Starters Guide to Email Marketing: 5 vital email statistics and what they mean

If you’re just starting out with email marketing it’s important to know how to measure success. Knowing what works or doesn’t work for your email marketing is not only a powerful advantage to have over other methods of marketing, it is vital for planning future campaigns. To help you get started we’ve compiled a list of vital email statistics and what they mean, to help you understand where email marketing can take you and your business.

Unique Opens
This shows you the number of emails tracked as being opened. It is a useful part of email reporting and the fine detail can give you data such as which days your emails were opened, even down to the hour. Unique opens are a useful ‘top level’ metric and a good starting point, however, bear in mind that not all email clients or business email servers allow opens to be tracked. Start here, but make sure you’re looking further into the detail as well, and don’t get discouraged if your open rate is a little lower than you would like.

Unique User Click Through
Unique click through reports register the unique number of users who clicked links within your email. You can find out how many people who received your email then continued to browse through and ultimately end up where you directed them. As unique clicks represent the interaction your recipients took part in, this is a substantial element of email reporting. Opening an email is all very well but this metric measures engagement with your marketing, which is what you’re really after.

Email Clients Report
The ‘client’ is the device used to read your email and the report within our MailFirst system allows you to see the top five devices your emails were received on, along with a percentage figure for each device. Knowing the destination of your emails if very useful as, once you get started with email marketing, you can optimise your emails for each device.

Popular content
A content report shows you which content within your email was most popular and is particularly useful for newsletter style campaigns. The report provides you with facts about the content within your email such as how many recipients clicked through and followed a link and how many times they viewed that link or article. The extra knowledge this provides is golden, helping you to shape your future emails from previous successes. The report allows you to tell whether your audience engages with lists, graphs, short articles or long articles, allowing you to adapt your strategy appropriately and telling you which bits of your marketing work and which don’t.

Unsubscribe Requests
Unsubscribe requests tell you how many recipients have asked to be removed from your address book. In MailFirst these people would automatically be removed, so that they cannot be mailed in the future. Almost every email campaign in the world will have unsubscribes, so don’t worry if yours does too. Keep an eye on it however: if one campaign receives more unsubscribes than normal then take a look at what you did differently and change your approach accordingly. It could be something as innocuous as what time you sent the email!

By Sorrel Ronan. Sorrel is ClientsFirst’s Marketing Apprentice, helping the team in all areas of the business, whilst building up her own already-impressive knowledge of the marketing word. She writes here on her experiences and shares her tips for improving your marketing. You can find her on Google+, Twitter and Linkedin.