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What email marketing reporting do I need to care about?

July 20 - 2022

Email Marketing Strategy 5 min read

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Email marketing is one of the most effective communications channels with an ROI of 38:1 (DMA Marketer Tracker 2021). However, to excel at this powerful mode of marketing it’s essential to understand what needs to be optimised. To do this, you need to be focussing on the right data points.

The challenge for time-poor email marketers is knowing which metrics you really need to care about. At different times, different metrics will matter most. Here’s a summary to guide you across the year.

We’ve broken these key metrics into 4 email performance areas.

  1. Email Performance
  2. Environment
  3. Engagement
  4. Deliverability

But first let’s take a look at why email marketing performance measurement is crucial to success.

The benefits of email marketing performance measurement

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure” a famous quote by Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management. Whilst this statement is true we‘re also drowning in a sea of data, so understanding what data points to measure is crucial to success.

There should be a clear line of sight from your email performance objectives and the business goals. How does each campaign support your marketing performance objectives? Which in turn should be informed by the business objectives.

Ensuring that you’re measuring and reporting on the metrics that matter to the business goals will not only make sure you’re optimising wisely, but also that your reporting will gain greater interest at a leadership level.

Simply put, measurement done properly is the best way to create a high performance culture.

Let’s take a closer look at the key areas you should be measuring to deliver outstanding email marketing results that help your business achieve their goals.

1. Email Performance

Most marketers look at ‘performance’ most often e.g. open, click and unsubscribe. Given the impact that Apple iOS15 might have on open rate, the click rate is the clearest indication of engagement within the email. Ideally you will link this to conversion (whatever that is for you i.e. revenue, attendance, downloads etc).

2. Environment

Is your email performance linked to how your email appears to each reader? How an email will look and behave depends on a number of factors, including, device, email client and web browser being used. Knowing how your email renders in the environments that most of your emails are viewed in is vital. If a significant percentage of your emails are read in Gmail, on iPhone with dark mode on, this data is beneficial to informing your email design strategy going forward.

3. Engagement

So your email looks great, now how are readers interacting and engaging with each element? First of all, do you have regular non-readers? As with all your segmentation, don’t treat them the same as other readers. Use your click reports to find out which specific elements are being clicked on. If engagement is high what could you do to enhance the campaign but if engagement is low you should consider how you can improve engagement. This insight can feed into your testing strategy. A/B testing content, imagery, CTA button colour and placement are all important elements to test.

4. Deliverability

The best designed, segmented and hyper personalised email won’t achieve anything if it’s not seen. Are your emails ending up in the spam folder? Or worse, not reaching the subscriber at all? This is where measuring deliverability is vital (and often overlooked by most marketing teams). Jarrang partners with industry experts, Validity, to provide clients with inbox placement and reputation metrics to ensure a healthy delivery over time. (Get in touch to learn more about our deliverability services)

Next steps

Jarrang works with leading UK brands from eCommerce to luxury hotels. We create industry leading email marketing programmes to fuel growth, drive revenues and build lasting relationships.

Through cutting edge design, development, content and consultancy, our in-house experts ensure our clients always see a return on investment. If you need expert consultancy to help you discover the most important email marketing metrics you need to be tracking, we’d love to help.

 

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