Over a lunch, of what now I wish had been nuts and grass, I had an interesting discussion with a friend on weight management and diet. I wanted to know his secret of losing 8 kilos in 2 months. As is usual in such cases, the losing party is enthusiastic and the gaining party is subdued. As I sat and listened with a subdued mood, I realized Email Marketing too has a lot to do with his secret. Downing another sugared-piping-hot-boiled-to-death chai, my mood was lifted as I began to think of Email Weight. What is Email Weight? Let me explain.

Many of us have a half acknowledged feeling of guilt about our weight. It’s like a fog that quietly creeps and settles on our conscience on Sunday nights after dinner. It’s a small persistent voice that tells us that we’ve had a tad too much to eat over the weekend. Weight creeps slowly on us till one day when we rummage around for that old denim jeans and realize that it no longer fits. The key to weight loss as my friend said, was a Digital Weighing Scale. Not analog, but a good digital weighing scale. Every few grams that my friend lost, he felt more successful. Even from an 80 Kgs to 79.9 kgs was a success since he was in the “70s” now. Every milestone made him even more motivated than ever. More than his diet or his healthier lifestyle the one thing that made a difference to his weight was that he could measure his progress to the gram. That he said was his secret. It is one thing to have a small voice telling you to go slow on the dessert to manage your weight, and quite another to regularly measure and improve your weight.

What you can’t measure, you can’t manage. Email Analytics Measurement Coming back to Email Marketing, the question I asked was what is your Email “Weight”? To answer that question you will first need to measure Email Marketing. Consider these Email Health Questions: “Do you measure your open rates and click rates? Do you know what Open rates you want to reach? What will you consider a good open rate? What will you consider a satisfactory click rate? What is your Email Cost per Click? How much time does an email newsletter visitor spend on your site vis a vis a display ads?” Only when you measure them can you guage how effective this channel is. You might say, that since we are into email marketing we naturally talk a lot about it and yes, maybe glorify it.

So here are some statistics. We measured the performance of Email vis a vis the other digital marketing channels. We measured the goals on the website like registrations, newsletter subscriptions, white paper downloads and cost per click across the channels. You can also measure time spent on website, pages viewed per visit etc as your benchmarks. Here is a telling report from our own Digital Marketing exercise: You see? Email has performed significantly better for us. Do you have an unhealthy email weight? You have an email weight problem if you are If you are never going to measure consistently some defined key parameters that make your email marketing a success you will be disappointed with the results. The key to having a healthy email weight is to measure, measure and measure.