192. Email Marketing › how it works › getting startedIf the recipient has given permission to be sent marketing messages by email, discussionthen it is not spam. Users give permission when they tick a box that says “Yes, When is email an email,please send me offers from your company by email”. The email address can and when is it spam?only be provided to another company if the user ticks a box that says “Yes,please send me offers from third parties selected by you by email.”Permission must be explicitly given to the company to be allowed to market tothat user. Trying to gain explicit permission in a sneaky way will only annoy yourusers, and might result in your emails being marked as spam.An email’s spam score can be checked at http://spamassassin.apache.org 6. Email AnalyticsAs with all things digital marketing, tracking, analysing and optimising is keyto growth and success. Email tracking systems produce statistics in a user-friendly manner.Key measurables for understanding the performance of email campaignsinclude: • Number of emails delivered. • Number of bounces (and this should be separated into hard bounces and soft bounces). • Number of unique emails opened: an email can be delivered, but not opened. • Unsubscribes: significant or consistent loss in subscribers is a key indication you are not meeting the needs of your subscribers. • Pass on rate: high pass on rate (forwards) indicates that your list values the content enough to constantly share with others. Putting an easy “forward to a friend” link in every email can increase this. discussion You’ll want to measure this link specifically. Adding a sign-up link to Open rate does not forwarded emails will organically grow the opt-in list. necessarily indicate • Clickthrough rates and conversion: These measure the effectiveness whether or not an email of an email via the links placed in the content. When a reader clicks has been read. How do through to a web page, these can be easily measured as a percentage you think a marketer can determine if emails are against the number of delivered, opened or sent emails. It reveals being read? which content or promotion was the most enticing for the reader.Some metrics are more useful than others. A good example of this is themeasure open rates. Emails are tracked using an image which gets downloaded,but many email desktop clients block the downloading of images. This meansthat people may be reading a text only version of your email.What you should be interested in is what activity takes place based on an email.So you’ll need to track leads or actions. You can do this through link tagging 189