Opens, clicks and conversions are three of the most important figures when it comes to email marketing.

Think about it like this:

FUNNEL DIAGRAM

All three are tied together. Although conversions (tied to revenue) is the ultimate goal, by measuring clicks and conversions you can start to undrstand where along the funnel customers are getting lost. This lets you come up with testable hypotheses:

• Are they not opening your emails because the subject lines are ineffective?
• Are customers ignoring your emails becasue you send too many?
• Do customers open your email but fail to click because they're generally in the middle of something else: interuptting their day.
• Is your CTA too weak, do customers not know what to do next?
• Perhaps your goal is incongruous with your email and landing page, meaning customers get lost between clicking and converting.

These sorts of insights are powerful.

OPENS ARE USUALLY UNDER-REPORTED

To track opens, a small image is inserted at the foot of your outgoing email. Most providers will do this automatically (if yours doesn't, get a new one!) This works very well unless customers have their images disabled. With up to 60% of customers have clients that block images by default, this is not that uncommon.

This generally means that your open figures will be under-reported. This isn't the end of the world but it's worth noting as it will influence how you interpret your data.

UNIQES VS. TOTALS

Unique and total clicks can be important figures. Unique is generally the most important as it lets you know how many recipients engaged with your email but, as you grow, it can be useful to look at how many times a customer opens an email as this can sometimes be an indiciator that a customer has forwarded your campaign to a friend or a series of colleagues.

This great case study from Tzvi at Userlicious is a solid example of a situation where total opens and total clicks would have been very interesting metrics: as the campaign mentioned a 'special coupon' for the recipients' corporation only it is likely they would have forwarded the campaign to colleagues who could also benefit from the coupon. In this instance you'd see a series of opens all tied to one recipient.

Always think about which metric is relevant for the campaign at hand.

HOW TO TRACK CONVERSIONS

Tracking conversions can be one of the trickiest elements. Ensuring you tag all links in your outgoing email campaigns with Google's UTM tags is a must.

This will allow you to track conversions using segmentation in most popular analytics tools, particularly in Google Analytics.

Say, for example, you have defined a goal in Google Analytics for 'completes checkout', like so:

When you view goal completions for this event you can break down which customers came from which campaigns, including those that clicked through from one of your emails:

ATTRIBUTING CONVERSIONS GA

In most email marketing software you can automatically append UTM tags. In Vero you can enable it from within the admin section:

Within Campaign Monitor you can do the same thing:

The same methodology can be applied with tools such as KISSmetrics and Mixpanel, along with high-end tools such as X and Y.

Some email marketing tools will also give you the ability to track conversions inside their own interface. This can be really powerful as it lets you see conversions side-by-side with opens and clicks and, with the right configuration, can be more accurate in terms of true attribution (more on that in the next section).

Here's an example from Vero which lets you track customer actions and use these to measure email marketing conversions:

By defining a conversion event you can see the true impact of your campaigns: would you rather have 100 clicks and 2 conversions or 40 clicks and 30 conversions? Tracking goals gives you the ability to make more informed decisions each and every time.