There are numerous ways to construct an email marketing campaign depending on a number of factors, such as the size of your company, the size of your customer base and the kind of content you want to market to your subscriber list. Rather than go through the various methods of constructing a campaign, this article is going to focus on what comes after; tracking your campaign, and why it’s important to keep on top of it.

With an email marketing campaign, it’s easy to think that the job is done once you’ve carefully constructed your content, made it look pretty and sent it out to your customer base. However, that is only half the job. The other half is slightly less creative but as important, if not more because it will help inform and guide your marketing campaign. Analysis, graphs, and statistics – they aren’t as fun as creating content, but they are just as important.

The first thing you need to be looking at when tracking an email campaign is seeing how many people are actually opening your email – after all, a campaign is pointless if the people who actually signed up are ignoring or even worse, deleting your email. You can keep track of this in a couple of ways. The basic way to do this is to receive an email receipt every time someone opens your mail.

This is great for small businesses, but for large subscriber bases it’s unsustainable as it will clog up your inbox. Which leads us onto the next point; if you’re managing large subscriber bases, sign up for email marketing software. Along with plenty of other benefits, most software will give you access to a wealth of tracking data and generally make your life a lot easier.

Effective email marketing software’s tracking options will allow you to, amongst other things keep track of new sign-ups, see how many mails are bouncing and track the average growth of your subscriber list. This allows for effective management of your subscriber list, which is vital for optimising your campaign.

More interestingly, you can also keep track of how many times your emails are being forwarded and the amount of times your content has been shared on social media. This is a vital metric for determining how successful your content actually is – after all, people can open emails but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are engaging. From this data, you can decide whether your content is working or whether it needs tweaking.

Keeping track of your competitors is also important. The basic way of doing this is signing up for their emails – this may bump up their subscriber stats but it does give you access to the sort of content they are creating and what you’re up against. Some software allows you to compare your campaign with your competitors via graphs and hard statistics – although it should be noted, the competitor has to be using the same software as you!

Keeping on top of your email marketing campaign tracking is vitally important. Obviously you want to see how effective your campaign is and how many people you are reaching, but by delving a little deeper and taking factors such as social sharing into consideration, you can also make informed decisions on your content and its effectiveness.

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision, specialists in email marketing campaigns

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision (http://www.extravision.com), specialists in email marketing campaigns

Author Bio: Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision, specialists in email marketing campaigns

Category: Marketing
Keywords: email marketing, email marketing campaigns, email marketing tracking