E-Mail marketing gives the ability to track performance in depth allowing you to optimize or even change your email marketing strategy. You can find out how best to communicate to your customers by creating a test plan, examining the results through tracking and then optimizing emails.
The key metrics that may be used for E-Mail marketing are

1. Deliverability
2. Bounce Rates
3. Open Rates
4. Click-through Rates
5. Forward Rates
6. Opt Out Rates

Improving the Deliverability of Emails:
Not all emails reach their destinations. You can increase that number by having your emails certified or accredited by a third-party agency.
This is taken as a positive sign by people who guard their inbox; including ISPs, webmail providers, and anti-spam technology providers. When it comes to assessing whether to filter them through to recipients or dump them as spam, certification gives your emails favorable treatment.

First, consider your current deliverability:
At Small Biz Express, we recommend you to find out the percentage of your emails that are reaching inboxes. The delivery rate reported by your email marketing service or software is only telling you how many sent emails didn’t come back as undeliverable. An anti spam mechanism might have been triggered by some of the so-called delivered emails that eventually found themselves deleted or rerouted to junk folders.

There is no fail-safe way to measure inbox delivery success, but you can use an inbox recording service to get a good idea. For each of the important address domains found in your list database and the delivery success, your list should be estimated as a whole.
You most probably have a delivery problem with Hotmail if your average open rate is 20%, but only a 1% open rate across all hotmail.com addresses.

How an improved deliverability helps:
You will obtain a metric on the success of your email program; leads produced per email sent, revenue per email sent, etc.
Your successes and failures help you target potential customers that will help you earn your profits, thus, it is important to track them
Your delivered emails, depending on the agency involved may now have:

• Enabled images instead of blocked ones
• Activated links instead of suppressed ones
• Attached icons indicating authenticity or a trusted sender

Bounce Rates
Bounce Rates are an important metric in online marketing. They inform you of the quality of the email list you possess.
The bounce rate tells you what percentage of addresses didn’t receive your message because it was returned by a recipient mail server. In this case, high bounce rates will impact your campaign because:

• Your sender reputation suffers when bounce rates are high.
• You delivery rate suffers when messages bounce.

It is essential to keep your mailing list clean. This refers to deleting the email addresses on your list that continue to bounce. No good addresses slow delivery to valid addresses and damage your sender reputation.
There are two categories of email bounces.

• A hard bounce refers to those messages that were returned by a recipient server because the address is invalid because the domain name doesn’t exist or the address for that domain isn’t recognized. A hard bounce would be returned, for example, if an address on your list was entered wrongly as info@yourcompany.cim rather than .com.
• A soft bounce is returned because of a temporary problem with the email address or recipient mail server. When a recipient’s mailbox is full, for example, the server will bounce the message back to the sender. Here, the address is valid, but there is something temporarily preventing the message from getting to them.

Understanding Open Rates
Marketers use open rates as a measure to indicate the number of people that view or open the emails they send out.  It also suggests how effective your subject lines are or if you were able to convince customers to open your email.

A tiny, invisible tracking image is requested by a piece of code included by your email service when it sends out your email.
The recipient’s email reading software sends out a request to the email service when it tries to display the email on the screen for the tracking image after reading that piece of code.

When the service receives the request, it records it and uses it as a sign that the recipient has opened the email. It also tells you exactly which recipient’s emails were opened.
The whole process takes place in the background while the email recipient is unaware of all this.

However, there are a few disadvantages of relying solely on your open rates:
First, the fact that your email was opened is just a mere indication that the recipient’s software displayed the email and a tracking image was requested. However, it doesn’t mention anything about whether the recipient actually read or engaged with your email in any way.

Second, even without the recipient seeing the email, the tracking image can be activated. A prospect can highlight an email on your screen and even delete it through the preview function available with some email providers it, without ever looking at its content. However, the preview function only means that the email client has tried to display the email and it is therefore registered as an “open”, even though some of those recorded opens are from recipients who never even looked at your email.

Third, sometimes an open is not recorded even if some recipients read your email. This happens because of the fact that an email service can only track the open if the tracking image is requested. The piece of code that reports the track is an HTML code. Therefore, the image code is never requested if your recipient gets text-only emails. No image request means there is no record of an open. Your recorded email open rate will then miss out on those people.

Many email clients refuse to display images. Therefore, images are ignored even if the email is opened. Consequently, even though the email is read, an open is never recorded.

Using Email Open Rates:

• Extreme open rates (open rates where your rate is zero or close to it), are a clear indication that something is not right. Explanations for this are obvious; for example, people might have got text-only messages, or your messages don’t reach Yahoo clients. It could also mean that you have an inherent problem with your subject line or the information you provide.
• The effectiveness of your subject lines can be checked with open rates. For example, if you sent Email A,  with one subject line and Email B with another, and Email A had an open rate of 45% whereas Email B only had 14%, then clearly Email A’s subject line is better.
• The effectiveness of your subject lines can be pointed out by following your open rate trends overtime as well. You may have a problem with reader fatigue in case your open rates are declining steadily. We recommend you to look at different parts of your emails and lists; certain lists may have lower open rates or certain headlines may have higher open rates. Use the statistics to isolate the cause and learn lessons that you can apply later on.

Average Open Rates:
You can’t compare the open rates of other campaigns to yours even though people often want a benchmark to gauge open rates. This is because:

• Different marketers calculate open rates in different ways. The most common approach is calculating the number of opens expressed as a percentage of the number of emails delivered. Others may count an open every time an email is opened. Some never count more than one open from each recipient, dealing only in unique opens. You need to know how your service or software calculates your numbers when it comes to interpreting your own open rates. You can make a better judgment as long as you know how you calculate open rates.
• Open rates for different types of emails and addresses differ in terms of quality. The benchmark figures are based on different lists and emails. Comparisons only make sense in case of similar emails. An average open rate would indicate little about what you might expect. Nevertheless, for instance, benchmark and average email open rates do allow you to follow email marketing trends. At Small Biz Express, our guesstimate for an opt-in e-mail campaign is 25%.

Improving Open Rates:

1. Improve your strategy- This is a basic concept. Send engaging, useful and relevant emails to the right set of people at the right time. Consequently, your open rates will rise.
2. Improve deliverability- You have a better chance of people looking at your emails if you deliver more of them.
3. Target customers- You are more likely to have customers that open your emails if your targeting is better.
4. White list- This will help you avoid spam filters set up by that individual. This means that the images that were previously blocked in your emails will now be displayed by their email service, thereby allowing the tracking image to be requested and included in your open rate report.
5. Good subject lines- Open rates are driven by subject lines. Good subject lines lead to good open rates and vice versa. Pay attention to the from line as well. We believe that this will help you to establish a good position in this field.

Click-through rate
You calculate click-through rates if you have links in your newsletter or email, and if you are interested in knowing the newsletter’s effectiveness in getting subscribers to click on these links. This will help you to modify your content by tracking changes and differences.

A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if a banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and one person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1 percent.

In order to understand which topics and information elicit the best reader response, click through rates can be useful. Differences between results presented by other publishers may arise because they define and calculate their click-throughs and metrics in another way.
Clicks are not an end in themselves. The point is to get the visitor to act over something i.e. buy a product, once they’ve reached the destination URL.

Click-throughs say nothing about the value of that click even though they measure the short-term effectiveness of your newsletter in convincing someone to follow a link. Besides, they mention nothing about long-term benefits.

Average Click-Through Rates:
Similar to Average Open Rates, you cannot compare businesses because there are so many variables regarding the content, topic, audience, ads and the layout of your page.
How to Improve Your Click-Through Rate:

1. Generate targeted traffic, maintain visitors on-site, attract them to navigate through a functional site with a simple, clear and uncluttered design.
2. Ads should be placed on the page in places that are more visible than others, as shown in the Google’s heat map This is because ad placement is very important.
3. A high CTR can be obtained mainly through Ad Relevance. An ad has a better chance of being clicked if it is closely related to the topic.
4. Placing page graphics and pictures next to your ads and on your web-site will have a profitable outcome. However, don’t place too many pictures.
5. At Small Biz Express, we suggest you to track the performance of your click-through rates. This will help you isolate those campaigns and designs that don’t work. You can test various templates and decide which works best for you.

Forward rates
Your reports may include the percentage of recipients who forwarded your email to others. Forwarded emails are a great indication of the success of your campaign. But the numbers are usually depressingly low.
It can also be misleading as for many services and software, forwards are only calculated when a recipient uses the formal forward to a friend feature that might be inbuilt in your emails. If recipients simply hit the forward button in their email client, it isn’t measured.
Chances are, your reports underrate the actual number of forwards. Before making changes to your campaign due to the results, check how your system or software measures a forward.

Opt Out Rates
Opt-in email advertising or permission based marketing is the process of broadcasting advertising messages via electronic mail wherein the recipients of these ads have expressed consent to receive them.
The opt-in process necessitates a potential prospect to select the products or services they want to subscribe to. The benefit to this tactic is that an individual who has expressed an active interest in an offer is a more qualified potential prospect.
Opting out is  when customers decide that they would no longer like to receive updates on your services or products and they filter you out. This is the opposite to the opt-in process.

Tracking a trend is trivial because it tells you of those prospects that do not want your services or products and lets you narrow your database. It also informs you of how effective your email marketing campaign is; whether your templates are appealing and whether you are sending your messages to the right groups.

Lowering your opt-out rates:

• Don’t take took too long to contact your prospect. When marketers take a few weeks or even months to follow up with prospects that have given their consent, prospects usually opt-out. Make contact immediately and establish a connection so they remember what they signed up
• Emailing too frequently is another Don’t. Its a complex issue; if you email too often, you push away your customer. If you email too rarely, they forget about you. Your best bet would be to let recipients dictate how often they want to hear from you. A proactive way to avoid opt-outs is to provide them frequency choices when they sign up; i.e. click here to subscribe to updates- daily/weekly/monthly.
• If your recipient is no longer interested in your product or service then maybe your prospect opted in when she was researching a purchase that has since been completed. Or maybe she went with a competitor. In this case, it’s if your customer purchased something yesterday, they might not purchase again for six months, but you still want to keep them involved. In that case, you want to move them to educational rather than promotional messages until they reach the end of that product’s life cycle.

Conclusion:
As in all facets of email marketing, we believe that testing is important. Without testing your email campaign would become stagnant and soon show a decline in profits. At, Small Biz Express, we believe that tracking your email campaign can prove highly profitable to your business. E-mail tracking allows you to monitor your email campaign. Open rates, click-through rates, forward rates, opt-out, opt-in rates, and bounce rates are good indicators of your overall success rate. Thus, it is crucial to check these routinely.