The point of investing in an eNewsletter is to grow your business and your brand, so it is critical you understand how to evaluate its performance.

An eNewsletter has a couple of major advantages over comparable forms of marketing. The first is the ability to easily personalise the message, the second is the ability to track its performance.

Forget paying for expensive marketing reports from third parties. A good eNewsletter program has built into it the capacity to track the receipt and subsequent actioning of your eNewsletter, as well as provide a report on the performance of each edition and the history of all editions sent for comparison.

That means every time you send your eNewsletter, you will know who is opening it, what they are reading, what they are forwarding and what they are responding to. Good hard data that will let you build on what is working and better meet the needs of your readers, and potential clients.

So, how is it done?

Your eNewsletter is 'tracked' by an invisible image inserted into the email. This image records every viewing of the page and every times a link is clicked on (Click throughs). If the eNewsletter is forwarded, the image is forwarded with it and the action recorded. This is all done by tracing the Internet Protocol address (IP addresses) that views the inserted image. IP addresses are the standard way of identifying a computer that is connected to the Internet, much the same way a telephone number identifies a telephone on a telephone network. An IP address is four numbers separated by periods, and each number is less than 256, for example, 192.200.44.69.

That data recorded through this image then comes back to your program and the statistics on various actions are compiled. If you are sending an eNewsletter, or plan to, the following are the stats you need to look out for.

Unique Opens

Your eNewsletter program will give you 'Total Opens' and 'Unique Opens'. It is important to know the difference and not get blinded by the always higher 'Total Opens' which aren't a true indicator. You see ... Total Opens is the number of times each eNewsletter is opened, while 'Unique Opens' is the number of unique IP addresses that open your eNewsletter. It is an important distinction, as one person opening your eNewsletter three times is not the same as three different people opening it. Think of Unique Opens as Unique 'people' and Total Opens as Total 'eNewsletters' to help distinguish the two.

As a guide, the Australian email marketing industry benchmark for Unique Open Rates is 22.49% (Vision 6 Email Marketing Metrics Report Australia July - December 2006). At Great Look eMail Marketing, our target is 30-35% but when we average results fro all the clients we send eNewsletters for our Unique Open is 40.06%. They may not seem like big figures, but think about the overflowing bins outside the Post Office. Reckon 35% of people read the corporate materials that arrive in their PO boxes?

Total Forwards

This is the number of people who have decided your eNewsletter would be of interest to a friend or acquaintance. This number is pure gold as it means other people are telling their friends and colleagues about your business. This type of WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing is invaluable. And don't get talked into using fancy "Tell a friend" forms for forwarding. 67% of people 'forward' using the forward button in their email program e.g. Outlook (The Aussie Email Newsletter Survey 2007) Why? Who knows a colleagues email address? It's too hard for people and they can't access their address book like they can when they use the forward function in Outlook to forward. A forward rate of 2-3% is good, we aim for a forward rate of 4%.

Click Through Rates (CTR)

If you build links into your newsletter, you can track the number of times each link is followed. This is a true indicator that your recipient is interested in your content, as he or she has had to 'take action' and click on a link. It is a good idea to build links into your content, so you can really drill down and evaluate what is (or is not) working. Plus you can get 'silent' market research on which articles are being read. You might find that it's not worthwhile writing that story about the staff Xmas party? Bench marks for CTR are a little tricky to average as every newsletter different links with different purposes. A restaurant might track how many people click on their menus so 6-10% of readers is good. While a law firm might have links to all their articles so 6-10% would be lousy, they should be aiming for 80%. And if you sell something from your website, wouldn't it be great to know what percentage are clicking on your order links? (64% of people purchase on-line after receiving an eNewsletter)

Amazing isn't it?

Tracking is a real strength of eMarketing.

Electronic delivery provides the capacity to evaluate the performance of your marketing in an extremely cost-effective manner. This critical marketing intelligence was once the sole preserve of high end agencies and large corporates. Not any more!

So get familiar with your key stats and make the most of the data you are getting back each time you send your latest edition. But do not stop at the stats alone. People far more learned than me have been warned of 'damn lies and statistics', so I will just add an eMarketing caveat to their observations.

In the eWorld, your stats will only reflect the activities of people who receive the full graphic version of your eNewsletter. Most of your subscribers will be using a version of Outlook as their email program and recent editions are set to automatically block graphics. This means the invisible graphic that tracks the activity of your eNewsletter will not be downloaded unless the end user agrees to download images. Most readers do chose to but some do not. In this case, no tracking data will be recorded. This is important to consider especially if you have designed your eNewsletter to not be reliant on the downloading of graphics i.e. content rich. This is a good reason to measure how many people click on your links (CTR) as this is independent of whether people download graphics or not.

How do you know what the 'no graphic' or TEXT readers are up to? Yes, there are still a small percentage of readers that choose to get plain text version. Only 8% but these people really want your eNewsletter as they have taken the time to choose their preferred format. But because there are no graphics these cannot be tracked so there are a range of useful strategies to help you assess ALL the activity generated by your eNewsletter, so ensure you tap into these by calculating extrapolated opens to include the text versions.

If you want to get really smart about measuring the ROI (return on investment) from your eMarketing outlay, set up a control group before you send out your first edition. Make sure it includes A, B and C clients and total their revenue for a year. After a year of sending your eNewsletter, total their revenue again.

I'm confident you will be happy with the result.

As well a combing your stats, try these strategies to measure whether your eNewsletter is hitting the mark. Monitor your subscribes and unsubscribes. If people are voting with their mouse, it is time to find out why - the good (new subscribers) and especially the bad (unsubscribes). Make sure you have a program that sends you an email every time someone unsubscribes, and the reason why they are removing themselves. We like to record how many new subscribers join after each issue we send. Monitor your direct responses. Are people getting in touch? If two people a month follow up, then it is delivering clients direct to you. And check where the replies go, and that they are responded to ASAP. These are hot leads, or complaints that need to be addressed immediately. Monitor your competitions. Are people filling in the forms? If they are, congratulations! You have an engaged readership. Make a mistake. The old favourite. Make an intentional slip up. If on-one notices, you may be in trouble! And this also gives you an excuse to send a follow-up email. You'd be surprised how many "Oops sorry we stuffed up" eNewsletter get exceptionally high open and click through results.

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