By Mark Brodsky

Once you’ve done all the work on your email newsletter and sent it off, it’s easy to move onto the next project and forget about it. However, you could be missing out on valuable information that can make your future emails much more effective.

Every time you send out an email with a service such as MailChimp or iContact and likely even some CRM programs, the system generates a report with statistics: who opened your email, when they opened the email and most importantly, what they clicked on.  The majority of your results will come in within the first 72 hours.

This report should also give you information about what email addresses are no longer in use so you can remove them from your list. You should also be able to see who forwarded your email to a friend or colleague, which gives insight into who’s really paying attention.

Why is this information valuable? It’s as good as people telling you directly about what they are interested in.

The two categories you should be paying attention to are open rates (the percentage of people who open your email) and click-throughs (the number of times people click on a link).

Open rate: Knowing this figure is important because it helps you gauge whether you’re generating more interest, less interest or remaining consistent. The average open rate is 20 to 22 per cent. If you’re getting less than this, it’s time to take a look at your subject line, content and timing. All can be adjusted to increase the number of eyeballs seeing your emails.

If you’re around there or above, great. Now the important thing is to maintain it. The systems make it easy to compare from month to month where your readership is. However, this statistic isn’t absolute – it’s tracked based on a small graphic in the email. If people have images turned off, it won’t register as an open.

Click-throughs: This is where you’ll get the most valuable information. Each time someone clicks through to an article you’ve linked to, they’re giving you specific information about what they’re looking for.

You can use the statistics to switch up the types of articles you’re featuring in your newsletter. Keep what works and lose what doesn’t.

Knowing these numbers allows you to refine the content of your emails to increase your open rates and provide people with information they want.

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