You’ve been meticulously crafting your newsletters and other email campaigns. They take hours to put together.

You choose each article and piece of content carefully.

You pick the right images to go along with your message.

You are SO proud of the copy you put together.

It’s all done, double-checked, tested and you got the nerve to schedule it or hit send.

Then….you wait.

Wait for what you’re not sure.

The money rolling in. The knocks on your virtual door to hire you. The order numbers ticking up and up and up.

If that’s you: AMAZING!

Or maybe you want your emails to start earning EVEN MORE.

MORE MONEY!!! Yes, please!

That’s why we’re doing this, right?

You’ve been pouring all of this work, dedicating all of these resources to your email campaigns, and you’re just not sure if it’s what your audience wants or makes them want to buy.

Don’t worry. I got you on this.

Here are the THREE WAYS TO KNOW IF YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS ARE WORKING.

GOALS

Most people pay 100% attention to the open rates of their emails to understand whether or not their subscribers are still engaged and interested in their email content.

Yes, email open rates are a good barometer to judge whether or not your list is engaged, but they’re not the end of the story. There are a number of factors that I’ve covered in other emails/blogs that determine an open rate.

So what do you pay attention to instead? Well, it depends on your goals for your email campaigns.

Most businesses do not have clearly defined goals for their campaigns, so measuring them becomes difficult.

If goals for your emails are more orders and you see a high click-through rate but no orders, then you know something fell short.

If the goals for your email campaigns are to build brand trust and visibility, then open rates would be an excellent way to measure whether or not people like your content. If your open rate stays steady, you’re doing something right. If it starts to drop, then something else is going on that needs to be looked at.

MICRO-SURVEYS

Asking your audience’s opinion about your brand is HUGE ask. One that needs a lot of incentive for your audience to feel compelled to let you know how they think.

That’s why you see either 5 stars or 1 star reviews. People need to be motivated to take the time to write out a review. If they really LOVED the experience, they’ll shout it out. If they really HATE the experience, they’ll FOR SURE shout it out.

Try creating micro-surveys embedded in your content.

You can ask a question like, “How did you enjoy this?” with an image of a smiley face and an image of a frowny face.

Those faces can link to a simple landing page on your site with the words “Thanks for the feedback!” Make sure they’re two different pages though. The copy can stay the same.

You can measure the success of the content by how many people clicked each link.

It’s not perfect, but it’ll give you a snapshot of how your content is performing.

UNSUBSCRIBES

Don’t take it too personally, but people will unsubscribe from your list.

It’s just part of being a person in this world. People are going to float away eventually for reasons that usually have nothing to do with you.

HOWEVER, if you see a jump in the amount of people unsubscribe from your email, then it’s time to take notice.

If it’s more than your steady trickle, then something is up with your content.

That’s your three ways of knowing if people are into your email content.

The more people you have your list and the more often you send, the more you’ll be able to see trends and notice when something seems out of whack. Once you have a baseline, you’ll be able to see the bumps that tell you when something either worked really well or not at all.

YOUR HOMEWORK:

Look back at your last 3 months worth of email campaigns. What trends do you see? Average open rate? Average clickthrough rate? Average unsubscribe rate?