Murmurs

The Marketing Institute, eConsultancy, Mailer Mailer and more are all great sources for email marketing reports and metrics.

There’s no substitute though for real data from a business’s own email marketing campaigns.

Campaign Monitor is a very popular and well-liked email marketing application. It’s cost effective too at 5 US Dollars per campaign + 1 Cent per recipient.

Campaign monitor have an API, meaning that you can develop a software programme to connect to your campaign monitor account and collect some information from it, this is often used to keep a business’s local database up to date.

I was curious to see what kind of information was available through the API so I made a small programme to collect several previous campaigns and see if I could compare them to find which the most successful campaign was.  Is a campaign with the highest open rate the best? Or a campaign which promotes the fewest unsubscribers? Or a campaign which prompts the most forwards? Or perhaps a campaign which has the highest open rate compared to the original size of the list of recipients.

This is what this application does. It will collect a few of your most recent campaign monitor campaigns, collect the number of unique opens, the number of bounces, the number of unsubscribers, calculate the open rate, compare it to the size of the list and show you which of your email campaigns was the best.

It then shows you some details about that particular campaign such as day sent and time send and encourages you to do the same again to try and replicate the same success.

Their API is pretty good and it’s easy to work with. They have their API well documented and provide information and samples for a range of languages that a developer might like to use to connect to their system. If you have any questions for CampignMonitor, they’re very active on Twitter and answered me quite quickly when I asked some initial questions about their API.

There are limits to their API, which was a bummer for what I was hoping to develop. Using their API you cannot access the email content of a previous campaign. I would have liked to see the content of previous newsletters to count the number of words, links and images. If you were one business accessing your own campaign then you would probably have access to your own previous email content anyway.

You can get a summary of each email campaign. It includes information such as subject,  date/time sent,  total number of opens,  the number of clicks, the number of bounces and the number of un-subscribers.

The ‘Total number of opens’ counts every time the newsletter was opened, including if the same person opened the newsletter a dozen times. Strangely, the ‘number of clicks’ counts differently. If the same person clicks a link in the email multiple times it still registers as one click.

Luckily, an API function exists to delve deeper into the Total opens (which I didn’t see at first) and find out who opened the email and how many times they opened each one which allows the Open Rate and the Click Rate of an email campaign to be calculated.

It would be fantastic to see when these users opened the email or when they clicked on links, it would be a great source of information. Its available inside Campaign Monitor but not via the API. It would be a great addition to the Campaign.GetSubscriberClicks function which shows a list of subscribers who clicks links, which links they clicked and how many times.  I see in reports that much of the readership activity of an email newsletter happens within the first 2 hours of a campaign. It would be good to see real world confirmation of this through the API.

In working with this API, I learned a few things that I hadn’t considered until I could see a grid of raw data in front of me. For example, if you send out an email to a few people, and they all read it and forward it to a few friends then your open rate will be above 100%. That’s great but you can’t expect every campaign to have this effect. So what was in that campaign that had such a great effect and how to do it again or how does one get those new readers that have been forwarded to, to sign up?

If you have a Campaign Monitor account, try out the application to find out which of your own email marketing campaigns was the best.

One of the ideas I had for my own software offerings was to create a email newsletter testing or validation service. A service which would allow people to send a copy of their email newsletter to a specific email address and receive a reply showing how their email newsletter worked in several of the popular email clients and desktop apps.

I did a little searching using Google for email newsletter testing / validation and I didn’t find anything similar to what I was aiming to develop. It seemed to be a promising idea.

Unfortunately, a couple of days later while searching for email statistics, I came across litmusapp.com which offers browser testing and email testing too.

Its a great service, I’ve signed up to their free account to see how well it works. The free offering tests a newsletter in Outlook 2003 and Gmail. The paid accounts offer a lot more.

You can send your email to a specific address and in a few seconds you get a reply. You can view your newsletter in Outlook and Gmail and also view how your newsletter looks by default, in text mode or html mode.

Its a great service, if you’re sending out newsletters I highly recommend it.