Email Marketing Analytics

Monitoring your Email marketing analytics is important, especially when you spend so much time designing and implementing an email marketing campaign that requires a lot of work before you even send your first message.

You might feel overwhelmed when you’re in the middle of it. But once you’ve finished the pre-emptive work and put it into motion, you’ll feel better and start to see some results.

Don’t get lost in the “it’s working” or “it’s not working” mindset. You’ll need to track your results and understand exactly what’s going on with your email campaign. If you’re doing well, or doing badly,your Email Marketing Analytics data will show you what you’re doing right or doing wrong. But the good news is that it’s much easier than before to track your email campaigns and results, and take corrective action where it’s needed.

Data-Driven Marketing

Your marketing campaign isn’t going to work well if it’s based on hopes and dreams. Data is the best option to finding your target market, delivering your brand message, interacting with users and eventually, converting them. Use your collected metrics to personalize your emails, refine your message, create better content that resonates with your audience and build trust with your recipients. Over time, you’ll see sustainable long-term growth for your company.

Email Marketing Analytics: Opens, Clicks And Engagements

While most marketers focus on these metrics, they don’t tell the whole story.

When someone opens your email, you may not know. Assuming you actually got into their inbox, the email must look interesting enough to open in the first place. The open may not register if the images didn’t download, so your metric may not be accurate. You may see a low number, when in fact, the actual open rate is much higher. Some users may open the email, but never click on the CTA.

Clicks mean that not only did someone open your email, they clicked on your CTA link. This is a little more accurate, since they had to open the email in order to click.

The last metric is conversion–how many people not only clicked on your CTA link, but actually did what you asked them to do. This is a better analysis of how well your email campaign did, and how far into your sales funnel these leads went.

The best metrics to track are:

• Individual email metrics: how many emails you attempted to send after telling your email system to suppress a certain group or number after you completed your segmentations.
• Email channel metrics: the collective number from all of your email sends, measuring the performance of your emails that communicate with your contacts. You can determine:
• How well your campaigns are working
• How well your email is helping leads move through your sales funnel
• How you can use email to drive traffic to your offers
• How it impacts your business
• If your database numbers are going up or down.

You’ll be able to see how well your campaigns are doing and how well they’re working for your business.

• Email health metrics: what happens when you click “send?” Deliverability, inactivity (including the dreaded “greymail,” the email people actually receive but never open), bounce rate, unsubscribes and spam notifications will all tell you who to eliminate or suppress to improve your success rate. Why market to people who will probably never read it?

These email marketing analytics metrics will give you a better sense of what your campaign is really bringing in, so you can determine your next steps.

Consider including these metrics, too:

• Clickthrough rate
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• List growth rate
• Email sharing/forwarding rate (are you encouraging your readers to share?)
• Overall ROI

List decay is another metric you’ll need to keep an eye on. As a rule, your list degrades at about 23% per year, and for various reasons. Your bounce rate will show you who’s changed emails and didn’t update their account, or left their job and didn’t tell you. Your unsubscribes will tell you who isn’t interested anymore. And there may even be some spam complaints involved. Left unchecked, without growth, your list may decay into almost nothing. So you need to continually generate new leads to replace these “drop-offs.”

Having a better understanding of the contacts in your database will help you better engage with them. You may not be able to retrieve some of your lost leads, but you can work toward keeping the ones you have while generating new ones.

Email Marketing Analytics

So, what do you look at when an email campaign isn’t doing as well as you’d hoped? Some things to examine:

• The subject line: this is the first thing people see when your email arrives. Is it interesting? Does it grab the reader? If it doesn’t catch their attention and offer them value, they’ll pass it up. Short, and “non-salesy” subject lines that are on point can help your open rates. If it works, great. If not, experiment with it, one thing at a time.
• Subscriber expectations: Readers may be receiving too much email from you, or you’ve fallen into the dreaded “graymail” category. Maybe it’s time to change the way you email your list.

Consider these issues and possible solutions:

• Options: offer your readers a selection of the types of email they’d like to receive, so that they’re not getting every single email you send out. Offer the opportunity to receive certain types of emails, (i.e., promotions, product updates, content, etc.) a monthly newsletter, or any combination. Let them tell you what they want to read. You’ll keep subscribers, you’ll have more data for segmentation and you can better target emails and offers to them.
• Tell them why they get your emails: this is how you end up with graymail. If they’ve purchased from you, or subscribed previously, mention this: “You are receiving this email because you. . . .” Many may not know how they started getting your emails, so let them know.
  • Did you purchase your list? These people didn’t opt-in, and they’re not opening it.
  • Did they not realize they were being subscribed? See if, or how, these people are engaging with your email.
• Fatigue: you are sending way too many emails! Back off a little, send fewer emails to your list, and see if your open rates increase.
• Contact non-engagement: create a list of these readers who haven’t opened your emails in the last 90 days, and send them a “re-engagement” email. Offer them something very interesting that will catch their attention, with content, personalization and language geared toward re-engagement.
• Your offer isn’t relevant: this is where segmentation really matters. Was the email sent to the right person? How about the content–was it relevant? Was this an email intended for leads, but sent to current customers? These are the kind of things you should examine closely to make sure you’re not sending your emails to the wrong groups of people.
• Deliverability: is your list current? Have you purged out the bounces? Is there something that’s keeping your emails out of someone’s hands? Are you flagging the email server with something that indicates it might be spam? Address these issues before your next send.

If you’re seeing good open numbers but low click rates, here are some other things to review:

• Your CTA: make sure your CTA is easy to see, clear and stands out. Otherwise, your readers will pass it up. Is it obvious what you’re asking them to do? If not, it’s time for a refresh to make a clear, precise CTA.
• Too many things going on: if you have multiple CTAs in your email, you are offering too many choices, and the reader isn’t sure what they’re supposed to be doing. Add only one CTA to your email, and make it clear what you’re asking of the reader.
• Not optimized for mobile: with more than 50% of emails opened and read on a mobile device, your email should be mobile-ready as a matter of course. If it’s not readable on their phone or tablet, chances are, they won’t bother with it. Mobile-optimized templates solve that problem.
• Non-matching subject line and content: these two items should always be synced. An open rate means nothing if your reader opens it up and doesn’t find any value inside. There’s no engagement, and you’ll likely lose that contact. Don’t write an attractive subject line for an email that doesn’t offer them value. If the value of the content isn’t attractive enough for a reader to open and engage with, reconsider it.
• Non-matching email and landing page: same situation, different location. Don’t send a great email that goes to a bad, or different, landing page, and isn’t aligned. The same is true if you have a bad landing page. Make sure that your landing page offers the same value as your email says it does. If your landing page has a high bounce rate, you need to revise it–quickly.

The landing page for your offer should contain the following elements:

• A clear, persuasive headline
• Discernable accentuation of the offer’s value
• No links to the menu or for navigation
• Length of the form matches the offer’s value

Conclusion

As powerful as email marketing is, “cross your fingers and pray” should not be your best strategy for any campaign. Research and testing on the front end give you somewhere to start, while email marketing analytics give you results to review and use to continue and/or improve your results. If something isn’t working, you can change it, and the data will give you somewhere to start.

Need understanding your email marketing analytics? Just give us a call at 5402595001 for a free consultation. Contact us today and to find out how we can raise your company’s online profile, and help you get more customers. You can also message us on Facebook.

Other articles about Email Marketing: Email Marketing Pro, Lifecycle Marketing, Contact Management Segmentation, Email Functions and Design, Email eMarketing Essentials, Email Lead Developer, Email Testing and Optimization, Email Marketing Analytics, Email Marketing Best Practices

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