This is a guest post by BringShare CEO, Justin Spring.

I don’t need to tell you that email marketing can be tricky.

There’s a lot that goes into preparing a great email … including a lot of guesswork.

It’s hard to know what subject line and content will get the best response. And then it’s even more difficult to measure the impact of each of those things on your success.

But what if you understood exactly what to do to improve your email campaigns? I’m excited to introduce you to a great new tool, called BringShare, that allows you to make smarter email marketing decisions by comparing several emails against each other.

And the best part? BringShare is FREE to all Constant Contact customers.

How does BringShare work?

Looking at the performance of just one email doesn’t tell you what you could have done better. To get this kind of insight, you need to compare several emails against each other to understand how each performs, and which performs best. Using BringShare, you can easily view a side-by-side comparison of each email you’ve sent and make conclusions about what works and what doesn’t.

BringShare allows you to compare multiple emails in a single dashboard so you can make smarter email marketing decisions.

3 minutes to smarter email marketing

Smart data makes for smart decisions. It takes just three minutes to compare your email campaigns using your free email dashboard in BringShare. This will give you everything you need to know about your email performance and how you can make smarter decisions with future email campaigns.

What should you be looking at? Start with these four things.

1. Open Rates – Look at the email with the best open rate. That email likely had the strongest subject line or it was sent at the ideal time. Pay attention to these two elements and see how they compare to your other emails with high or low open rates. See if you can determine a pattern – i.e. the emails with the best open rate had similar subjects lines or were sent at a similar time.

2. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)– This is an indication of two things: either great content or a great offer. Study the emails that have the highest CTR and compare them to the ones with the lowest CTR. You’ll probably see an obvious difference between the two. Better promotional offer? More images? Promotional offer button located higher in the email?

3. Bounce Rate – Are people bouncing off your site? In other words, did they click through to your site and then leave without doing anything? A high bounce rate typically means that you didn’t take them to a relevant page on your site. If your email talks about zebras and they land on a page of your site that speaks about ring-tailed lemurs, that’s a pretty major disconnect and a bounce waiting to happen. Test your links and make sure there is a relevant connection from the email to web link.

4. Sales / Conversions – This is where the rubber meets the road. You have to be succeeding on all of the above in order for this metric to look good. Did you generate sales or leads from your email? If the answer is “no”, and you have a low conversion rate, perhaps you need to rethink your offer, your price, your call to action, or the simplicity of your checkout process.

Make faster, smarter decisions

There you have four ways to start making smarter email marketing decisions. Be sure to check out the BringShare app in the MarketPlace. With the app you’ll be able to track the end-to-end results of your email marketing campaigns from delivery to conversions and revenue all in a single easy to use dashboard.

What data do you look at to make smarter email marketing decisions? Tell us in the comments below.