How to Use Email Insights to Plan Email Campaigns

Your email marketing campaigns are a key component of your marketing strategy. However, what do you do after you are finished collecting email addresses, setting up your email client, and are done sending emails a few dozen times?

You plan your next campaign, but this time it isn't only based on a whim but based on different metrics to measure email performance in your last campaigns and redesign your email strategy accordingly.

So what important metrics should you look at to measure campaign performance and what should be included in your email reports?

Also Read: What are the Best SaaS Email Marketing Strategies?

What email marketing metrics need to be included in your email marketing report?

Email marketing campaigns are not just about putting a few words together to craft an email message and then just hoping that you reach your subscriber engagement goals and achieve a high conversion rate.

Which key metrics should you look at and what do you do with them?

Email deliverability

To check out deliverability email marketers need to see how many emails were successfully delivered. This is an important metric because if you keep sending emails and your delivery rate is low, your recipients will never see your emails - it is all a waste!

To see email deliverability, you check out your email open rate, clickthrough rate, and your bounce rate.

Some emails may be soft bounces where the recipient does not receive them temporarily because of a problem in their server or another technical problem. Hard bounces mean the email address is incorrect, does not exist, etc. and your email will permanently not be delivered.

The more hard bounces you get, your sender reputation is likely to suffer and consequently, your email deliverability will suffer.

Your email marketing reports will mention your open and clickthrough metrics or they will be mentioned on your dashboard regardless of the email provider you use. You will also get a statistic for the bounce rate.

Solution:

If your email deliverability rate is low, that means your emails are landing in spam and there are several reasons for this.

You can prevent this by not including multiple links in your marketing emails, sending emails to email subscribers so you get fewer spam complaints, and warming up your email domain-especially before sending bulk emails.

There are other reasons you may be landing in spam, check out the top reasons why emails land in spam.

Ensuring you follow the protocol mentioned above is the way to the recipient's inbox.

GoCustomer leads the way to this path easily - and cost-effectively with its email warm-up service that minimizes emails that land in spam and enhances your email deliverability.

Your delivered emails will then tell you more about what you need to look at next.

Unsubscribe rate

You need to check out how many people unsubscribed from your list.

This means you have unengaged subscribers or you are sending them irrelevant, uninteresting content.

The higher your unsubscribe rate, the worse your sender reputation gets - and that's not good news for email marketers.

Your unsubscribe rates tell you whether your email marketing strategy is going in the right direction or whether you need to steer your email marketing campaigns to a different destination.

This may also tell you whether you are pitching to the wrong audience and you may need to look at your subscriber list and their characteristics again.

Solution:

If your unsubscribe rate is high, look at your email list again. Are you sending emails to the wrong people? Have you developed a proper buyer persona and are those the people in your list?

Also review your email copy and the content of your campaigns. Make sure it is relevant and interesting for your audience. Don't always try to hard sell and send content that adds value for them.

Open rate

Your open rate can tell you about your delivery rates because if your emails are not being delivered, they also won't be opened.

However, that's not the only reason that the open rate would be low. Your emails may be delivered but your subject lines may not be attractive. Your sender name my be vague or people may not have subscribed to your emails and since your sender name is not familiar, this tells them not to open them. You may not be sending your email to the right people or you may be sending it at the wrong time. People usually check their emails first thing in the morning so 9 am has always been a popular sending time. Later on, their inbox gets filled up with other emails and yours may just be lost in the noise.

Solution:

You can try adding value to your subject line: explaining a pain point, asking a question, adding statistics, or personalizing it to include the company or person's name.

You can optimize for better sending times and write a sender name that includes your first name with "from [company name]". This may help recipients recognize you.

If your email list isn't of high quality or specifically made for your business, then you need to generate a high-quality email list. People who are likely to be interested in your product or service will most likely open your emails.

The open rate is a basic email marketing metric that sets the stage for all the next ones.

Click through rate

A very prominent and important email marketing metric in your email marketing report-click through rates on your email marketing campaigns. The click-through rate tells you how many people clicked on your call to action.

If your click-through rate is low, that means your email is not compelling and you may want to change the design and specifically the copy.

Solution:

Look at whether you are providing enough information, emphasizing pain points and solutions, and clearly telling your audience what you want them to do and why.

Why is very important, especially if you want your audience to do something within a specific time period - such as when e-commerce businesses ask you to purchase a product within a few hours to avail of a 50% discount.

Your call to action may include asking someone to read, subscribe to, purchase, or sign up to or for something or may lead them to a landing page on your website. You may also want to make your CTA more interesting and directly related to the pain point. For example, Yes, I want to improve productivity is a better CTA than Purchase Now!

Google Analytics will tell you how much website traffic you got from your email, the leads generated (people who added themselves to your email list or filled out a form), and how many people have bought your product/service.

This brings us to the next metric in email reporting.

Conversion rates

Your email report may not be giving you conversion rates directly if you are leading your audience to a landing page where they check out.

However, Google Analytics data can tell you about this important email metric and tell you exactly how many people actually purchased or bought your product/service.

Some people may drop off when they get to your website and this may mean that there is something wrong with your user experience, your checkout process, your pricing, or the copy on your website.

Solution:

You need to decipher why customers are dropping off and not converting on your landing page. Perhaps your product/service is overpriced. your checkout process is complicated, or your landing page is not persuasive enough.

If people are not converting, you can send them a quick email asking them why they bounced from the website and providing them a discount to complete their purchase. This can elongate into a drip campaign as whoever comes to the conversion stage is probably highly likely to become a customer even if they bounced.

You need to pinpoint the reason for the bounce and make amends.

The more conversions you make, the higher your return on investment.

These are valuable insights and you may have to use web analytics rather than email analytics to measure them.

However, your campaign may not only be for purchasing. You may be sending emails for people to complete another desired action - such as joining a group, signing up for a course, providing their info, etc.

All of your emails may not be aimed at conversion. Some emails are triggered emails or automated emails that simply give the audience information when they perform a certain action on the website.

These people are sometimes automatically added as new subscribers or given the option to subscribe to your email list.

If someone has performed a certain action on the website or provided their email address while filling out a query or form, they can opt to be added to the list for updates. This leads to list growth.

This brings us to the next metric.

Growth rate

Your email marketing report can also show you your growth rate by showing you how much your email list has grown over time. The longer your email list, the higher your chances of converting some of them. Usually, email marketing efforts generate 1-2% conversions from an email list which is on the thousands.

Therefore, a growing email list is good news for an email marketer.

Solution:

If your growth rate is low, you need to re-check your content to make sure most of your people are not unsubscribing because of irrelevancy or annoying messages.

You should also ensure you are offering your visitors the opportunity to subscribe to your list in several places - your website, social media profiles, your email campaigns, etc. Make sure it is easy to subscribe.

Bottom Line

Your email platform will provide these metrics and then you can decide how to re-design your email marketing campaigns based on which metrics need a push. Check what's working and what's not-the key component to digital marketing.

It is clearly mentioned above what you should do if any of these metrics are falling or too high - in the unsatisfactory range. If you pay heed to all of this, you are likely to ramp up your email marketing efforts!