7 min read
Email seemed to be on its way out as a medium of digital communication for a while. With the advent of newer, speedier forms of communication such as text messaging or direct messaging, people anticipated it to turn into an outdated and useless tool. However, the actual results were slightly different.
As technology improved, both email and the means of accessing email such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc also improved. This fast-paced transformation suddenly made email the most relevant and effective mode of digital communication. Today, email is actively used not only for interpersonal communications but also for B2C communications by a large number of brands.
From creating brand awareness among potential customers to improving engagement with existing customers, email is now a highly significant part of modern-day marketing. Email marketing allows brands, especially e-commerce stores to share important information with their customers in a very personalized manner.
Apart from this, advancements in email technology have also introduced many new metrics that brands can use to better understand their audience. Now, brands can easily track how customers interact with their email campaigns, using valuable data insights. This is known as email analytics.
In this guide, we will try to explain what exactly is email analytics and why it is important for brands today. We will also list a few key metrics that you should pay special attention to while measuring your email campaign’s effectiveness.
What Is Email Analytics?
Simply put, email analytics is the practice of tracking the way receivers interact with your email marketing campaign. This helps brands in evaluating the performance of their campaigns as well as understanding their audience better. It involves examining a wide range of metrics including open rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, and much more.
The data insights collected during this examination can help brands in identifying the parts of their campaigns that worked as well as the ones that did not work. They can then use this information to develop more effective and successful email marketing campaigns in the future.
Brands can choose to either evaluate the analytics of each individual campaign or the entire email marketing strategy as a whole. Either way, the data as well as the customer behavior insights received, can provide huge long-term benefits.
However, these benefits can only be enjoyed when brands know exactly what they need to evaluate. Marketers should be aware of the right tools that need to be used to measure the right metrics. To provide further help, we will share some key metrics later in this guide as well.
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Why Is Email Analytics Important For Brands Today?
Whether it is the quality of its products or customer service, a brand should always be ready to make improvements. The same is true for email marketing campaigns as well. Brands should strive to identify the gaps in their existing campaigns and take timely actions to cover them up.
But how will you find these gaps, if you can’t measure the performance of your campaigns in the first place? Email analytics solves the same problem. It allows marketers to evaluate various aspects of their email marketing campaigns and measure their effectiveness with in-depth reports and graphs.
Given the scale of investment that a brand does in its marketing campaigns, not a single resource should get wasted on unproductive strategies. Thus, brands can use these data insights to identify all the things that didn’t work out the planned way. Then, they can either improve on those areas or develop better alternatives.
This will ensure optimal utilization of resources as well as improve their ROI. The same is backed up by data, too. As per certain reports, marketers who employ email analytics have an ROI of 42:1, as compared to the 38:1 general average.
In addition to this, email analytics also provide a wealth of information regarding user engagement, prevalent behavior patterns, and the strengths and weaknesses of your content. Using this information, you can deliver a more tailored experience to your audience, by employing smart behavioral segmentation.
In short, email analytics is important if you wish to improve the results of your email marketing initiatives and stay on the top of the mind of your audience.
Key Metrics Of Email Analytics
Email analytics can offer a truckload of benefits, but only when you know exactly what you need to look at. While the relevance of each metric may differ depending on the nature of the business, there are a few key metrics that every brand should pay attention to. In this section of the guide, we will be discussing a few of them.
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- Open Rate
In simpler terms, the open rate is the percentage of the email recipients that actually open your emails. It is one of the most important and widely used metrics. If you don’t know whether your audience is reading your emails, you can never determine the true performance of your campaign.
- Bounce Rate
Bounce rate indicates the percentage of sent emails that couldn’t be delivered to the recipients. This is as crucial as the open rate, because finding out the number of recipients who do not receive your messages is also important. A higher bounce rate usually indicates that your subscriber list is either full of fraudulent email addresses or has many errors. Immediate actions should be taken to change this.
- Click-Through-Rate
CTR represents the percentage of receivers who have clicked on at least one of the links provided in your emails. Needless to say that this is an important metric to measure the effectiveness of your message content. If your recipients are actively clicking on the provided links, it means that your content is engaging. On the other hand, low CTR means ineffective body and subject line.
- Conversion Rate
This can be understood as the second part of the CTR metrics. While CTR measures the number of recipients who click on the given links, the conversion rate measures the number of recipients who complete the required action after clicking on those links. It is a crucial metric to determine your ROI. When you clearly know the percentage of potential buyers that are converting, it becomes simple to assess if your campaign is paying off.
- Rate of Unsubscribers
Another very important metric to measure the performance of email marketing campaigns is unsubscribe rate. It reflects the percentage of recipients that unsubscribed to your mailing list after receiving your emails. It can help you evaluate the performance of specific emails by measuring the number of recipients who unsubscribed after receiving them. It is also an indicator of how engaging the content of your emails is.
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Conclusion
The importance of email analytics cannot be stressed enough. The collection and analysis of detailed and complex data sets may appear tedious, but it can offer enormous benefits. It provides a direct, quantifiable way to check if your email marketing campaign is performing as you expect it to be.
You can use the metrics mentioned above to achieve this objective. However, there are now many advanced tools available that let you perform a much more detailed analysis. Make sure to explore them all while evaluating your next campaign.
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