By Richard Buss

Email marketing can be a powerful way to boost your business, but establishing a campaign that works isn’t always quick and easy. Tracking these three key metrics will help you improve your return on investment.

List growth

The larger the list, the more revenue it can generate — but only if the email addresses on the list belong to “pre-qualified” buyers. A list containing 1 million addresses will do you no good if a large percentage of those addresses are invalid or belong to people who aren’t interested in your product.

Don’t add email addresses indiscriminately under the assumption that the law of averages is on your side. The open rate — the percentage of recipients who actually open the email — is far more significant than the number of opens.

Though nobody really tracks open rates in the aggregate for adult entertainment, good open rates in the gambling, gaming and photo-and-video sectors range from 18 percent to 25 percent. Shoot for that neighborhood. Once you can claim an open rate in that range, grow the list in such a way that it maintains approximately the same open rate.

If your list isn’t growing, neither is your potential customer base.

Click-through rate

Click-through rate, or CTR, is the make-or-break metric. No matter how many recipients open an email, if none of them clicks any of the links inside, the email has been a waste of time — theirs and yours.

How do you convince a recipient to click through? There’s no surefire technique, but a killer subject line helps: Make a promise, ask a question, offer something free. Then, lead the potential to your site by following the subject line’s hook with a bigger hook. Tease the email recipient all the way to your website’s front door, but use a little finesse. Too much teasing can wear out a person’s patience.

A good baseline CTR for any industry is 2 percent; for gambling, gaming and photo/video campaigns, a CTR of 3 percent to 3.5 percent is exceptional. If you’re hitting that mark or exceeding it, pat yourself on the back.

Conversion rate

Getting email recipients to your website is only half the battle. The true test of any campaign’s effectiveness is whether they take action while they’re there. Optimize landing page(s) so customers can’t wait to join, buy or do whatever else it is you want them to do.

Just make sure you deliver whatever the marketing email promised. If you don’t, the readers who followed your breadcrumbs will never darken your virtual doorway again.

No reliable baseline data for conversion rates exists for any industry, and certainly not for adult. Typically, true conversion ratios are closely guarded secrets, and there’s no way to verify self-reported data.

Set a target that seems reasonable based on performance of past email campaigns, and tweak and test until you increase the conversion rate to a point that delivers the kind of return on investment your business needs to succeed.

Richard Buss is the senior account manager for YNOT Mail and director of products and services for YNOT Group LLC.