"I am trying to get to grips with my e-mail service provider and analyse the effectiveness of my campaigns. Which aspects of the data report should I focus on?"

There is certainly no shortage of data from e-mail campaigns. The different e-mail service providers tend to have similar reports. If you're starting out by analysing this data, the trick is knowing "how do we compare?" To an extent you need to run several campaigns to gauge this, but you can get some idea by comparing your results to others in the sector via this e-mail marketing benchmark: UK e-mail marketing report

I suggest you break down your analysis this way:

1. Delivery – does your message get through? We're interested in "hard bounces" which are where the address is unknown. This suggests the account is not live or there is some other delivery problem. If you're in a business-to-business sector you should follow-up on these to try to establish a new contact.

2. Open rate – does your subject line engage? Technically speaking the open rate is based on images downloaded, so with many e-mail readers now blocking images by default this tends to underestimate the number of readers. Still, it is still useful to compare the strength of your subject line and it will also be influenced by other factors like delivery time and targeting.

3. Clickthrough rate – does your creative encourage clickthrough? This will depend on many factors, in particular the power and clarity of the incentive to click. You should check the report, which shows the clickthroughs on different links to see which work best. Some tools offer a visual overlay, which is a great way of seeing which of your messages and calls-to-action are most effective.

4. Post-click tracking – how do visitors engage with the website? Which pages to they visit and do they buy, or complete some other action? These questions aren't easily answered by most e-mail software, but many marketers don't realise they can configure Google Analytics to answer these questions. This requires coding of the links in your e-mail to tell Google Analytics that the visitor to the website came from your e-mail. You can set this up through the URL builder http://www.google.co.uk/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=55578 although some e-mail systems add the necessary codes automatically.

Dr Dave Chaffey is director and lead consultant at Market Insights Limited, an independent digital marketing consultancy, and author of internet marketing books including eMarketing eXcellence: Planning and Optimising Your Digital Marketing, co-written with PR Smith.

You can read more of Dave's Insights on digital marketing on his Right Touching Digital Marketing blog

E-mail your digital marketing questions and problems to Dave at digital@themarketer.co.uk 

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