The best way to know if what you’re doing is working is to analyze the results. Email marketing statistics should drive your decisions when making adjustments. Here are the main email marketing stats you’ll want to track to make sure your marketing efforts are succeeding. And for reference, check out these industry benchmarks from MailChimp.

OPEN RATE

An open rate is the percentage of people who opened the email from the total number of people who received the email. Having a good email open rate is crucial. If your recipients aren’t opening your emails than they aren’t reading your content. To improve your open rates, look at your subject lines, preview text, from name, and email address. Open rate goals vary by industry, but overall, aim for an open rate of 20-25 percent.

CLICK-THROUGH RATE

A click-through rate is the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email from the total number of people who opened the email. The click-through rate is dependent on what you’re offering in the email and the lead information you provided in the messaging to build to that click. Ultimately, the goal of any email marketing tactic should be to get clicks to the next step.

UNSUBSCRIBES

Unsubscribes, as you may have guessed, are the number of people who have unsubscribed from your emails. With a well-developed list, you should see low unsubscribe rates. However, if this number is high, it’s a key indicator that you need to take a long look at your email marketing list.

There are many different takes on email subject lines and like much of email marketing best practices, you’ll have to trial what works best for your audience. However, there are a few best practices to start with:

• Write for your audience—use language they’re familiar with
• Personalize it
• Keep it short – for mobile’s sake
• Use clear action words

Content that offers value to the customers, for example, a discount or sale would elicit an instant response. But, emails are not just meant to inform customers about offers and discounts.

There is a journey that each brand has to travel vis-a-vis each customer to drive him/her to reach to the end of the sales funnel and ultimately make a purchase.

Through emails, you connect with the audience, build interest in your brand, build trust and then get down to talking about the sale. When you directly talk about the sale, it might generate a positive response once or twice but, to convert that customer into a loyal one, you need to go through this journey.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an end-all, be-all answer for that question. It varies depending on your email list and recipient preferences. To figure out what works best for your readers, try different days and times and analyze the results. As often as you can without annoying your customers. For some companies, this might look like once a week; for others, they can send daily emails while maintaining high engagement levels. This is going to take some trial and error – start slow, and work your way up to more frequent emails, and see how your customers respond.

A/B testing is a great technique for uncovering the best email marketing tactics and timing for your specific audience. You can test everything in your email from template to subject line to headline. Here is a list of some ideas to get started:

• Subject line
• Layout of the message (one-column or two)
• Personalization strategy
• Call-to-action
• Headline
• Images
• Time/Day of week

Keep in mind that you should only test one variable at a time, so the data is clear on what worked, and what didn’t. My advice, test continuously—there’s always room for improvement.

When it comes to email marketing, there is always something new to learn and try. Hopefully, these email marketing questions and answers give you a good start.

Segmenting your email lists will help them reach the right audiences, offer the right promotions, and get better open and click rates. Segmented and targeted emails can increase revenue by 58%, and  74% of marketers say personalized emails trigger more customer engagement. Instead of sending out a batch of emails and hoping that people open them, segmenting your email lists helps drive increased engagement and deliver better quality emails.