How to know if your email is successful

Where to check your email stats and suggestions for improving your performance

Determining if your email is "successful" or not is an important part of email marketing. Being able to reproduce successful emails, and learn from the emails that weren't as successful, will improve your future campaigns. If you don't know where to begin, you're in the right place! Once you know where to go, you'll be able to analyze your statistics quickly. Let's get started:

Early results

Once your email is sent, the first place to look is in the Early Results Email (if you used this feature when you scheduled your email). The Early Results email gives you a quick glimpse into a campaign's performance within the first 48 hours after it was sent. You'll get your email's vital statistics delivered right to your inbox.

Email details

The Email Details page will give you a comprehensive report of the email's results. Click on the name of your sent email to see its statistics. You'll be able to drill down into the email's reports (Opens, Bounces, etc.), and see how many unique clicks the links you included in your email received. Use the Heat Map to check out where in the email your contacts are clicking the most! This information can tell you a lot about what your contacts like and what to include when you're creating the next email.
 

Reporting tab

On the Reporting tab, you'll see results for all of the emails you've sent. Scroll down to the Email campaigns table and click on the hyperlinked numbers to drill down into the report you want to see. These four reports will tell you how engaged your contacts are (or aren't):

• Opens
• Clicks
• Bounces
• Unsubscribes

 
Try to narrow down what you're looking at by using the checkboxes to compare up to 5 emails. Choose similar emails to compare to each other. If one was wildly successful, determine what differentiated it from the other emails so you can replicate your success again.

What to do with this Information

Now that you've seen how previous emails did, take what you've learned and apply it to future emails. Here are some places to start:

• Are your open rates lower than what you expected? When viewing your email reporting, check them against your industry's average. Don't worry about low numbers until you compare it to your industry - you could be doing just fine! Make sure to also compare the results from your latest email to other emails you've sent.
• Try a rewrite of your subject line using best practices and these 12 tips for writing great subject lines if your open rate wasn't good enough. You could try to resend the email to those who did not open and see if the new subject line improves your open rate.
• Clean up your lists on a regular basis. Your sign-up forms and other list-growth tools will continue to bring in new contacts.
• Make sure that you're designing engaging emails that look great. This will help you get the opens and clicks you want.

Be a better marketer: Want to make sure you're sending the best emails possible? Be sure to avoid these 40 common email marketing mistakes!

Questions?