Whether you are starting with a consumer email list or a business email list, campaign metrics and measurements are a continual work in progress. With countless possibilities for determining a campaign’s effectiveness, some online marketing groups have even proposed standardizing metrics.

Monitoring a few simple metrics, like those below, will not only provide adequate analysis of your consumer email campaigns and business email campaigns but insights for implementing more successful future efforts. The below metrics will also be helpful to judge over your consumer email lists or business email lists that you are using for your email campaigns.

Bounce Rate – The key measurement of deliverability, regardless of if you are using consumer lists or business lists. When it comes to email, there are two types of bounces – hard, for messages that cannot and will not be delivered and soft, which get delivered to a full mailbox but should eventually be read. Bounce rates vary substantially after releasing both consumer email and business email, so this should be monitored over several days.

Open Rate – Once your email gets delivered, does the subscriber open it? The primary marketing control over open rate is subject line wording. Low open rate? Conduct some subject line testing. Run an A/B test to see which subject line prompts more opens.

Click Through – This metric is a bit tricky and can be divided sub-metrics. Ideally, you want to set a baseline and then follow which clickable links from your email subscribers used to access your site until the trail ends. The tricky part is assigning each link an individual tracking code to get the most accurate analysis possible.

Conversion – Most often associated with e-commerce sites, conversion has a broader scope that can apply to any campaign. Start by figuring out exactly what you are hoping to convert; a sale, contact, or site traffic. Then divide the number of conversions by the total emails sent out from your consumer email list or business email list and you’ll determine the conversion rate.

Cost Per Click – Since money is the bottom line, determine how much your campaigns cost versus the subscribers’ overall response to the email. Think long and hard about this one factoring in the time spent on design, building and releasing the email. CPC should be as low as possible.

With a feel for these basic metrics, you can move on to more in-depth analysis with the aid of an online marketing guru or email service provider and get down to the basics of how campaigns using your consumer email list and business email list impact subscribers and ultimately, your business.