After you become a pro at HTML email design and coding, and you're sending campaigns on a regular basis, how do you measure performance? How do you know if your email marketing efforts are working or not? How can you experiment, and improve your performance? Here's a basic rundown of what you should be measuring, and how you can test your campaigns.

Open Rates

How many people opened your email? An open rate of about 20% to 30% is considered "average." Watch your open rate over time. Your first email might get a great open rate (like 50% to 70% or more), but over time will level off some. Try experimenting with different things, like:

Click Rates

How many people clicked links in your email? Which links did they click the most? Did they click on product links, or research links? Did you see a rise in purchases? How long after you sent the campaign do links keep getting clicked? Try experimenting with:

• The number of links in your message. One big, giant link, or lots and lots of different links?
• Product photos for each link
• The wording of each link.
• Segmenting your list, and sending more focused emails (and links that are more relevant)

Unsubscribe Rate

What's your unsubscribe rate after each campaign? Less than one percent is average for lists that are contacted regularly, and well-maintained. If you send very infrequently, or if it's your very first send, your unsubscribe rate may be much higher. Check your unsub rate after each campaign. If you see it spike after a particular campaign, see if it had anything to do with your content. Maybe you're sending too frequently. Maybe not frequently enough. Keeping a good, fresh, quality list will result in a very low unsub rate.

Bouncebacks

Watch your bounceback rate after each campaign. A good list management system will break down your bouncebacks into "hard" vs. "soft" bounces, and clean your list for you. Soft bounces are emails that exist, but for some reason, they couldn't be delivered. For instance, their server might have been too busy at the time of your delivery. Hard bounces are undeliverable---perhaps the email account doesn't exist anymore, or there was a typo in the address. Hard bounces should be removed immediately. Your email marketing service should let you read the header information from each bounced message, so you can see exactly why they bounced.

Try experimenting with:

• Re-sending your campaign (a little later) to the people who "soft-bounced."
• Look through your hard bounces for any obvious typos. For instance, "hotmial.com" could probably be corrected to "hotmail.com"

Euro.message LIVE Helps Manage Your Bounces

Not all bounce-backs are bad. Soft bounces are mostly "temporary" and you can probably keep them on your list and try again. If euro.message sends your campaign and an email address "soft bounces" back to our system, we'll watch that email address over the next 5 campaigns. If it keeps soft-bouncing, we'll automatically clean it from your list. But if an email address "hard bounces" (Like when it's an undeliverable address), we immediately remove it from your list. You shouldn't send campaigns to a bad email address over and over---ISPs block you for doing stuff like that. Viewing SMTP replies for bounced email When a recipient's email address bounces back to euro.message, the server that bounced it usually sticks a little "message" in the email's header, which is called the "SMTP Reply." These SMTP replies tell us why the email was bounced (such as temporarily busy, over quota, on vacation, bad email address, account no longer exists, etc). This helps euro.message classify the bounce as "soft" or "hard." But sometimes, email servers don't use standard codes and messages in their SMTP replies. It's all up to how the server admin set things up. Worse yet, some anti-spam firewalls outright lie, by inserting "this email address no longer exists" into their SMTP replies. This is meant to trick list management systems into removing an email address from their list. Classifying bounce-backs as "soft" or "hard" isn't a perfect system. That's why euro.message LIVE gives you the "View Full Headers" option in your bounce reports, so you can read the headers of each and every bounce-back, and determine exactly why each email bounced.

Traffic to your website

Check your website traffic logs after each email campaign. Does traffic pick up? Do orders increase? Do the cash registers go, "cha-ching?" Check and see if you get a spike in traffic immediately, or if it's more like a "gradual wave." How long does the new traffic last (and how long should you keep the graphics and pages that your email points to hosted live)?

Signups since last campaign

After each campaign, do you get lots of new subscribers? That could mean your wonderful recipients are forwarding your emails on to friends. How nice! Your content is actually useful! Don't see any list growth at all? Make that content more interesting!

Try experimenting with:

• Place some text near the top of your email, that says, "feel free to forward this to a friend"
• Place a "view this email in your browser" link at the top of your email. It should point to an archived version of the campaign on your website. Some people like to forward that link on to their friends.