Do you know how much revenue do you bring in through your email program? Are you earning back what the company spent on you?

In this article Loren McDonald tells us that we need to run some diagnostics on our program and determine the key drivers of our program's successes and failures.

There are lots of these diagnostic-type metrics, but let's take a look at four examples: share of e-mail, list activity, subscriber drop-off and deliverability. They aren't designed to tell you if your e-mail program met its goals. But they will help you uncover problems or weaknesses and develop strategies to improve them:

• Share of e-mail: do you know which links (products, offers and articles) consistently drove the most traffic or conversions?
• List activity: do you know how many readers are still opening and clicking six months after they sign up and which ones are basically just valid addresses in your database?
• Subscriber-interest timeline: when does interest drop off to the point where subscribers don't actively open e-mails or act on them?
• Deliverability: is delivery going down steadily or does it ebb and flow?

Read the full article here.