How To Get The Most Out Of List Building Statistics

Your listbuilding efforts will be guided by statistics - the number of opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes. The email open rate is generally used to indicate how many people open the mail you have sent them. However, there are conflicting views about how useful this is as an indication of the quality of your message or the appeal of your product or service.

The open rate for an email sent to multiple recipients is the total number of opened emails as a percentage of the total number of emails sent or delivered. The number delivered is itself measured as the number of emails sent out minus the number of bounces. The problem is that you have no indication of whether the email was actually read, until a reader responds with a query or an order.

Also, as many webmail services and email clients block images automatically or recipients may choose to receive text-only versions of an email, it makes the open rate inaccurate. So open rates cannot be considered a definitive measure of your email's success, but it can be useful as a guide. You can use it to test, for example, different formats or subject headers sent to similar groups or at different times.

Email addresses that bounce should not be unsubscribed straight away as there can be any number of reasons for the rejection - servers down temporarily, people putting their messages on hold while on vacation, mailboxes being full. It is best to wait and see if the email bounces again before removing it finally from your list.

To increase the rate of subscribers, use prefilled forms to make the experience easier, or get advice on the usability of your subscription process. There is an infinite variety in sign up forms and most are off-putting if they take longer than a few minutes to complete. Hopefully most people are using Autofill these days.

The frequency of your emails is another hot issue in email marketing circles. According to a 2010 survey, 59% of US and UK Internet Users said the reason for not regularly opening or reading email marketing messages is that they come too frequently. People report that they decided to stop purchasing from a company because of too many or irrelevant emails but in spite of this promotional emails continue to increase. As this is now the recognized major interface between you and your customer, it pays to concentrate on the quality of your message, the professional content of your newsletter, and the careful planning of the timing and frequency of your message.

Consider the marketing statistics as a guideline and when in doubt, go for quality.