You can use the statistics facility to check how many visitors have come from emails; however this is not always easy to work out; as each email provider will send visitors from a different web address.
By creating new copies of your web pages, with a slightly different address for each email; you can track exactly how many visitors and page views are coming from your emails. E.g.: Duplicate your page sales.html with a page named sales-email.html, and point only the email links to that page.
Question Tracking
This is the cheapest form of tracking, but it is also the least accurate and will gain the least results. You simply ask your customers and visitors whether they read or responded to your email!
For the time and effort involved in asking and logging the answers you get, you may as well spend a small amount to get accurate email or website tracking.
Responses
It is rare for any email marketing campaign to get a response rate of above 10%; in fact, if you use a bought in list the average can be around 2%. However, as with all types of promotion, that figure can vary drastically depending on any number of factors.
Remember that even though most people did not respond, a large number will have seen it. This helps remind those customers of you, and they may be the people who respond next time.
If you are sending an email with a good offer/promotion or details of a new product, you need to consider whether you are prepared for a big rise in enquiries. If your email marketing works brilliantly, would you then be risking disappointing those customers by having too few staff or too little stock?
Simply adding a line to the effect of “Stock is currently limited on this product, we are doing our best to get new stock as quickly as possible.” could help prevent customers that miss out from feeling annoyed. Make sure you avoid what a large DIY retailer did a few years ago. They promoted fantastic special offers which were all but impossible to actually get stock of in store; this created a public outcry and severe bad publicity.
