Business owners and marketing directors rarely take the time to sit down and craft that perfect email. I'm talking about a marketing email that conveys enthusiasm, personality and also has a call-to-action designed to increase engagement and sales. I swear, lack of time is the biggest reason for spam emails and bad blogs. Keeping ahead of the curve and having time to revisit your marketing, at least a couple times before hitting the send or post button helps ensure your brand doesn't take a hit. Having your target market and audience personas in front of you when you write your emails helps as well.

Here's the thing. Email marketing is one of the best marketing methods you have to generate leads and convert prospects to sales. Research shows that one out of nine sales made online was initiated by an email marketing campaign. To ensure the best results using email marketing, you have to keep track of what worked and what failed so that you can improve. Beyond adding personality and speaking to your prospects in the right voice, here are areas where the monitoring your email marketing analytics and making adjustments can improve your sales.

What is an Email Bounce/Delivery Rate?

These two metrics mean people did (delivery) or did not (bounce) receive your email marketing message.

The delivery rate is simply just the percentage of individuals who received your message. For a successful campaign, you should have an email delivery rate above 95%.

Bounce rate can be either soft or hard. Soft bounces are where the recipient temporarily can’t receive the message – such as when their inbox is full. A hard bounce is a symptom of when your server is blocked from sending messages to their server or incorrect sending details.

Statistically, 83% of bounced emails are not delivered because the recipient has used a free service to report your ISP. If numerous people do this, you can gain a bad reputation. This doesn’t happen unless you’ve been previously sending low-value emails.

Avoid this by sending out email marketing messages containing valuable information for your potential clients like “what a color to paint your room to make it look bigger”. Topics like this are what people will want to read – rather than one that just asks for their credit card.

List Growth Rate

Calculating the rate that your list grows is an important aspect of your email marketing campaigns. The average list grows by about 25% every year. Unfortunately, the average email list has a dropout rate of 25% as well.

If you finding that you are not achieving that you, your business could consider one of these to improve results:

•    Creating a more enticing offer to encourage visitors to complete the sign-up form. i.e. a free e-book on trending kitchen cabinet designs.
•    Increase web traffic  – by utilizing your blog and social media platforms drive more traffic to the offer landing pages
•    Page optimization –you might need to optimize your page so that fewer people are distracted, and more are funneled down to fill in the form.

Email Marketing Click Through rate

The number of people who click through from a ‘Call-to-Action’ is typically called the Click Through Rate (CTR). If you have a high CTR, you know that the offer was enticing if your rate is rather low you will want to improve it.

One of the problems that you could have is that you are sending the same email marketing message to one large list.

Attempt to separate the list into different groups, such as ‘Previous Clients’, ‘Requested Decorating Quote’ or ‘New Signup.' With each list send a particularly targeted email that will resonate with their current position in the sales process.

You should expect a CTR around 4.8%.

Email Conversion Rates

Determining the number of people that buy from an email marketing message is an important metric. The value of the sales also indicates the revenue per email sent.

Get the best results from your email marketing campaign by directing readers to a landing page that is aligned to the message. For instance, a message in regards to the best colors to paint a living room should send readers to a page that is about living room decorating services.