Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Metrics
Metrics
When testing emails, you can examine different metrics.
- Subject lines: You can look at your subject lines, tracking what works and what doesn’t. There’s a variety of ways of doing subjects. Which ones worked? Which ones didn’t? Which ones do you want to try again?
- Offer or content: Again, you’re testing this out, seeing whether the offer sounds good. Does it work?
- Email creative and layout: Does the email content actually have a creative layout?
- HTML versus text: Looking at the code. Looking at plain text. What works really well? Have your people look at your email on the most bare-bones device.
- Email headlines: Take a look at those. Go into different clients and take a look. Your testing is such a massive part of this because it’s where you get to fix things. You get to correct mistakes. You get to iterate. You get to build. You get to see, “Okay, this is what we did before. What can we do again this time in a new way?”
- From address: Test different addresses to see which ones are most effective.
- Personalization: Which types of personalization yield the best results?
How do you track, how you measure? How you use those measurements and metrics to iterate and build and evolve your email marketing strategy really says a lot about the work you’re going to be doing when you’re using email for marketing.
Why is spam testing important?
Spam testing is so important. Your email service providers will help you out with this. Sometimes the rules may change on you. So you’re going to be sending, creating, testing, and sending again. It’s going to be this whole process that’s a cycle where you’re going to be creating content, sending it out, testing it, seeing if it goes in spam folders.
What worked in the past may or may not work in the future. And it’s important to understand that. And it’s important to just be okay with that because spam filters are just trying to help make everybody’s experience with email better. And it’s your job to test, send, create and just keep going through that cycle.
Back to TopEric Stoller
Eric Stoller is a Higher Education Strategic Communications Consultant and Blogger at Inside Higher Ed. With a background in student affairs, academic advising, wellness, technology, and communications, Eric educates clients and audiences on digital identity development. As a blogger, he generates conversations, answers questions, and provides insight about a variety of tech topics, including Social Media Strategies and Email Marketing.

By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
- Evaluate the role of email marketing in demand generation and lead conversions
- Evaluate marketing emails designs and their effectiveness
- Appraise the performance of email marketing campaigns