There are many ‘untruths’ floating about in regards to your email marketing solutions. Will shrink the ‘wooden nose’ on some of those not-so-truthful ideas, as they pertain to your email marketing solutions data. Being aware of these common errors will help you be a successful email marketer.

The amounts of delivered emails your emails turn out are not an accurate figure. So let’s get in a little closer on what it means for an email to be ‘delivered’. The most important thing to know about this is that your delivered statistics DO NOT take into account the addresses that were relegated to a contact’s junk/spam folder or those that were deleted without being opened. Your statistics are likely more inflated than the truth.

The only way to get real statistics on the delivery of your emails you’ll need to look for some of the services offered that monitor in detail the delivery of your emails.

As strange as it sounds, your data has a lot of hidden meanings. Taking a magnifying glass to them will certainly show you how your emails can be even more successful.

The averages and percentages that get returned to you from the emails that you send out are for the most part amassed from your entire contact list. Therefore, by not looking any closer you’ll be glossing over some of the different reasons your contacts have opposing reactions to your emails. By zooming in on those percentages you might discover that a chunk of your contacts are all under a certain domain (like att.com or comcast.com). If these portions of email addresses are generally not opening your email, you now can determine that there is something ‘off’ with the deliverability of emails to those domains. What is more important, you can understand how to fix the issue and therefore have better results from your campaigns.

It is also important to review your open rates with a fine toothed comb in order to get a more accurate measure of how many active readers you have. By looking back to see the trend in your open rates you will probably see that they tend to look similar with some small variation as time goes on: 25%, 24%, 26%, 22%, 25%, 27%, 26%…etc.

It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to determine just by looking at that line of numbers that the average number of people opening your email per campaign is 25%. It is certainly possible that this number reflects your readership. However, what is more often true is that your contacts are opening your email at an inconsistent rate. This means it is better to look back at which of your contacts are opening your email over a period of a month, or over the last three email blasts. You’ll find that your number of consistent readers is 1) higher and 2) more accurate.

This is because your contacts might no necessarily open the email EACH time you send it. It is far more reasonable to conclude that they might be busy sometimes, or on vacation. In other words they might not have time to read the email one week, but have plenty the next.

Variations also happen because of the differences in your contacts’ wants and needs. As a result, this is key information to use to send them emails that speak to their interests. Here’s an example to better illustrate the point: If contact ‘A’ only opens your emails when you offer a dessert special at your restaurant; and contact ‘B’ only opens your email when you offer family dining promotions then you now have a better understanding on how to target these contacts’ wants.

Paying attention to email marketing data is easy, but takes a bit of time. It will help you determine how to find greater success with your email marketing solutions by targeting the needs of your contacts with more efficacy.

Rudy Barell is a Senior Business Development Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing solutions used by businesses around the globe. Experience how easy it is to build your mailing list, create eye-catching emails and track your success using detailed reports with the complete email marketing program. Try it free!

The people who put the most effort in their email marketing solutions find the greatest success. That’s not just common to email marketing, that’s practically the way everything works! Here are a couple of ways to work a little bit harder and get better email marketing results.

If you are in the process of finding out how to make your email marketing software efforts more effective then, you’ve probably already heard that a key to success is separating out your contacts that have not responded to your emails in a reasonable amount of time. So you probably already know that the purpose of this is to send that groups an email that will re-initiate contact with them (if you didn’t know this, then just pretend you did, because I am going to briefly explain how it works anyway). Whether that means sending them an email asking them to click on links they might have interest in, or requesting that they re-new their sign up to your newsletters and promotions. This is a smart way to begin creating a more refined contact list.

Common email marketing solutions knowledge dictates that an in-active contact is one that hasn’t responded (by clicking on the links in your email or even opening it) to your email in any fashion over a defined period of time. We’ve also just discovered the importance of sending these contacts an email to determine whether or not they are inactive. The truth is, before you can make such a determination, you need to know how a contact opens their email so that you do not mistakenly remove someone who you THINK is in-active but is in fact an avid reader of your messages.

There are a percentage of people who do not download images in their email programs. The way that tracking open rates works, is that they will not be counted on your data for opens if subscribers do not download the images. However they will still be able to click on the links in your email. So if you attribute your success based on open rates, you might be doing even better than you think! You should also change your strategy to considering both your open rates and the clicks. You will get a much more correct understanding of you which contacts are not active by using the opens and clicks data in your email marketing solutions account.

Before deleting an inactive contact make sure you have taken the time to determine that they REALLY are inactive: give them a chance to re-confirm their interest through one or maybe two emails that are designed to get them to take action, like signing up again to the list or clicking on a link that might be of interest to that contact. Then look through your metrics and see if they haven’t opened or clicked on your email so that you can delete the ones that haven’t.

Also, pay closer attention to ‘unsubscribes’. Low unsubscribers are not necessarily a sign of success, so its time to modify your tactics if that’s where you’re at. One of the main reasons is that there are people who tend to use the ’spam’ or ‘junk’ link to indicate that they want to be rid of an email. This is doubly the case for contacts that do not trust a certain sender.

If a contact presses the ‘junk’ or ’spam’ button, they will not register as someone who has unsubscribed. So, if you are judging your success by the minimal amount of ‘unsubscribes’ you receive, you might not have an accurate picture of what is actually going on.

Again, it’s better to concentrate on data like ‘opens’ and ‘clicks’ to determine your success. Successful email marketers are always finding ways to analyze their stats to create a higher quality, and more targeted list of contacts. Understanding the truth about the stats you receive will help you create a higher quality contact list and offer you greater email marketing success.

Rudy Barell is a Senior Business Development Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing solutions software used by businesses around the globe. Experience how easy it is to build your mailing list, create eye-catching emails and track your success using detailed reports with the complete email marketing solutions software. Try it free!