There can be little doubt that email campaigns have swiftly become the marketing managers best friend. The apparent cost effectiveness and speed of preparation has been difficult to resist. No longer does regular contact with customers require enormous lead-times, printing and postage costs. From conception to completion, email campaigns can in some cases take little longer than a day or two.

But for many organisations the missing ingredient to really successful email campaigns is adequately assessing what email is actually doing for them. The biggest plus point with e-marketing after all, is the ability to track, analyse and learn all manner of key information regarding campaign performance. Through performance measuring, details such as delivery, open and click-though rates should be considered elementary. There is evidence however, that many organisations don't even measure these basic indicators. Instead, they simply put faith in the modern marketing approach and believe it's the way things are done. Crudely relying this type of rule of thumb measuring and simply attributing an increase in sales to a recent marketing campaign can obviously be dangerous, leading to mistakes in future campaigns.

Sophisticated email campaigns planners are not only measuring the basics but also joining this up with website analytics. In many ways marketing emails should be considered as an extension to a website, attempting to seduce potential customers so that they click a link and continue through to a predetermined goal. These very same web statistics can also highlight some unexpected results. After all people may be ignoring the campaign goal and instead making a purchase elsewhere on the site or indeed making no purchase at all. Marketing managers should also be asking themselves if sending out an email midday on a Friday produces a bigger response than first thing on a Monday for instance. Simple technical issues can also come to light such as web server performance during times of high demand? Occasionally it may emerge that visitors are initially gathering product information and purchasing several days later? These are just a few examples, but there are a multitude of questions we can and should be asking.

The electronic feedback email provides is in any case where its strength really rests. By ensuring emails are adequately tagged and monitored, tapping into this data gives marketers an opportunity to learn something about their customers and to hone future campaigns for even better results and therefore good return on investment (ROI). Unlike traditional marketing methods where such instant, quality and in-depth information is rarely available, or at best a little unreliable.

How email recipients respond and the subsequent actions they take is becoming much more important than just the measurement of click-throughs etc. There is little use in getting all excited over basic click data without following the entire trail to its logical conclusion. High click-throughs could just mean someone did an excellent job on the email creative side, yet some other factor effectively spoilt the party. Often it may just be that something fairly simple needs modifying or tweaking in some way. Just a few small adjustments here and there can have a dramatic outcome.

For those who want to get the most out of their email campaigns its essential that conversion tracking along with post click and post view are properly monitored and analysed. Post click illustrates the actions of web site visitors after clicking through from an email, whereas post view provides details of the people who visited the web site at a later date. Adopting this kind of 'proof of the pudding……' approach has to be more logical. It is after all results that count not meaningless statistics.