Oh, for the good ol’ days of email marketing. You remember those days—the ones where customer engagement meant opening, clicking, and forwarding. Back then (okay, it wasn’t that long ago) determining the success or failure of your email campaign was as simple as monitoring a few key metrics. Today, customer engagement is a whole different ball game.

Open rates and click-through rates are still the foundation for gaining an understanding of subscriber engagement with your emails. However, the advent of social media has not only introduced another dimension to the engagement dynamic, but has also subtly shifted subscriber expectations as they interact with your brand. Let’s take a look at what today’s subscribers expect from the emails you send them.

• Human Interaction

Consumers today won’t be impressed by a virtual billboard delivered to their inboxes. They want to feel as though they’re interacting with a real person, someone who cares about their needs and with whom they can discuss and relate. Humanize your emails by occasionally including personal stories and anecdotes, encouraging interaction, and providing timely responses to subscriber questions or feedback.

• Dialogue

Social media has changed the way people view businesses. No longer can advertising focus on one-way communication; people expect the opportunity to respond, share opinions, and provide feedback. If you don’t talk to them, they’ll talk about you to someone else. For email marketing, that means soliciting subscriber responses, promoting social sharing, and demonstrating benefit to the customer rather than spotlighting the company.

• Multi-Channel Communication

Your email subscribers undoubtedly encounter your brand in a multitude of places outside their inboxes including Facebook, blogs, review websites, your company website, and Twitter, not to mention more traditional advertising forums like television and print ads. Consumers today are looking for a cohesive message and they’re looking to be recognized for their loyalty no matter where they encounter you. Capitalize on this tendency by integrating the various prongs of your marketing strategy and by providing opportunities for subscribers to share content over a variety of venues.

• Relevancy

Perhaps the greatest shift in email marketing is the expectation that content by personally relevant to the subscriber who receives it. List segmentation based on subscriber behavior and profile data enables you to target your messages to the people for whom they hold the greatest appeal.

Today’s email subscribers hold their information closer, demonstrate less loyalty to any particular brand, and expect businesses to earn the right to continue communicating with them. eConnect Email can help you create personalized, relevant messages for every subscriber using our advanced list segmentation, dynamic content options, and social sharing capabilities.

How successful is your email marketing campaign? That can be a tough question to answer, especially since so many elements must work together to create measurable success. The real question, then, should be how you can quantify success in order to know when you’ve got it and what you can change in order to generate it. And that’s what testing is all about.

Before you start testing every metric out there, let’s take a look at two of the most important measurements of email marketing success as well as some of the elements you can test to determine how you can improve.

Open Rates

Sometimes viewed as the holy grail of email marketing, open rates let you know just how many people actually open the messages you send. There are three primary elements you can test to improve your open rates:

• Subject Lines

Test content topics such as price, incentives, benefits, and offer end dates. Also, test different wordings once you’ve chosen the content.

• Sender Name

Try using your company name, a person’s name, or a combination of the two as your display sender. Beware of making drastic changes too frequently, however, since your subscribers may not recognize you or you may be tagged as spam.

• Send Dates/Times

It’s usually best to test just one element at a time (i.e., either date or time, but not both) in order to get a true picture of when you’re likely to get the most opens.

Click Rates

Click rate refers to the number of subscribers who click on a link within your email once they’ve opened it. Here are a few elements you can test to boost your numbers:

• Link wording

Keyword-rich links tend to do better than simple “click here” links, but the important thing here is what works. Test several options to find out.

• Link color

Make sure your subscribers can recognize your clickable text as a link. Test basic blue against other colors, perhaps matching them to your overall color scheme.

• Call to action

Call to action tests can deal with wording, button size, button placement, color, and several other elements. Get creative to determine what elements you might change to produce the best results.

There are plenty of other elements and metrics you can test to boost the success of your email marketing campaign. The important thing to remember is that testing is the only way you can gather the information you need to achieve that success. Take advantage of the testing options available from eConnect Email to view vital stats in real time as well as printable reports and campaign statistics.