Email is a personal way to connect with our GABA-CA Women In Business group members. It's how we spread the word about our quarterly events. By integrating email with our email-based discussion group and social networking, it helps us achieve our mission: to create a professional-development community for international women in business. But the question is, how can we measure and analyze whether our email efforts are effective?

Email testing and measurement is a key component to any efficient email marketing program, and analyzing this data can help us understand and better target our audience. In other words, it enables us to create a more personalized experience and more deeply engage with the international business-women who form our community. However, while it's actually easier to measure performance of electronic media, many non-profits don't test email the same way they would a direct mail piece.

Due to cost-cutting and consolidation of administrative activities, the German-American Business Association of California (GABA-CA) recently abandoned Constant Contact for 123Signup, a less expensive email marketing software that is primarily focused on online registration, but does not provide tracking information.

The last GABA-CA newsletter with Constant Contact measured delivery to 3,800 subscribers with a 22% open rate and a 21% click-through rate, but without segmentation of the Women in Business Group subset, or tracking results over the duration of our email marketing campaigns since November 2007, these figures cannot serve as a benchmark.

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The main questions I'd like to be able to answer are:

1. Is the email subject line working? The open rate is one of the simplest ways to evaluate subject lines - if it's around 17%, it's meeting the national average. If the email open rate is less than 17%, it's time to start evaluating whether the subject line is clearly communicating who it's from, and is relevant to our audience.

2. Is the call to action working? The CTR is the number of recipients who click through on a link in your email. Since our call to action is typically registration for an event, we could roughly compare the number of registrants to the number of GABA-CA constituents receiving the invitation. But without knowing delivery rates, opt-outs, and segmentation of the WIB group, it's impossible to calculate an accurate click-through or response rate.

3. Which has better deliverability: text or graphic emails? Although graphic HTML email messages are more attractive, simple text emails can often get through more ISPs. But without the means to test and measure email deliverability, it's impossible to know which version works best for our email list.

Without the ability to measure these results and track them over time, we don't know if our email messages are getting to our constituents properly, how many people are opening them and clicking on links, which messages are most effective, and most importantly, how to improve them.

Do you have any useful tips about how to successfully test and measure email marketing, especially under these restrictive circumstances? Whether corporate or non-profit, share your successes, challenges, ideas, etc. in the "Comments" section below. We'd love to hear them!

Other blog posts in this Non-Profit online marketing series:

• Digital Marketing Best Practices for Non-Profits
• Email-based Discussion Groups for Non-Profits
• Social Networking for Non-Profits

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About the Author

Linda Cleary manages demand generation marketing programs at Lyris, Inc.