"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." That's a great quote that every email marketer should be intimately familiar with. Email analytics are a critical tool that, when used right, can be both your crystal ball and your marketing budget ATM card.

The savvy email marketer knows that developing a targeted email campaign goes beyond simply segmenting by demographic and focuses on behavioral segmentation, which enables delivery of the most relevant, targeted messages to your recipients. How does one track behavior? Just look at your email analytics reports (aka your crystal ball). Intelligent email marketing requires different tactics for follow up and re-engagement based on previous actions, but if you are not capturing any of these analytics all of this might really sound like magic.

A recent survey by my company, eROI, looked at how marketers were using -- or not using -- email analytics to measure campaign success and improve their overall marketing strategy. The final results reveal some interesting habits, showing that an alarming percentage of marketers are still taking an extremely careless approach to email marketing.

Cover these four key areas of knowledge and awareness and you'll have a firm handle on your email program.

Know how to keep score
After your campaign has launched, it's time to follow up by analyzing the metrics. But what do they all mean? How can you improve each one? And which should you really be paying attention to? Here's the breakdown:

• Delivery rate: Take the total number of emails successfully delivered (sent minus bounced) and divide it by the number of emails sent.
• Open rate: Emails are encoded with a tracking pixel. So when a recipient opens an email, the tracking pixel is called from the server, and an ''open'' is registered. Note that if images are blocked, you can't track an open.
• Click-through rate: Take the number of unique clicks in an email and divide that by the total number of delivered emails. Links are tracked the same by default in email marketing platforms.
• Conversion rate: Take the total number of conversions, however you define a conversion (e.g., sale, downloaded whitepaper, watched a video) in an email campaign, and divide it by the total number of delivered emails.

Email marketing works because it takes guessing out of the equation. Benchmarking, then testing, is the true solution to nearly any weak metric in your email marketing campaigns.

To see a more detailed list of metrics, common challenges and how to improve each one, please download the full report from eROI.

Beware instant gratification and missed opportunities
While it is quick and easy, the shotgun blast approach will ultimately cost you more than you realize -- lost subscribers, defamation of the company image, higher sending costs, and attrition from more campaigns needed to re-attract prior customers.

Instant gratification also applies to the metrics that receive the most attention. Open rate, followed by click rate and open-to-click ratio, are shown to be the top three metrics to marketers.

These metrics ultimately give you the least amount of insight into the true success of your campaign. Open rate is not a reliable metric. Click rate is better, but unless you can tie those clicks to dollars, campaign ROI can still be tough to prove. However, the ''brand engagement value'' of a click is extremely important and often discounted.

Another major opportunity missed is conversion tracking. A big surprise in this survey was the fact that about one-eighth of all email marketers are not tracking conversions. Of those, the majority don't track conversions because of time or budget considerations, but, shockingly, about one-quarter aren't tracking conversions simply because they do not know how.

Know what's really valuable
Prioritizing these metrics will eliminate missed opportunities in follow-up and nurture campaigns. Drilling into segment-specific metrics will show you the path to delivering the most efficient, targeted and relevant content, in turn increasing statistics across the board. Tracking the campaign source of your conversions shows what campaigns are the best at generating revenue.

Positive and negative clicks are important as well. Having a high number of clicks and a high click-to-open ratio are good, but not if all those clicks were on the unsubscribe link, or on a less valuable tertiary call to action, like a logo linking to your home page. When you drill into click-through and open-to-click rates, positive vs. negative clicks is a much stronger indicator of campaign success.

Sharing is caring… about getting the budget you want
So now you should have a better grasp on email analytics. You have ways to find the best nuggets of data, but what's the next step? If you're like most email marketers, it's time to share the results with:

• Executives: 75 percent of email marketers share campaign statistics with executives. Drill deep into the most important business analytics (not all of them) and use the information to prove online marketing ROI and brand engagement value. This can help make your case for budget increases, showing the value in your email marketing program and the strategy and tactics around it (ATM card!).
• Corporate marketing: 60 percent of email marketers share campaign statistics with corporate marketing. Share successes or failures with the marketing department as a whole. This unifies the team, and allows marketing as a whole to build upon messaging or content that is successful and refine or change that which has not worked. Expand on wins and strengthen weak spots in the program, as a team.

Having a little savoir-faire when it comes to analyzing the most important metrics will help you improve not just your email marketing campaigns, but your entire marketing strategy.

Jeff Mills is director at eRoi.