As a small business owner myself, I know the importance of spending limited marketing dollars wisely. That’s why it’s so important to measure the results you’re getting.

A colleague of mine says, “If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing” and I agree. That’s one of the reasons I love email. As far as I know, no other form of marketing provides such specific measurable results.

Here are four ways that email marketing with a professional email marketing system helps you measure the effectiveness of your investment:

1. The main thing that any professional email marketing system measures is the number of people who open your email. This is an incredibly important statistic because even if people don’t read the entire email, you know they have seen your name and your branding. More eyeballs equals more business. According to Smart Insights, the average open rate for a marketing email for a real estate professional is below 21 per cent. Some of my clients boast a 45 per cent open rate! If your open rate is low, there are a few simple things you can do to boost it. I’ll discuss these in a future article.
2. Another main measure that the system gives you is the links on which people clicked. This is crucial information because if you don’t know what interests your clients, you risk boring them and then they’ll unsubscribe or delete your email. Use this feedback to give them more of what they want and they’ll keep opening your emails. If you’re going deeper and segmenting your lists, you can send emails that are more targeted to specific groups of people, which tends to boost engagement.
3. You need to pay attention to the number of people that unsubscribe from your emails. It should be about .5 per cent to one per cent with each email distribution. If it’s higher than that, take a look at the email from which they unsubscribed. Was the content not relevant to your database? Are you sending too frequently? Fine tuning your emails will help you retain more people in your database.
4. The other valuable piece of information you get is a list of people whose email addresses bounced. The system will tell you why. The reason you want to pay attention to this is because roughly one-third of email addresses change every year and you want to stay on top of it. You can reach out to the people whose email addresses bounced to get an updated email address. It’s a perfect opportunity to touch base and if their email address has changed because of a new job or other life event, who knows, they may be looking for a new home.

Mark Brodsky

Mark Brodsky has been working with Realtors since 2008, producing monthly newsletters and social media management. Send him an email or visit his website.