
? Open Rate
? Click Through Rate
? Unsubscribe Rate.

When benchmarking, there are two different approaches to use that yield useful intelligence about campaign performance. One is to benchmark performance against prior experi?ence for the brand or marketing program. The other is to benchmark against industry norms. The first addresses the question: ?Are we doing better than we used to?? The second addresses: ?Are we doing as well as we should be??
Most organizations begin by answering the first question because it is the information that is most easily obtainable. If you don?t have a history of tracking your performance metrics, there is no bet?ter time to start than now. Then periodically evaluate your latest campaign against previous campaigns, especially those against similar lists or using similar tactics. By varying one aspect of the campaign at a time, you can build marketing intelligence that will help improve your campaigns every time. Industry statistics are harder to come by. But, if you can find statistics on your competitive set, that is most useful. Check with various marketing organizations that support your industry to see if they offer the information you need. INSPIOR can publish email delivery statistics from our client base in total and by industry groups. This information can be a great resource for your evaluation of delivery, opens and click rates.

Delivery Rate
Deliverability is a metric that must be measured to determine whether or not your email is actually making its way to the intended recipient?s inbox. Optimization of this metric often includes monitoring for list fatigue as well as honoring customer preferences.
In order to determine your deliverability, you should measure:
? Number of complaints
? Number of bounces
? Number of messages sent
? Size of the messages.

Spam Rate
Are you analyzing your campaign?s abuse report rate? This measurement gives valuable insight into the perception of your campaigns. Are your permission-based customers viewing messages as spam due to frequency or content? Do your opt-in recipients truly believe that they opted in to receive mes?sages from you? Do they believe that they opted in for the type and frequency of messages you send them? Once you determine your campaign?s ?spamminess,? try adjustments to message relevance, frequency, or call to action in order to reduce spam complaints. Ask your list members what they want and then honor those requests in your mailing activity.

Acquisition Rate
Whether qualifying an acquisition as a lead conversion or a purchase conversion, analyzing a cam?paign?s performance on cost per acquisition can be insightful. You should monitor a cam?paign?s conversion rate to aid in determining its effectiveness.

Open Rate
Are your messages being opened once delivered? Open rate is an important measure in determining the effectiveness of your subject line or the trust factor of your ?from? address. Open rate is determined by the quantity of your email send versus those that open. Most email marketing providers trend this data for you.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Your message has been opened, but are your customers responding to the content or call to action? By measuring your click through rate you can determine if the content is relevant to your customer and urges them to learn more. To establish your click through rate on a campaign, analyze the ratio of emails sent to the number of clicks.

Unsubscribe Rate
Are customers unsubscribing from your email campaigns at higher rates than previous historical trends? If the answer is yes, then it may be time to rethink your campaign?s frequency and relevancy. Measuring your unsubscribe rate is essential to keeping a ?clean? list. Most providers monitor your un?subscribe rate to help you better understand your overall campaign performance. Determining your unsubscribe rate can be done at a campaign level or across all email marketing campaigns. To calcu?late your unsubscribe rate, measure the ration of sends to unsubscribes. See ?benchmarking? to establish a baseline for your email campaigns.

Ensure Deliverability
Deliverability Measurement
Legitimate email doesn?t always land in your customer?s inbox. According to MarketingSherpa, ?25% of business-to-consumer marketers surveyed said they?ve seen a significant increase in bounce rates.? How do you ensure that your emails successfully reach your customer? Incorporating best practices into your email marketing will benefit your delivery. Monitoring your email campaign delivery rates, cleansing your data routinely, and requesting to be added to the customer?s address book are just a few ways to safeguard your email from landing in the spam filter. In addition, it?s critical to maintain a healthy relationship with the ISPs to which you are sending email. A trusted email marketing provider such as INSPIOR takes care to constantly evaluate ISP relationships and address any issues that arise.

Spam
Spam is defined by Yahoo! Mail as ?whatever consumers don?t want in their inbox.? Over time email marketing has evolved as less of a measurable definition of what spam is considered and more as a qualitative metric determined by the recipient. Ensure that your email marketing focuses on your customers? expectations including content preferences, relevancy, and fre?quency. If your customer finds no value in the email being delivered, regardless of opt-in, then it isn?t a good email. Are you viewing spam reports to determine if the messages you are delivering are the right message at the right time?

Test, Test, and Re-test
Testing is critical for email marketing success. Creating different landing experiences, offers, call to actions, imagery, and content allows you to optimize your campaign to its greatest potential. There are two possible modes of testing:
? A/B testing: testing one element of a campaign against another. It may include varying the offer, call to action, look, or subject line of a message.
? Multivariate Testing: Testing multiple changes simultaneously in a live environment.

Relevancy
Content relevancy is the search engine?s measure of how well a particular website or web page accurately matches a searching question. For example, a query for sail boats would list pages that were on the topic of sailing boats above pages that were just about boats, generally, because the pages about sailing would be much more relevant.
Likewise, delivering a message that doesn?t speak to the customer can disengage a valuable relationship. Email marketing has evolved from utilizing a one-off broadcast email campaign to employing a strategic program that targets the customer with a relevant message at the appropriate time. Consider this: ac?cording to Jupiter Research, ?untargeted email campaigns have open rates of only 20%, a click through of only 9.5% and conversion rates of only about 1%, while targeted email campaigns have a 33% open rate on average, a 14% click-through rate, and a conversion rate of 3.9%.? Engaging your audience with content and offers that are delivered strategically will uplift your message in an extremely competitive market. Create a message that meets the needs of your customers to enhance your relationship as well as reinforce your trust factor.

Segmentation
On the other hand, one of the most prevalent reasons for an email being ignored is irrelevant  or perceived irrelevant content. Segmentation en?sures that your message is delivered at the right time, to the right person, with the right content. Segment your audience based on data such as behavior, preferences, or demographics. Collect data through a list management tool to easily integrate segmentation within your campaign. Determine what segmentation meets the needs of your overall business objectives. Perhaps you choose to segment a campaign on the purchase value of a customer, or perhaps you believe a product-based segmentation will yield a higher return. Whatever you do, make certain that the message and offer complement the seg?mentation.

Optimization
Now that you?ve determined your metrics and addressed the deliverability and relevancy of your cam?paign, it is time for optimization. Analyze your metrics and determine where there is opportunity to increase performance and convert low hanging fruit. Your initial strategies may change, meaning that you need to continually make campaign adjustments. Or, maybe, the end goal you were hoping to achieve doesn?t yield the response you had hoped. Don?t be hesitant to shift resources.

Production Process
Many clients ask what\'s our process for achieving results? INSPIOR uses a 12-step process that works across different types of organizations and fields of interest that starts with Defining the Problem, Innovating and then Adding Value. This process is a way to get all key stakeholders on the same page with moving forward in tackling difficult or complex problems. We encourage you to use this process in your efforts to achieve success.

Grossary (pdf. download)
A glossary of industry terms supplied by the Trade Show Exhibitors Association (TSEA).