Excerpt: An email campaign report is not a stagnant document you like to check up on from time to time. It is to be engaged in a contextual dialogue.
What exactly is meant by an email campaign report? Well, you can think of it as a dashboard that displays the comprehensive history of your actions throughout a campaign.
Consequently, creating an email campaign report involves collecting various data points to evaluate the overall performance of your email campaign.
(Bear in mind that data collection and data analysis are two separate domains of expertise. Certainly, one of the benefits of working with an email marketing company is that you will have access to detailed analytics and reporting. However, success depends on how you use that data to drive improvements where necessary.)
After all, it’s crucial to establish a perspective that provides a reliable context for guiding your future marketing initiatives. To that end, here’s a brief guide on what goes into drawing up a failsafe email campaign report.
Key Metrics Identification And Analysis
The key metrics of an email campaign include open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, spam rate, subscriber growth rate, and unsubscribe rate.
Now the significance of each metric may vary depending on the unique needs of a particular campaign. For example, when disseminating a legal update, the primary focus should be on assessing the open rate. Again, in the case of promoting a Fall sale, the spotlight is on the conversion rate.
Email Deliverability Analysis
The two main metrics for email deliverability analysis are inbox placement rate (IPR) and bounce type.
The inbox placement rate shows the percentage of emails that successfully reached the recipients’ inboxes, avoiding the dreaded spam folder. The bounce type will differentiate between hard bounces (permanent/long-lasting delivery failures) and soft bounces (temporary delivery failures).
Content Analysis
Content analysis looks at how well your content is performing across the campaign. It is important to remember that getting emails delivered, opened, and read does not by itself guarantee ultimate success. You want to know whether or not the content you create is actually making a difference in how your subscribers act toward your offers.
So here you look at your best or worst performing email sequences and automations. The former involves studying how well a particular email sequence has performed. For the latter, you want to know which triggered email has fared badly, relatively speaking.
Engagement Analysis
At a very basic level, subscribers can be divided into two kinds: the first kind loves your product/services and engages with your emails on a regular basis; the second type has almost forgotten about your brand and needs to be engaged again.
Engagement analysis will tell you how to optimize your emails according to the behavioral dynamics of either type.
Segmentation Analysis
Gauge the performance of different segments of your email campaign by evaluating audience response.
Next, conduct a thorough analysis of each segment based on criteria such as demographics, location, behavior, and other relevant factors, depending on the granularity provided by the email marketing platform you are utilizing.
(Pro tip: Select an email marketing company that favors a high level of granularity in terms of data and segmentation capabilities.)
Device And Platform Analysis
Device analysis involves determining the percentage of open rates on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. Platform analysis, on the other hand, will show which email clients and platforms are most commonly used by your audience.
Time And Frequency Analysis
Identify the best send times i.e. the times of the day when your audience is most likely to engage with your emails. That would be your send time analysis.
Next, conduct a frequency analysis. So basically you want to know “how often is too often.” This is because the frequency of emails determines engagement rates and unsubscribe rates.
Revenue And Return on Investment (ROI)
Carry out an attribution analysis. Put simply, you want to trace and assign values to relevant touchpoints in a customer’s sales journey.
Importantly, there are several kinds of attribution models in email marketing. How do you know which one to use? Once again, it depends on your unique needs as a brand. Determine what precisely it is you want to learn by conducting an attribution analysis.
Then calculate the return on investment (ROI) considering such factors as customer lifetime value, increased sales, overall cost of the concerned email campaign, etc.
Wrapping Up!
So now you know what an email campaign report looks like. Of course, an analytics report has many other things besides those discussed in this post. Replete with all kinds of charts and graphs, the typical AI-driven analytics template is a goldmine of data.
However, as we mentioned at the outset, it’s how you use the data that will ultimately determine the effectiveness of your email campaigns. By ‘use’ we mean extracting actionable insights from data and converting them into opportunities to make real-world impact. Email campaigns are dynamic, constantly evolving over time. Data-driven adaptability is the mainstay of continued success.
