Let’s say that you have established your list, and you have hundreds of subscribers on your list by now. You have sent a few emails to your list, and you have seen that some of them are responding positively to your offers.
What should you do now?
Well, what you should do right now is to add more subscribers to your list and keep on sending valuable emails to them. But, most importantly, you have to start tracking your metrics.
What does it mean?
It means tracking your list building performance to know exactly your success rate. By tracking your metrics, you will be able to know for sure whether your emails have a good response rate or not. In this way, you will not just be measuring your success based on your assumptions, but on the real statistical data that you have from your autoresponder provider.
Here are the benefits of tracking your email marketing performance:
• You know exactly the performance of your campaign based on real data, not an assumption.
• You will know the open rate, conversion rate, subscription rate, and unsubscription rate of your campaign.
• You can improve your campaign effectively.
• You can split test your campaign and see which one performs better.
It is recommended that you don’t track your email marketing campaign when you are still in the earlier stage of your list building journey. For instance, if you still have about 20 subscribers on your list, it’s not important for you to track your campaign. Instead, it is more important for you to add more subscribers to your list.
Also, you don’t need to be too obsessed with the tracking part of your list building campaign. While tracking can give you valuable real-time data, it doesn’t determine the success or failure of your email marketing campaign. Tracking will only give you relevant data. The success of your campaign will depend on the way you keep your subscribers interested in your emails.
About Split Testing
If you want to track your email marketing performance effectively, you should do it with split testing. Split testing can help you to determine which variant of your campaign gives you the best result. You simply run two campaigns at the same time, and you will see which one is better.
After finding the better one, you will split test that campaign with another campaign. You do it continuously until you can find a real winner for your campaign. Then, you will stick with it for a long time, as you add more subscribers to your list.
These days, most of the popular autoresponder systems have built-in split testing functions that allow you to improve your email marketing results considerably. You can test a wide variety of options, enabling you to figure out the best way to improve results.
The method for split testing varies between the different providers. Most of them should offer step-by-step tutorials on how to do it. If yours doesn’t, email them and ask them for help using the feature. They should be more than willing to help you set up an A/B split test for your list.
Let’s take a look at some of the things you should be testing in order to improve your overall email marketing results. These are just a few of the many things you could test, but they are some of the most important.
Which day of the week do more people tend to open and read your emails?
What time of the day are people most responsive?
What type of subject line works best for your list?
Which name should you use in the “From” field? Should you use your company name or your own name?
Does your list prefer newsletters or offers? What type of offers do they respond best to?
It is recommended for any new internet marketers to split test their campaign as quickly as possible, once you’ve reached at least 1000 subscribers.