Email marketing is a fundamental part of marketing strategy for many businesses. The channel has proven itself as a strong way to reach consumers directly and has been a key player in marketing efforts over the last few decades.
For businesses refining their email marketing approach, it’s crucial to make room for evaluation. Reviewing analytics will help your team determine how effective your efforts are and discover areas for growth. These growth opportunities will provide a starting point for making changes that will best support your improvement.
To start, you must understand the various performance indicators used to measure email success. After deploying campaigns, email platforms will often provide insights on delivery, open, and click-through rates. These analytics are key to understanding your audience and the impact of your campaigns.
Maintaining Your Audience
Deliverability Rates
Before measuring the impact of your emails, you first must ensure that your campaigns are reaching inboxes. Pressing “send” doesn’t guarantee your audience will receive the message, so you want to track your deliverability rates regularly. If you’re noticing a good amount of your emails not being delivered, there could be issues with your campaigns that are preventing deliverability.
Sender reputation is a big factor that could impact your success in this category. Aspects like spam complaints and unsubscribe rates can both harm your reputation and decrease your deliverability rates.
If you’re struggling to pinpoint the main cause of your deliverability issues, teaming up with an outside agency may help you further dissect your analytics. Agencies like Hawke have full teams dedicated to analyzing your campaigns and discovering growth opportunities. Agencies bring value by helping you weed through technological challenges and improve your overall strategy.
Spam Traps
As you’re tracking deliverability, there are behaviors from your audience that not only affect your sender reputation but also give insight into needed strategy changes. Spam complaints and traps often indicate that your methods aren’t up to industry standards and are bothersome to your subscribers. For instance, if you’re sending too many emails, there’s a better chance of your subscribers marking your campaigns as spam.
Sending a small amount of emails on a sporadic schedule can also harm your brand, as consumers may forget they subscribed in the first place. Keeping track of spam records month over month will give you perspective when planning your email calendar and making decisions to add campaigns.
Subscriber Insights
One of the most important components of your email marketing success is your ability to maintain subscriber loyalty. Consumers always have the power to opt-out, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on this metric. Subscribers are often turned off when too many emails are sent or if the content they receive is irrelevant to them.
Spikes in your unsubscriptions will clue you into the deployments that didn’t land well among your audience. If you notice a lot of unsubs after a monthly campaign, that could be your sign to revisit the strategy. Sending every email to your entire database can also do some harm. Focusing on audience segmentation will help you space out your campaigns and target consumers who are more likely to engage.
Performance Metrics
Open Rates
Once feeling more confident in your deliverability, it’s time to take a look at your engagement. Open rates are a key indicator of how your audience reacts to seeing your brand in their inbox. If you’re trying to increase open rates, consider experimenting with send times and subject lines. A/B tests are the perfect way to test how your audience will respond to different copy and changes in your strategy.
However, while analyzing your open rates, keep in mind that these statistics highly depend on the email service provider. Apple Mail, for example, has restricted its analytic services due to privacy. Their changes have caused all email accounts to show as openers, which may skew your data.
Click-Through Rates
Diving deeper into your campaigns, your click-through rates will tell you how people interact with your emails once opened. Click-through behaviors depend a lot on your content and your audience’s desire to engage more. Analyzing these rates will help you determine the success of your creative material.
Low click-through rates may indicate your content is not resonating with your consumers or a lack of call-to-action. Emails that are too long, for example, may hinder your impact if your audience needs to scroll to see special promotions. This is another area where A/B testing can help you experiment with a different approach.
Email Revenue
At the end of the day, you want to feel confident that your marketing strategies have been worth the effort. If your business is promoting online sales through your email campaigns, you can easily track conversions you get from deployments. Utilizing an API or link tracking within your email builds will help you track the actions your customers take after clicking through your email.
At the end of every month, assess your tracking and the number of people who started from the inbox and made it to “Check Out.” Reviewing these conversions will provide a better glimpse of how successful your efforts are and pinpoint the value of email marketing in your business. The success of the aforementioned performance indicators will influence your revenue, making each metric crucial to your overall success.
All Pieces of the Puzzle
Several components play into the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. It’s essential to pay attention to all metrics and how they can boost or hinder your performance. By taking a step back to look at your strategy at a high level, you can gain knowledge of the weaknesses of your approach. These learnings will help you make decisions to best improve your efforts going forward.
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