Now that you are all set to start your email marketing, you must also know how you should measure your email marketing success. This way, you can compare the performances of two or more email marketing campaigns and know whether they have outperformed or underperformed the benchmark you set for the email marketing campaign. Measuring the success of email marketing involves watching several metrics and measuring them to improve the overall performance of the email marketing campaign.

1. Bounce Rate determines how many emails could not be delivered.

The number of emails that could not be delivered expressed as a percentage of the total emails sent. Some mails will not reach their destination because of a temporary problem with the email address, such as a full in-box or a problem with the server. Such problems will usually sort themselves out, or you may try resending the mails. Other mails may not have reached because of faulty addresses. These are hard bounce mails, and such addresses should be immediately purged from your list. Measuring the success of email marketing by the bounce rate is important since having too many bounces may make you look like a spammer to an ISP.

2. Delivery Rate determines the success or failure of your email campaign.

This is the number of emails that were successfully delivered out of the total sent out, expressed as a percentage. Since the email has to be first successfully delivered to the recipient, in order for it to be counted as a possibility, this is an important parameter in measuring the success of email marketing. The delivery rate may slip over time, and this could be due to two reasons. One may be the email addresses in your list are getting outdated or becoming invalid. The other reason could be the subject line or content may need tweaking to prevent it being tagged as spam by major ISPs or corporate firewalls.

3. List Growth Rate shows how fast your email list is growing.

One of the ways of measuring the email marketing success is in knowing how fast your email list is growing every month. This is measured as the ratio of the number of new subscriptions gained to the total number of mails sent, expressed as a percentage. Normally, you should expect your list to decline 25% or more annually. Therefore, you have to work continually to farm new addresses and add them to your email database.

4. Click-Through Rate tells you how many clicked on your links.

The CTR or the Click-Through Rate is calculated as the ratio of the number of unique clicks to the number of mails delivered. This way of measuring the success of email marketing is important because it tells you how relevant your content is. Whether people are simply skimming over the content without clicking anywhere (low CTR) or they like your content and are reading through it (high CTR). The benchmark will be different for the different types of emails you send.