Measuring the Success of your Email Marketing
Engaging through email marketing
For almost as long as there has been email, marketers have found ways to reach clients through it. One of the great advantages of email marketing is the ease with which its metrics can be tracked. We are able to monitor who opened a message and when, where they navigated next, and whether they decided to make a purchase or abandon the product altogether. With all this data available, we get so mired in information that we lose sight of its actual purpose.
What constitutes success in email marketing?
Traditionally, brands have defined the success of their email marketing programs through the sole evaluation of engagement rates. If users are opening your email and clicking through, have you not achieved your goal? No, says popular tech site mashable.com, unless your main objective was simply to get your brand seen. Engagement metrics are undoubtedly useful indicators of how well the channel is doing. However, much more can be gained by trying to understand where the client goes beyond the email. This information can be pivotal in determining future content and targeting considerations. That being said, engagement metrics are perhaps not even the tip of what email marketing has to offer. 
Revenue success
Another way to value email marketing is to base it on the revenue attributed to it. However, revenue does not equal profit. Email marketing is predominantly used as a discount channel, driving a strong return on investment (ROI), but there is also revenue loss associated with those discounts. Rather than only relying on revenue as a channel success indicator, calculate the cost of sale to determine the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.
Success as measured by incremental behaviour
Measuring incremental behaviour in the email platform, particularly if used in conjunction with the lifetime value of a subscriber, allows you to measure the effect your emails have on your subscriber base, as well as measures the value of maintaining this type of customer relationship.
Email marketing remains a powerful and popular way to engage with clients. Its success can be determined in many ways, which proves especially useful in combination with each other.
