Email Analytics
Email analytics are far from dead and are still valuable resources for gaining information about your companies marketing efforts. Email marketing also has a funnel affect in place similar to traffic that goes to your website, but it starts with whether or not the user opens the email and clicks.
The final goal would be completing a purchase off a link that was sent within the email. There are a few different metrics to watch out for: Sent, Delivered, Unique opens, Unique Clicks, Visits to landing page, and completed actions.
One strong reason to use email is to support shopping cart abandonment metrics for both new and current customers alike. And, it does a great job to inform old customers about new products that are now available. It allows new customers to become loyal customers and reminds old customers of how great your service has become all of which drives the bottom line of your ecommerce business up. Understanding the metrics for your emails will elucidate what campaigns and what messages are working for your customer demographic.
The analytics of your email is a gold mine of information. The most important email analytics are open rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, an opt-out rate. The open rate is the percentage of users that actually open the email. This is the most important rate because it represents the users that you have already been able to reach and catch their attention. With so many marketing emails that people receive everyday it is hard to catch the attention of people with a marketing email. These most likely are the customers that are interested in what you are offering.
The bounce rate is important for administrative purposes and can be helpful in making sure your email list is up to date with only active emails. The bounce rate lets the administrator know which emails are no longer active or receiving emails at this time. The click-through rate is important because it represents the users who actually took an action or engaged with your email. They were interested enough to click onto your marketing message and take an action to further explore your website.
The opt-out-rate is the rate that represents the users who no longer wish to receive your emails. It is important that you recognize these emails and no longer have them on your email list. It aggravates individuals if they continue to receive your emails when they no longer want to.
Different industries have different rates for all these metrics. It is important to compare your results to your industry. This will give you a good bench mark to see how your marketing messages via email are working. If there are glaring gaps in your metrics adjusting your marketing emails maybe key to bringing those metrics and averages up.
Prioritizing metrics to improve is also important, the click-through rate is the metric that has the most room for improvement. The goal for this metric is to be constantly be improving and having it rise. This means that your marketing messages are on target and you are reaching the right audience. Remember that if this metric doesn’t start going up then you are most likely in need of a new marketing email list. Tactics to improve the click-through rate is trying to send your email messages at different times of the day. The ideal time of the day can be different for different industries.
For example, trying to grab the attention of a user first thing in the morning can be hard if you are trying to sell office supplies. That is not a usual thing people are trying to pay attention to when they first wake up. Remembering that users generally first open their email when they wake up, check during their commute or directly after, lunchtime, and generally prior before leaving work can help you try and make decisions of when to send your email. Analyzing the metrics can help give answers to when your marketing emails will be most effective and resonate with your marketing email list.
One really important tool that can help your email analytics is making sure to track your efforts with Google Analytics. You can find out from Google Analytics how well your email links are preforming from email marketing campaigns. You do this by using UTM parameters, which gives insight to how users navigate content. Finally, Google Analytics will help you also learn whether or not your email campaigns are creating conversions.
This is the point where the customer makes a purchase because of your email campaign. Making a conversion from your email is the ultimate goal. Making sure to use the information your initial campaigns are telling you to make future campaigns better is the ultimate outcome from your analytics.
