When measuring the success of email marketing campaigns, the metrics most often tracked are open and click-thru rates. While those are noteworthy statistics, unique clicks to unique opens which I call the Engagement Rate is a very important, yet often over-looked measure of the overall success of a campaign. 

Most companies calculate click-thru rates as the number of clicks/number of emails delivered (clicks either being total or unique).  What the click-through rate doesn’t provide insight to is the percentage of overall readers who find your email useful or relevant. 

The click-thru rate doesn’t distinguish between a scenario in which you have 10 subscribers (an anemic number for a list but it makes the math a lot easier) and 1 user clicks on 10 links in an email and 9 subscribers open the email but do nothing and a situation in which all 10 subscribers each click on a single link.  In both cases, the number of clicks is 10 and the number of opens is 10; however, I would argue that in the later scenario, you have a higher level of engagement with your readership because each of your subscribers each found something in your email of relevance.

That doesn’t mean that traditional click-thru rates aren’t important, but the tracking the engagement rate will help you make sure that you are providing value to as many of your subscribers as possible.  If your engagement rate is low or declining, it may be that you campaigns are too general and you should offer multiple, more targeted emails or try segmenting your audience and include more specific content. 

In any case, the engagement rate provides another way to look at how your e-mail campaigns are performing and that additional insight will help you make them even more effective.

When creating your next email marketing campaign, make sure you carefully consider these 5 questions:

1. Are you providing value to the recipient?  Before you hit the ’send’ button, make sure that your email is providing some value to your audience.  Don’t send a campaign just because you haven’t done so in a while.  That would be a waste of both your and your subscribers’ time.
2. What are the specific goals for the campaign?  Don’t implement campaigns just to give the appearance of marketing activity.  You need to know what ultimately defines success.  Is it an online sale, offline sale, having someone forward the email to a friend, traffic to your website, etc.?
3. How are going to measure success?  You need to have tracking in place so that you know if you accomplished your goals.  Open and click-thru rates are important, but you need to know if your campaign ultimately achieved whatever conversion goals you set.  Any decent web analytics application will allow you to set-up campaign tracking to make it easy to track and compare the success of your email marketing campaigns.
4. Is your website ready to receive the traffic?  Have you given thought to where you are sending traffic from your email and did you make sure that the landing page relates specifically to what the user clicked on?  Does the landing page have a clear call to action?
5. Are you testing some variable of your campaign?  Test subject lines, call to actions, landing pages, delivery times and other elements of your campaign.  With each campaign you should learn something new that will help improve the performance of future campaigns.