Wendy Roth writes a great piece for iMedia Connection on the core metrics every email marketer should measure. She states some of the clear and obvious ones, but also discusses some that are very important and often are overlooked. The top 7 metrics to watch on Wendy’s list are:

• Delivery
• Opens
• Clickthroughs
• Funnel navigation
• Conversions
• Unsubscribes
• Spam complaints

These are all key metrics in measuring the true performance of your campaigns and more imporantly giving you the data you need to accurately tweak and optimize your efforts. One of the metrics that stood out to me was “funnel navigation” which essentially is the path that your customers will hopefully take to the point of converting. As Wendy mentions, its important to keep an eye on where your users are going off the click and hopefully to the point of acting on whatever your conversion event is, a sale, an RSVP, a lead, etc.

Here is a graphic used in Wendy’s article that helps visually show the funnel navigation process:

Its very important to watch where your recipients are going once they click. We always advise on the path of least resistance, meaning make your funnel navigation path as short and as sweet as possible. Guide your customers to where you want them, clearly and concisely. Watch what works and change what doesn’t.

Check out the complete “In Focus” series by Wendy Roth “Email Marketing: What to Measure”

I am featured in today’s iMedia Connection article “Using Behavioral Targeting with Email” by Robert Moskowitz. Robert talks about the use of various behavioral targeting tactics marketers are using and the effectiveness of such strategies.

Anytime you can mine more information, particularly user behavior, from your customer database, you increase your chances of successful conversions. Targeting and relevance play a huge roll in the way more sophisticated email marketers are using the channel.

One of the key advantages to email and online in general, as I point out in the article, is that marketers have the flexibility of testing various behavioral targeting strategies to small segments of their database. If a particular tactic is working then you can deploy it on a larger scale, and if not, you can easily drop it with very little risk.

This quote from Jupiter sums up the importance of taking behavioral targeting seriously in your email marketing efforts:

“…when marketers actively target their email campaigns to specific behavioral and demographic characteristics, they can produce more than 18 times the profits that broadcast messages produce, according to Jupiter Research.”