At this point in the email marketing programme cycle, you will hopefully have sent your first campaign! You may or may not have chosen to implement automation as part of this process; regardless it is vital now that you have built in some time to do the appropriate analysis of the campaign using a pre-defined set of metrics.

Your analysis phase should consist of 2 parts:

• Firstly, there is the analysis to be carried out on the whole campaign and programme to date: Did your campaign deliver to the goal specified at the beginning (e.g. increased customer acquisition etc.)? Were your segmentation techniques effective? Did your content, layout and design produce the required response from the recipient? Were the organisational resources in place to create, manage and deliver the campaign?

• Secondly, there is an analysis to be carried out based on the metrics available to you within Sage E-Marketing for Sage CRM. These are generated automatically from the moment you hit the "send" button. The decision to be made in the analysis phase is what mix of metrics is the most important in terms of representing - and delivering to - your business objective.

Below are examples of the metrics that come as standard:

Between these 2 elements, you should be able to do a thorough analysis and create the conditions to feed this back into your programme design. Over the next series of posts we will take a look at each of the metrics available out-of-the-box in Sage E-marketing for Sage CRM, when they should be used, and the conclusions you can draw from each.