See how many emails your team sends and receives every day. See how many people your team corresponds with, and the number of spam emails they receive. Drill down into any metric or figure by clicking on it to see a list of every individual email included in the calculation!
Team management
Add your team’s email accounts and compare email activity. Who sends the most emails? Who receives the most? See average email response time for each team member, emails sent, emails received, and more at a glance in a team table.
Visualize your team’s email activity in Gmail (including Google Workspace) and Outlook (including MS365) with email analytics. No software to install, no credit card required. See your email activity in less than 60 seconds!
What is EmailAnalytics?
And to make things super convenient for you, we send you a daily email activity report for you and your team, so you can easily stay informed of your team members’ activity every day. You’ll be amazed how it enables you to identify who your top performers are, re-balance workloads, and increase productivity!
How does it work?
How much does it cost?
Do you have access to or store my emails?
Does it work with Outlook?
Can my team members see their account metrics?
Is EmailAnalytics a Google-verified app?
Yes, we are! 😎 We’re Google-verified and have passed Google’s mandatory annual third-party app security audit. This security audit is required for any app that uses the Gmail API. Our security auditor is Leviathan Security Group.
What questions does EmailAnalytics help me answer?
I have a different question. Do you guys have a knowledge base?
What are some other general email analytics questions?
What is email analytics?
Email analytics is the method of tracking various statistics and metrics associated with email activity. Some common email analytics include number of emails sent and received over a given date range. Average email response time, click-through rate, response rate, and open rate are other common email metrics.
Does Gmail have analytics?
Gmail does not have an official analytics app, but it’s possible to access Gmail analytics through third-party software that integrates with your Gmail account. EmailAnalytics is the most advanced and highly-trusted Gmail analytics provider.
Does Outlook have email analytics?
Microsoft Outlook has a productivity analytics platform which includes basic email analytics, called Viva. It is available through the Office 365 cloud-based suite of productivity applications. However, to get advanced email analytics for Outlook, you will need to use EmailAnalytics.
How can I find my average email response time?
If you use Gmail or Google Workspace, you can use a third-party email analytics tool to calculate your average email response time (or that of your team). EmailAnalytics is a popular choice for this purpose.
Do you store my payment info?
No, we do not store any payment information in our servers; this is delegated to Stripe.com, which is a PCI-Compliant merchant services provider. All communication between our servers and Stripe is encrypted as well.
Do I need to train my employees how to use this? And will this slow down Gmail or Outlook?
There’s no software to install, so your Gmail or Outlook speed won’t be affected at all. EmailAnalytics works entirely and exclusively through the back-end (via the Gmail and Outlook API). In other words, we get our data directly from Gmail and Outlook’s servers, not yours.
And no, you don’t need to train employees how to use EmailAnalytics 😀 It’s a monitoring tool that is designed to help you visualize email activity. Neither you nor your team members need to do anything different; just continue emailing the way you normally do!
Is it hard to set up? Any software to install?
How are metrics calculated?
Will my team members know they’re being monitored?
Does it work with Google Workspace?
How do I monitor my employees’ email accounts?
How secure is my data?
How can I contact an EmailAnalytics representative?
Who uses EmailAnalytics?
Email Marketing Metrics
1. Clickthrough Rate
Clickthrough rate (CTR) is likely the first answer you’ll get when you ask an email marketer what metrics they track. It’s what I like to call the "day-to-day" email marketing metric, because it lets you easily calculate performance for every individual email you send. From there, you can track how your CTR changes over time.
How valuable is a clickthrough rate?
Clickthrough rate is a very important metric for all email marketers to be tracking, as it gives you direct insight into how many people on your list are engaging with your content and interested in learning more about your brand or your offer. Read this blog post to learn what a "good" clickthrough rate is, according to industry benchmarks.
2. Conversion Rate
After an email recipient has clicked through on your email, the next goal is typically to get them to convert on your offer — in other words, to take the action that your email has asked them to take. So if you’re sending an email to offer your audience the chance to download, say, a free ebook, you’d consider anyone who actually downloads that ebook to be a conversion.
Because your definition of a conversion is directly tied to the call-to-action in your email, and your call-to-action should be directly tied to the overall goal of your email marketing, conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for determining the extent to which you’re achieving your goals. (We’ll discuss more specific goal-related metrics later.)
In order to measure conversion rate on your emails, you’ll need to integrate your email platform and your web analytics. You can do this by creating unique tracking URLs for your email links that identify the source of the click as coming from a specific email campaign.
How valuable is your conversion rate?
Free Email Metrics Tracker
Use this template to document, track, and analyze your email KPIs.
3. Bounce Rate
Soft bounces are the result of a temporary problem with a valid email address, such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. The recipient’s server may hold these emails for delivery once the problem clears up, or you may try re-sending your email message to soft bounces.
Hard bounces are the result of an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and these emails will never be successfully delivered. You should immediately remove hard bounce addresses from your email list, because internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates as one of the key factors to determine an email sender’s reputation.
How valuable is a bounce rate?
While a bounce rate doesn’t directly link to your goals, you should still look at it to make sure there are no deep issues with your emails. Having too many hard bounces can make your company look like a spammer in the eyes of an ISP. Read this blog post to learn more about the difference between hard and soft bounces.
4. List Growth Rate
Aside from the call-to-action metrics (CTR, conversion rates), you’ll also want to be keeping tabs on your list growth and loss. Of course, you should be aiming to grow your list in order to extend your reach, expand your audience, and position yourself as an industry thought leader.
How valuable is your list growth rate?
5. Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate
Why? Because this is how you generate new contacts. The folks on your email list are already in your database. So while conversion is still a primary focus, this doesn’t help you attract new leads. Encourage your readers to pass along your email to a friend or colleague if they found the content useful, and start tracking how many new people you can add to your database this way. Read this blog post for tips on getting people to forward your emails.
Why Email Sharing and Forwarding Rates Are Valuable
6. Overall ROI
As with every marketing channel, you should be able to determine the overall ROI of your email marketing. If you haven’t yet, set up an SLA system whereby you assign different values to various types of leads based on their likelihood to generate revenue for your company.
How valuable is ROI?
How many of each of these types of leads did you generate via email marketing? How does this translate to potential revenue? Actual revenue? These are the types of metrics that will help you show your boss and your sales team how valuable email marketing is as a channel that drives real, tangible results.
7. Open Rate
Most email marketers are still bent over backwards trying to optimize their subject lines for higher open rates. While this can have a positive impact — and more opens are a great thing — they really should be focused on optimizing their clickthrough rates, instead.
The fact of the matter is that open rate is actually a very misleading metric for a few reasons. Most importantly, an email is only counted as "opened" if the recipient also receives the images embedded in that message. And a large percentage of your email users likely have image-blocking enabled on their email client. This means that even if they open the email, they won’t be included in your open rate, making it an inaccurate and unreliable metric for marketers, as it underreports on your true numbers.
How valuable is your email open rate?
You can get some value out of open rate as a metric if you use it as a comparative metric. For instance, if you compare the open rates of this week’s email send to last week’s email send (both to the same lists) it might give you some insight since the variables are somewhat controlled.
8. Unsubscribe Rate
As with open rate, the unsubscribe rate isn’t a reliable picture of the health of your email list. Many subscribers who are tired of receiving email messages from your brand won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process. They’ll just stop opening, reading, and clicking on your email messages.
That’s why it’s much more effective to measure subscriber engagement by clickthrough rates and conversion rates. From there, you can keep an eye out on unengaged subscribers so you can consider removing them at some point, like we went over earlier.
How valuable is an unsubscribe rate?
Useful reports
There are two major reports that will tell you most of what you need to know about your emailing, including both deliverability performance and campaign performance. These reports were created in Exponea, but you should be able to recreate them in the analytics program of your choice.
Email domain report
The first one is the email domain report , which shows you metrics for specific recipient domains. This will help you see any deliverability issues with a particular mailbox provider – and you can use open rate variance metric here. If a certain provider shows 30% lower open rate than the other, this is most likely due to bad inbox placement. Similarly, if there is any spike for soft bounces or hard bounces, you should look into what is causing those issues.
Campaign report
The second perspective, which uses mostly the same set of metrics in a different format, is the campaign report. You can get this report by using the previous Email domain report, but in rows, you should use “campaign > campaign_name” instead of “email_domain”. You can also add “campaign > subject” as an extra row, in case you want to see the subject lines used, or if you tested various subject lines.
Soft bounce / bounce report
If you spot any problems in the campaign / email domain report, you can use the following report to investigate further. This will help you understand where soft or hard bounces are coming from: is it bad email list health or is your content being blocked?
Open and click time report
To help you understand when customers are opening or clicking on your emails, and whether this is in line with their usual shopping time, you can build the following report. You will see most of the opens and clicks happen after sending the campaign, but you might find out that this isn’t when your customers typically do their shopping. You can then use optimal send time prediction to manage this for you, or manually adjust the campaign launch times.
Here you could benefit from using optimal send time prediction, as this would make sure every customer receives an email at their optimal time. If this prediction isn’t available to you, you can also use this for the segmentation of morning and evening shoppers, and send campaigns at two different times for these two segments.
Sources:
https://emailanalytics.com/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/metrics-email-marketers-should-be-tracking
https://exponea.com/blog/email-marketing-analytics-metrics-goals-kpis/
Email analytics
Email analytics—and analytics in general—are some of the most powerful tools available to the modern business owner. They can show you what content is working and what isn’t, allowing you to focus on successful content instead of putting days, weeks, or even months of work into content that doesn’t grow your business.
How to Use Email Analytics to Improve Your Campaigns: The Ultimate Guide
One of the most common mistakes business owners make is continually producing content with no regard for their analytics. This is a huge mistake because studying your data, especially your email analytics, can help you create more effective marketing campaigns and even improve your products/services.
Analytics is a systematic way of tracking data over time. In the marketing world, this data typically relates to customer behavior. Business owners with an online presence have three main types of analytics they can work with:
- Social media analytics – Often provided by the platforms themselves, these analytics tools track how people interact with your social media accounts. These statistics include data such as views, shares, and comments both on individual posts and your overall profiles.
- Website analytics – These analytics show you how many people visit your website, how long they stay on your site, and how many pages they look at before they leave your site. WordPress users typically use plugins like Jetpack or MonsterInsights for these analytics, or Google Analytics.
- Email analytics – These analytics are tracked by your email marketing service. They tend to look at things like how many people open your emails. Some services also offer advanced analytics tools like heat maps, which track the parts of your newsletter that get the most interaction.
Subscribe rate
Where to view this information: There are two ways to figure this out in MailPoet. First, you can head to the “Lists” area. Next to each of your lists, you’ll see subscribe and unsubscribe numbers:
To see how well your signup forms are performing, go to the “Forms” area of MailPoet. Beside each form listing, you can see the number of people who have subscribed using that form. You can get even more detailed information by using a lead generation tool like OptinMonster, which lets you track detailed statistics for individual signup forms.
Unsubscribe rate
Where to view this information: There are two ways to see your unsubscribe numbers. To view overall unsubscribe rates, head to the “Lists” area of MailPoet. Here, you’ll see the number of people who have unsubscribed from each list. You can turn this into a percentage with a numbers-to-percentages calculator.
To view how many people unsubscribed after receiving a specific campaign, go to the “Emails” area of MailPoet and click on the numbers listed under “Opened, Clicked”. This will open a page where you can view more detailed analytics, including the number of unsubscribes.
What your unsubscribe rate tells you: Some turnover is normal, but a high unsubscribe rate means your content isn’t lining up with what your audience wants. A sharp drop in subscribers after a specific email also indicates that your audience disliked that content.
Open rate
Where to view this information: In MailPoet, you’ll be able to see the open rate for an email campaign listed beside the campaign’s title in the “Emails” area. You can click on the number listed for more information.
What your open rate tells you: A high open rate (over 20%) tells you that your content is resonating with your audience. If your open rate is highly variable, this tells you that only some of your campaigns are effective.
Click rate
Bounce rate
Where to view this information: In MailPoet, you can view hard bounces by going to “Subscribers” and looking at the “Bounced” category. This category tracks hard bounces and addresses that have bounced over 10 times in one week.
How to use your email analytics
1. Schedule time to check your numbers
Make an appointment with yourself at the end of each month to look at your email analytics. Track the most important numbers—the statistics we discussed in the last section of this guide—in a spreadsheet. List both numbers for individual emails and the overall numbers.
2. Reflect on your numbers
3. Refine your customer profiles
Customer profiles are tools to help you understand your audience. To do this, you create a fictional person who represents a specific segment of your existing or potential audience. Every business should have a minimum of three profiles to work with:
If your product or service appeals to several different groups of people, you may also want to create multiple profiles in each category. For example, if you sell high quality cookware, you might want to create one “best customer” profile for young adults moving into their first home and another profile for stay at home moms.
Over time, you can use the data in your email analytics to add new categories to these profiles. For example, you might want to add categories for products/services most often reviewed by your best customers.
In some instances, you’ll want to create entirely new customer profiles. For example, if you run a major lead generation campaign and get several hundred new subscribers in a specific part of the world, you might want to create a profile to represent them.
4. Improve your lead generation
Lead generation campaigns are marketing campaigns designed to funnel people from your website and/or social media platforms to your email list. These campaigns can be simple, like putting a form in the sidebar of your website, or complex, like a multi-network social media campaign.
- Use multiple types of signup forms. Specifically, consider adding a pop up or slide-in form that appears when your audience performs a certain action, like finishing an article on your site. MailPoet makes it easy to create several types of signup forms, with templates optimized for every format.
- Create or refine your opt-in bonus. An opt-in bonus is a reward people get for joining your list. This can be a discount, an information product, a free consultation, or anything else related to your business. The key is to make sure that it helps your audience while also reinforcing your newsletter’s overall value.
- Create or refine a landing page. A landing page is basically a sales page for your newsletter. You can create one easily with Elementor. If you already have one and it isn’t pulling in the numbers you want, your landing page might not be properly explaining the benefits of your newsletter. If the page looks great, you might not be sharing it in enough places, which brings us nicely to the next point:
- Automate newsletter promotions. Create automated posts advertising your landing page on social media. Include a link to your landing page in your social media profiles and contributor bios. Write a standardized “join my email list” message you can post at the end of articles or pages. Add a “sign up” option to the checkout process if you sell ecommerce products. Make marketing your newsletter as effortless as possible.
- Ask for referrals. Consider adding a message saying “Enjoyed this newsletter? Recommend it to a friend” to your newsletters. You can use the free Share Link Generator to create links that will share your landing page (or an online version of your newsletter) on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and email.
5. Refine your content
Once you’ve got a handle on the numbers and you’ve updated your customer profiles, you can use this to shape your content. There are a couple of layers to this: optimizing your overall marketing strategy and refining individual email campaigns.
Optimizing your overall marketing strategy
To do this, go back to the notes you made during the reflection step. Specifically, pay attention to the highest and lowest-performing content types. You might even want to pull up individual emails to get a better feel for the design, copy, and offers contained within those emails.
- What makes certain content types more popular? Is the content itself more useful than other types of emails you send? Does the email template you use for specific content look better on mobile devices? Are you using more effective subject lines on certain emails?
- Can you apply these lessons to other content types? For example, if shorter emails are more successful with your list, can you find ways to shorten all of your emails? Can you re-use design elements from one type of email in other emails? Is there an effective format for subject lines that can be applied to multiple email types?
- Can you change your content plan to focus more on popular content types? For example, if you run an educational newsletter and “Quick Tips” perform better than longer lessons, can you switch to only publishing quick tips, with links to longer content on your site?
- Can you introduce new content types? Are there ways you can expand your content to better serve your audience? Can you build on some of your popular content to create something new?
Important metrics in Gmail Analytics
Now that you know why is important to measure relevant data in your email, you should know what metrics matter the most in this evaluation. We have united all the relevant metrics for Support teams and Sales teams.
Customer support
Average email response time
The average email response time runs between the time that a customer sends you an email asking for help and the time the support team starts engaging with them. When it comes to email, the response time can be measured in minutes, hours, or even days. But always respect the fact that your customer expects an immediate reply.
Closed tickets by day
Monitoring the number of closed tickets each day helps to identify the capacity and efficiency of your support team. It’s simple math: if the number of tickets solved each day is less than the number of incoming issues, you have a problem. In case all the tickets that arrived on a specific day can be solved, it can also indicate that the support capacity is affected somehow.
Agents behavior
Measuring your agents’ performance at work is demanding to know how you can improve their methods. For example, you can see how each agent performs while solving tickets. If there are agents with a low performance it indicates that you should not only talk to them but offer training as well.
Sales pipeline
Metrics for sales teams influence directly on the performance of your business revenue, that’s why is so important to keep track of your sales channels. If email is one of them, having insights can be a lifesaver. The main email metrics to track for sales are Conversion Rate, Vendors Performance
Conversion rate
Number of Acquired Leads
Lead generation needs your attention, mostly because when it’s low something needs to be changed on the acquisition channels. You should be tracking how many leads you’ve captured in a certain period, to check what it is working or not.
Advanced Email Analytics Best Practices: What To Measure
Delivered Messages
Delivered messages as an email marketing metric sounds pretty straight forward, but you may be surprised at the complexities involved. Senders usually think that email delivery simply happens, without fault, when you hit the send button. While this is certainly the desired outcome, an email is not considered successfully delivered until the sending server has received a 250 response code from the recipient server ensuring delivery.
Often, senders are shocked to find that there are tons of moving pieces that all must be perfectly aligned to successfully deliver high volume email. Starting with the actual email infrastructure itself, then considering the various mailbox provider rules and IP reputation management — there is a lot that could go wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing. To get a better understanding of how an email is actually delivered read our blog here , or to learn more about the different problems that occur within this delivery process, read our blog on SMTP error codes.
With advanced email analytics reporting, senders can get more information on what messages are not being delivered, and more importantly, why they aren’t being delivered. With this information, email senders can see how effective their email system is and what steps they need to take, if any, to improve their sending capabilities. If messages aren’t getting delivered as planned, email professionals, like those at SocketLabs , who have years of experience, will be able to analyze your data and easily diagnose any problems.
Opens and Clicks
Two important email marketing metrics to understand are opens and clicks. Opens are the amount of people who open your message, and clicks are the amount of recipients who click the links within your email. Obviously the higher your opens and clicks are, the better your email is performing.
The performance of your opens and clicks are a very good indicator of how your email is being interacted upon by your recipients. A poorly written subject line, bland and unrecognizable design, low quality email lists, and poor button placement are the most common causes of low opens and clicks.
Using an email analytics report to measure opens and clicks can certainly point you in the right direction in terms of email design and copy. If you want to learn more about how to increase your opens and clicks, we’ve already covered the topic in a blog just for you!
Spam Complaints
Tracking your complaints is the quickest and easiest way to tell right away if your lists are poor quality and if your email content needs work. The lower the complaint rate, the better, meaning people are genuinely interested in the value your email provides.
The more relevant and organically sourced your email lists are, the better your email will perform and the better your deliverability will be. Email lists that perform the best are opt-in lists that are composed of people who actually want to receive your email. Sending to a purchased list will be the first reason your complaint rates are high.
If your lists are clean and you are still seeing high complaints, your next focus should be the quality of content and your delivery strategy. To learn more about producing content that is optimized for success, read our blog on what affects email delivery here.
Hard Bounces
Offering even more raw feedback on the quality of your email list is the hard bounce metric. A hard bounce is an email that has been permanently rejected due to something that occurred after making it to the recipient server. This will typically happen when the recipient email address is invalid. For example, maybe the domain name does not exist, the email is no longer active, or the recipient is simply unknown.
Tracking when and why your emails are bouncing will help you keep a closer eye on the overall performance of your email. High bounce rates should be taken care of immediately as this will quickly diminish your sender reputation and hurt your deliverability. To learn more about email bounces and how to reduce them, read our blog on email bounce rate here.
SocketLabs StreamScore: A New Email Analytics Report
The SocketLabs StreamScore isn’t an individual email marketing metric like those mentioned previously. Rather, StreamScore is an advanced email analytics report that provides insight into a variety of qualitative email metrics designed to help clients better understand the quick and simple overall performance of their email through an aggregate score.
Sources:
https://www.mailpoet.com/blog/how-to-use-email-analytics/
https://www.dragapp.com/blog/gmail-analytics/amp/
https://www.socketlabs.com/blog/what-is-email-analytics/
Email analytics
Zendesk Sell is a modern CRM that helps accelerate revenue for sales teams. And now with the Act-On integration, marketing and sales teams get unified access to multichannel marketing activities, buyer behavioral data and scoring, and an accelerated buyer pipeline.
How to get the most out of your Mailchimp reports
How to set up automated campaign reports in Mailchimp
If you want to receive automated campaign reports from Mailchimp, all you have to do is enable tracking. Then, our analytics reporting tools will take care of the heavy lifting and provide insight into how well your automated emails are doing as a series. You’ll also be able to view Mailchimp analytics on individual emails.
What is email analytics?
Email analytics provide valuable insights that allow you to identify what’s working for your business and refine campaigns that can be made even better. The data provided can sometimes be difficult to decipher, but you’ll always receive digestible, easy-to-read insights with our digital marketing reporting software.
Our analytics and reporting tools work by monitoring the engagement, growth, and revenue of your campaigns across different channels. This includes emails, social media ads, promo codes used, and so forth. As a result, you can gain a deeper understanding of what your customers like and continue creating content that fits their needs. Digital marketing reporting tools also allow you to see how your email campaigns compare to the competition. The best part is that you can do this without ever leaving the Mailchimp analytics dashboard.
How to do email analytics
Email analytics can be difficult to grasp, especially for small business owners who don’t know where to begin. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. With Mailchimp data analytics, you can start making more informed business decisions with reports packed with the necessary insights.
Our marketing reporting tools can provide email campaign, automation, landing page, and ad reports to ensure you get a comprehensive overview of your previous and ongoing campaigns. Each one will dive deep into different metrics. For instance, landing page reports will measure how well your landing pages are doing with views and clicks.
By using digital marketing analytics tools, you can develop an action plan based on the data you gather. Ultimately, reporting and analytics tools create a valuable opportunity to further enhance your marketing efforts and grow your business. Whether you want to segment customer data based on demographics or identify underperforming content, we’re here to help.
When to get analytics for email campaigns?
Our analytics reporting tools will start gathering data as soon as your email campaign is published and your audience begins engaging with it. Mailchimp’s reporting tools will also analyze data received from clicks, opens, and purchases. However, you may not be able to see the results of your campaign right away since some emails can take time to send and be delivered.
You can view a summary of your campaign’s performance by opening your email campaign report. The overview we provide includes crucial information that can influence your next campaign, such as the total order revenue earned, open rate, unsubscribed recipients, and more.
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Top email metrics to focus on
Let’s explore some of the top email marketing KPIs using a hypothetical small business undergoing some marketing optimization as an example. Let’s imagine an ecommerce business that also does live events to promote its products.
Their email list has recently reached 1,500. And after a good quarter, the owner has decided to expand its marketing budget to make room for hiring a freelance copywriter and graphic designer to create brand-appropriate communication.
Open rate
This email tracking metric records the percentage of emails that were actually opened by the recipient. An opened email means that something about the headline grabbed the recipient’s attention. So it’s good to know exactly which headlines got an opening click, and which didn’t.
Experts agree that the average person gets about 121 emails per day. Most of those don’t even get opened. If your marketing team has crafted a sales email subject line that actually inspires the recipient to open it, it’s worth trying to replicate that same angle and see if it gets the same result.
Up until now, our business owner has been writing their own email headlines and copy. Their last email campaign was sent out to all 1,500 subscribers. Of the emails sent out, 350 bounced back, and only 10 were opened.
At not even 1% open rate, this is a pretty poor performance for email marketing. With an open rate this low, it’s unlikely that this business was generating any meaningful revenue from its email marketing efforts.
With a new open rate of over 15%, our fake ecommerce business is now performing better than industry benchmarks for food and beverage. At the very least, this email engagement metric reveals that the copywriter’s headlines are resonating with the subscriber list.
Clickthrough rate
The clickthrough rate—or CTR—is the percentage of how many recipients clicked on a link contained in one of your marketing emails. This metric is excellent for measuring engagement—but at around 2-3%, average click-through rates are much lower than average open rates.
Marketing emails typically contain a call to action (CTA), which is a direction for the next step the recipient should take if they’re interested in the product or service. And usually, the CTA points to an embedded link that brings the recipient to another location, like an appointment schedule app or enrollment website.
Our online business has improved its email open rate to 15%, just by crafting better headlines. Let’s also say that the subscriber list has grown by 100. Now, the owner wants to improve the number of recipients taking the desired next step.
Throughout February, the owner has plans to send out a sequence of 3 emails advertising its exclusive Valentine’s Day live webinar. The email’s CTA—an embedded link—brings recipients to a page where they can reserve a place for two with a $10 deposit to hold their spot.
After the event takes place, the owner wants to know exactly what percentage of subscribers actually clicked the link and followed through to the form. They’ll calculate the clickthrough rate using this formula:
At about 4%, this clickthrough rate would actually be considered above average. When metrics fall above average like this, it’s wise to take note of whatever practices were going on at that time. Because if something is working, you need to be able to replicate it. A high click-through rate indicates that the copy and/or the visuals of the email were compelling enough to inspire further action.
Conversion rate
Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who not only opened your email and clicked through to the next step, but also performed the desired end result. That end result might be filling in a form to enroll for a free webinar or demo, or outright purchasing the product. If the subscriber ultimately performs the action the email was intended to inspire, then that’s considered a conversion.
Obviously, then, part of optimizing your emails is making sure that every single one has a clear call to action and specific desired end result. Tracking conversation rates isn’t as straightforward as open or click-through rates. That’s because what constitutes a conversion depends on the goals you assigned to each campaign.
In the example from above, our fake online ecommerce business sent a February email chain promoting its Valentine’s Day live virtual event. We already determined that 50 people clicked through and opened the enrollment form. Of those 50 who opened it, 30 filled it in. So now, the conversion rate formula looks like this:
The conversion rate is 2.4%. As the owner continues running marketing campaigns for similar events in the future, tracking conversion rate metrics will give a good indication of how well their subscribers are responding to the actual content being offered.
The best email analytics strategies
Here are some useful strategies for approaching and using email analysis to optimize your messaging. Keep in mind as you read these strategies that every subscriber base is different, and therefore some approaches may ring more true for some populations than for others. Consider your company’s unique buyer persona and ask yourself how well each strategy would apply to your process.
Organizations that send personalized, segmented and targeted email campaigns see 17% more revenue than marketers who don’t. This means you should be doing everything in your power to tailor your emails with names, titles, relevant interests, and other data that will say, “Hey! You know me!”
Think of your subscriber’s email inbox as a big party. You and all the other businesses stand in a corner trying to get the subscriber’s attention, which creates a whole lot of noise. Even something as simple as calling out the right name will help you stick out from the crowd. Using a good CRM will help you collect and access the kind of information you can use to personalize messaging. That way your emails can land in inboxes one step ahead of the others.
Whatever call to action you include in your emails, make sure the next step can be performed on a mobile device. Plus, make sure that the format and copy you’re using in your emails looks neat and well organized on a mobile device screen.
Additionally, when tracking your email analytics metrics, make sure to monitor engagement on mobile devices vs. engagement on computers. People spend a lot of time on their mobile devices, and if your marketing efforts aren’t including mobile usage, you could be missing out on clicks simply because you aren’t expanding your messaging to the right platforms.
Depending on your industry, there are different kinds of content you should add to your marketing campaigns to inspire higher email engagement metrics. You can have blogs, video tutorials, ebooks, podcasts, special offers, and more – all to entice your recipients to take some kind of action.
The more content you have, the more you can offer to your subscriber list and see which ones get the most interaction. You can then gauge the effectiveness of your content by running A/B tests and offering different kinds of content.
Even if you have a wealth of fascinating content, resist the temptation to throw it all out at once. The more data you have on how well your emails are performing, the better. But that doesn’t mean you should start cranking emails out just for the sake of collecting information to use for optimizing your emails.
If you go too far with sending out campaigns, you easily risk annoying your subscribers. Test out different intervals of sending emails, and take note of how often seems to be too often. Currently, one to two emails per week seems to be the goldilocks region. Fewer than that, and you could miss out on potential sales. More, and you risk ending up in the spam folder or unsubscribe list.
One of the best things you can do to boost optimization using analytics is to segment your subscribers. However you generate leads, you should be using your CRM to capture and store critical points of information about every contact. Then, you can use this data to segment lead populations according to things like interests, demographics, and locations. This lets you create even more targeting marketing campaigns, so that every communication you send resonates with the person it’s intended for.
Sources:
https://mailchimp.com/features/reports-and-analytics/
https://www.zendesk.com/sell/features/email-intelligence/
https://www.sendx.io/blog/email-analytics-for-better-conversions