In this post, we talk more about watching your analytics in email marketing . It is very important that you keep analyzing the right parameters, so that you can keep improving your performance and do better with every campaign.

In an earlier post, you would remember that we talked about how, as a marketer, you can get started with setting up successful email marketing campaigns. We also talked about how you need to get your lists ready before you launch into your campaigns. Setting up your email marketing infrastructure was next on the agenda and we talked through whitelisting techniques, email service providers as well as managing the opt-in mechanisms and autoresponders. We then talked about how you should treat email marketing like a dialogue with your prospects, in which you are gradually moving a prospect from an anonymous user to a paid customer.

Watch your analytics in email marketing

Copy in email messaging is very important, as is the case in web copy. Every service provider I’ve ever worked with in the past provides complimentary analytics. Though they’re all important, the 4 most important to me are open rate, click through rate (CTR), bounce rate and unsubscribes.

Your open rate will tell you how well you’ve built your relationship; if the number is low, it means that people have started to delete upon receipt, which means you need to work harder on providing value and/or managing expectations.

If your click through rate (CTR) is low, it means that your message is either not targeted enough, or simply not able to deliver the value that you are promising. In this case, focus on improving your copy or improving the promotional elements of the asset that you are trying to promote. It always works well to bring in references, citations to support your claim, but of course, packing all of them together in an email is usually a challenge.

If your unsubscription rate is high in relation to your opt-in rate, then you’ve passed the point of building value and writing good copy. You will have to do some serious work in terms of strategy of your email reach outs and the content that you are using to engage with them. Try to examine when people are leaving and take action based on those leaks.

If you have a opt-in list and in case you are using double opt-ins, your bounce rates will be almost nil, except if people have left their positions recently. With single opt-ins, it is still possible to get a decent bounce ratio, as people may have provided false email addresses. However, it is less likely as you will typically auto-deliver the knowledge assets directly to the email address.

If they’re leaving after a certain autoresponder email, then re-work it. Typically analytics in email marketing will provide you this information. If they’re leaving after marketing messages, then re-work the way you present offers. If they’re leaving early on in your funnel, then you need to fix your original call to action. Email analytics are critical in that if you’re paying attention, they’ll give you very specific clues as to what you’re doing wrong. Of course the key variable here is being able to pay attention and deriving this information out of the raw data that is presented to you by these electronic direct mailing tools. These are just some of the ways in which analytics in email marketing can help you improve your performance. 

Of course there is a lot more to email marketing than what we have covered, but then, this was a primer to get you started. I sure do hope you enjoyed the journey. We do have tons of case studies, where we have improved email marketing performance for our clients by over 200% within a span of 2-3 months.

Here’s what you can expect from us…

We publish a newsletter once a week with content on a variety of digital marketing topics, all of which is focused to ensure that businesses can use digital marketing to achieve their  business objectives. Make sure that you do not miss out. 

Also, would request you to take two seconds to join us on social media, as this will be our primary method of communication outside of email updates (we share tons of cool things there):

Like our Facebook page | Join us at our Facebook Group | Follow us on Twitter

Atul Dhakappa

Atul is Founder & CEO at Xenia Consulting. He has over 22 years of experience in marketing, across corporates as well as SME,start-ups. Over the last 5 years, he has gained significant expertise and has helped several companies drive growth leveraging digital marketing