Email marketing is one of the most measurable marketing tactics on the planet. You can track everything from who opened and clicked your campaigns to where the subscriber lives and which links they clicked on.
But, as marketers, we need and want more detailed insights, especially when it comes from a channel that’s as powerful as email marketing, delivering an incredible ROI of $44 for every $1 spent.
Sophisticated marketers are looking beyond traditional vanity metrics and are digging into engagement trends that look at the health of their email lists, performance of their campaigns, and segments allowing them to gain valuable insights that shape their evolving email marketing strategies. But data and analytics can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t know where to get the data and what to do with the results.
This guide will explore why analytics are critical to your email marketing strategy, show you the most insightful metrics to measure, and give you resources to take action on the results to drive your business forward.
Why insights are critical to your business
As a marketer, tracking all your email analytics can often be a challenge. However, tracking the performance of your email marketing campaigns in aggregate is important for a number of reasons:
Like most marketers, you’ve probably got a lot of things to do and not enough time and resources to do them. Because of this, the key to your success is focusing on the strategies and tactics that drive results and not spending too much time on those that don’t. By measuring the performance of your email marketing, you can see how it compares to other channels (like social media, PPC, content syndication) and better prioritize your time and efforts to drive maximum results.
In the past, we may have looked at our email performance in a one-off, campaign-by-campaign basis, looking at how each campaign performed in a silo, but truly understanding our analytics and trends at an aggregate level is critical to inform our email marketing strategy. If you only look campaign by campaign and are not measuring engagement growth over time, you could be missing out on valuable insights.
The more effective approach is to take a step back and look at which engagement and acquisition strategies are working better and why to inform your decisions.
Using analytics to drive strategy
To get the most from your email marketing, you need easy-to-understand yet powerful insights that are actionable. Most marketers don’t have time to spend their days bogged down in spreadsheets pouring over email analytics.
In the past, email reporting has been lackluster (mostly reporting vanity metrics like open and click-through rates and not much else), which caused many marketers to focus on basic email metrics like the number of subscribers, opens, and clicks.
But sophisticated marketers need to go beyond opens and clicks, as an authentic email marketing strategy is about long-term subscriber activity, engagement trends, email list health, and optimization. By focusing on these engagement trends vs. just traditional email marketing KPIs, you can maximize the return on investment for your email strategy and get more bang for your marketing bucks. You can be more efficient with your time, energy, and send and deliver the most relevant, targeted content to the most engaged subscribers.
Before diving into the specifics around measurement, we’ll explore some of the fundamental concepts of a solid and profitable email marketing strategy: engagement, growth, and health.
Develop an engagement-first mentality.
Consumers expect the emails they receive to be personal, relevant, and valuable. If you deliver on these expectations, you can foster loyal and engaged subscribers that take action on your campaigns. An active and engaged subscriber base usually equates to a healthy (and profitable) subscriber base.
The purpose of email marketing has always been to develop a long-term, loyal relationship with your audience. The path to that relationship is through the value of the content you deliver in your campaigns. If you deliver valuable content that your subscribers want, they will, in turn, engage with your messages and likely take the desired action.
By focusing on all the touchpoints along the way to that desired outcome, you employ an engagement-first mentality that will result in a healthy audience.
In contrast, if you send a huge email “blast” out to your entire subscriber base that is low value, they’ll likely be turned off and delete your message, mark it as spam, and be less inclined to open your messages in the future. These kinds of tactics result in an unhealthy list full of disengaged subscribers.
Having insight into the “health” of your audience provides you a holistic view of how your campaigns perform, because you can see beyond opens and clicks and reveal how your audience is interacting with your campaigns. And interaction is priceless.
Using tools like Google Analytics, email tracking is easier than ever. This is true whether you’re tracking based on quality or quantity. Which matters more?
Quality over quantity.
Although we focus a lot on interaction and engagement being a true indicator of a healthy, profitable subscriber base, we still need to understand where our highest-quality subscribers are coming from.
Do certain channels produce higher-quality subscribers than others? By understanding this, you can see where to focus your acquisition efforts and tactics.
Marketers used to be focused on building the largest email list possible. To stay competitive, marketers tried heaps of tactics to grow their lists, from pop-ups to running contests on social media that require an email address to sign up.
But some of these outdated tactics no longer work well. Sending out large email “blasts” to huge subscriber lists no longer returns good results. List decay is increasing.
Simply put, a large list doesn’t translate to better results. The average open rate for branded emails is a mere 20-40%, and the click-through rate is even less.
Today, results-oriented marketers are focusing on growing high-quality, engaged lists of subscribers, not massive lists of subscribers that may never interact with their campaigns.
A healthy audience is a more profitable audience.
As marketers, we may have always just assumed our email lists were healthy, strong, and delivering results, but all email lists encounter some degree of decay over time and begin to experience increased bounce rates, unsubscribes, and inactivity.
The success of your email campaigns is largely dependent on a number of factors that need to be monitored and maintained over time to get the best results.
If you neglect maintaining your email list health, use non-permission-based data, or let the quality of your email content slide, you can damage your email deliverability in a way that can be difficult to repair.
Is a large percentage of your list inactive? Have a majority of your subscribers not clicked on a link in the last three months? If so, instead of continuing to mail to inactive subscribers over and over again only to have them ignore or delete your messages, you can create a reactivation campaign to win them back with different content or a relevant offer.
If reactivation campaigns don’t succeed, you may choose to remove these inactive and non-engaged subscribers from your list, leaving you with a slightly smaller, but more engaged email list. By mailing to active, engaged subscribers and reactivating or removing inactive or unengaged subscribers, you’ll be working with the healthiest list possible that can drive returns for your business.
Insights and KPIs you need to track
You can think about the measurement of your email marketing through two lenses: email performance and subscriber activity.
You do this to understand how your emails are performing, but also to get insight into subscriber behavior and engagement.
Email performance
Email performance encompasses most of the traditional metrics and reports that you think of tracking to benchmark the KPIs from one campaign to the next (e.g., open rate, click-through rate, bounces, and unsubscribes), giving you an indication of how well your emails are performing and what opportunities there are for improvement.
Evaluate your campaign performance.
Let’s look at a short explanation of what each metric is and how it measures the performance of your campaigns.
Campaign open rate
Open rates vary largely, depending on the size of your list, method of collecting email addresses, and a host of other factors, but, generally speaking, a healthy open rate is in the 20%-40% range. If your open rates are above that, then your campaigns are well optimized. If they’re below that range, there’s likely some opportunity for improvement.
Your open rate is typically an indicator of how well your subject lines are performing. By tracking the open rate trends for individual campaigns against your benchmark, you’ll be able to test which subject lines are the most compelling for your audience.
Campaign click rate
Your click-through rate can vary, depending on the size of your list, the content of your email, and a host of other factors, but, generally, a healthy email click-through rate is in 15% range.
Your CTR is usually an indication of how valuable the content of your email is to your audience, as well as the call to action associated with it.
Click-to-open rate
Click-to-open rate, or CTOR, is determined by taking the unique clicks divided by unique opens, and is then expressed as a percentage. It tells you the percentage of recipients who opened the email, how many clicked, and is a leading indicator of the value of the content that you’re sending.
Unsubscribe rates
By evaluating unsubscribe rates, you can quickly see if the content that you’re sending and the frequency of your communications are valuable to your audience. Unsubscribe rates less than 2% are within industry norms.
Check your deliverability trends.
Deliverability benchmarks may vary by industry and company, so it’s important to understand how your company’s overall delivery rates are trending to create a benchmark for all of your campaigns and automated emails.
The delivery rates are calculated by summing up all of the emails sent and subtracting out the bounces. If your deliverability rates are low, you may be unintentionally doing one of these nine things.
One great way to look at deliverability is by domain. This can give you some insight into how specific inbox providers (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo) view your sender reputation.
It’s also helpful to troubleshoot deliverability with specific domains by evaluating at the campaign level if you notice a spike in bounces on a particular send.
Evaluate journey performance.
Just as you analyze your campaigns after they’ve been sent, you need to examine your automations and email journeys regularly to see what’s working and what needs improvement.
Check back regularly to see how many subscribers have been through an automation, and how much the response to that journey has changed over time.
Content performance
If you send multiple pieces of content in your newsletters or include multiple links, then understanding exactly which links subscribers are clicking can help you improve the way you format CTAs and structure your campaigns.
Our Content dashboard can help with this. These reports provide a detailed view into which links and CTAs are driving the most engagement in every campaign.
Insights like this can help you make more strategic choices about the placement of content in your campaigns and can help you make changes that positively impact your CTOR and significantly influence your overall email performance.
Subscriber activity
Subscriber activity is all about understanding the behavior of your audience and the health of your subscriber base.
Monitor audience health.
Detailed analytics allow you to uncover where your most active subscribers are coming from and how their engagement with your content varies, helping you create a plan for developing a highly effective and profitable email marketing strategy.
List growth over time
A growing list is a good sign of a healthy list. It should be no surprise that, if your list growth is stagnant, your wider audience is probably not interested in your messaging.
Monitor how your list grows over time to ensure a captive audience.
Active subscriber comparison
Understanding the portion of your subscriber base that is active, disengaged, or unsubscribing is incredibly important to develop a strategy that supports a healthy balance of growth and engagement.
Your engagement dashboard will reflect these measures, allowing you to take action on any indications of declining engagement, increasing unsubscribes, or other red flags for your email campaigns.
In contrast, it will also enable you to see your most active and engaged subscribers so you can scale campaigns or content that have been the most effective.
Engaged and inactive subscribers
Developing a healthy level of engagement with your audience is arguably more important than sheer subscriber growth.
Having pre-built segments to show which subscribers are most (or least) engaged makes monitoring extremely easy. And leaning on these segments makes for quick re-engagement campaigns or VIP activations.
Track how subscribers are viewing your emails.
There are more devices and more email clients than ever before, and, to ensure your campaigns look great wherever your audience is opening them, you need to know what devices and clients they’re using.
Engagement by client or platform
Engagement by platform provides a breakdown of the platforms your subscribers are using to engage with your campaigns.
Using the click-rate trends as a proxy for engagement, you can then optimize your campaigns to suit the environments they are being read in.
For instance, if you see a lot of your subscribers are reading your campaigns on Outlook iOS, then it might be worth optimizing your campaigns for mobile by applying some mobile email best practices.
Engagement by email domain
Engagement by email client provides you the insight about what email clients your subscribers are using to read your emails.
Not all email clients render emails the same. And, if, for instance, you have a large part of your subscriber base using Outlook, you may use different design tactics than if the vast majority of your list uses Gmail.
Wrap up
The processes of collecting and reporting data insights may seem like tedium in some cases, but it offers great potential. The insights you gather are the foundation of your marketing strategy and your guide for tracking your progress.
Email reporting is all about clear, yet powerful insights that are easy to take action on. Use your insights to continually improve your email marketing strategy and create better-performing campaigns that generate undeniable results for your business.