Reports with a Purpose
Email marketing remains a cornerstone of digital marketing campaigns, offering businesses a direct line to their audience. But how do you ensure your email campaigns are truly effective? The answer lies in understanding and leveraging email reports. These reports provide crucial insights into your database health, audience engagement, and overall campaign performance. Think you’ve got it handled? Here’s what you may be missing.
1 – Email Report Discovery
Begin planning your reporting strategy by thinking about your goals. Consider the audience for your reports and what information all stakeholders need. Your reports should initiate incremental improvements and optimization, and help you answer some of these questions:
- Was this an effective email marketing campaign for my organization and why?
- How do my email campaigns compare to others in my industry?
- What do I need to change to make this email campaign more successful?
- Do I have a healthy email audience?
- Am I following recommended deliverability best practices?
Additionally, consider the types of emails you send and whether certain categories should be excluded from general reporting or reviewed independently. For instance, you may analyze operational emails separately from marketing emails, customer vs. prospect emails, or focus on emails that meet a specific recipient threshold. It can also be beneficial to distinguish between evergreen content, such as nurture or autoresponder emails, and one-off email blasts in your reporting.
Get buy-in from all stakeholders on what needs to be answered. While additional questions may arise over time, it’s ineffective to change the report parameters every time. The team should agree on what information will be extracted and analyzed regularly.
Finally, identify the best reporting cadence for your organization. A monthly report will include enough information to analyze without demanding too much effort, but also not allow too much time to go by if something needs improvement. Your monthly reporting can include data from previous months to provide a look-back comparison.
2 – Build Email Report
Once you know what to look for, it’s time to build your reports. This involves:
Selecting the right tools: You can set up email performance reports in your marketing automation platform, or your organization may prefer to use a platform like Tableau or custom reporting tools to gather data that may be available across platforms. However, you don’t need complex analytics software. Simply start looking at the information that is available to you.
Organizing data: Structure your reports to focus on key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some standard metrics that are typically available for email reports:
Marketing Database Metrics:
- Total Database size
- # New Leads this month, # News Leads month-over-month
- # Marketable Leads, % Marketable Leads
Email Performance Metrics:
- #Sent, #Delivered, %Delivered
- #Opened, %Opened
- #Clicked, %Clicked
- Click-to-Open %
- Conversion Rate: % of forms filled out from email
- #Unsubscribed, %Unsubscribed
- A/B testing results on any of the above
Email Link Performance:
- URL
- #Clicks, %Clicks
- #People who clicked, %People
Verify results: As you build these reports, do the numbers tell the whole story? Check to see if there are any missing data points or metrics that could provide additional context. Get familiar with any caveats to email performance metrics. Email bot activity and email client behavior may influence how your automation platform reports email metrics. Make sure that you understand the numbers that are generated and be able to explain the outputs.
Automating Data Extraction: Where possible, set up automated reports to save time and ensure consistency. Ensure your reports deliver information on all of the intended emails, audiences, and time frames that you need.
3 – Design Email Report
How you present your findings can make a big difference in how they’re received:
Choose the Format: Decide whether a slide deck, dashboard, or spreadsheet best suits your audience. Each format has strengths—slide decks for presentations, dashboards for real-time monitoring, and spreadsheets for detailed analysis.
Visual Representation: Incorporate screenshots or graphs to make data more digestible. Clear visuals can highlight trends and patterns more effectively than raw numbers alone.
Clear Comparisons: Serve up clear examples that contextualize the numbers on the screen. Offer examples of the highest- and lowest-performing emails by click-to-open or unsubscribe rates.
4 – Execute Email Report
With your report designed, it’s time to execute. The right amount of planning will make this monthly practice the simplest part of the process.
Data Extraction: Pull the relevant data from your sources and ensure it’s accurate. If your reporting process can be automated, implement scripts or use built-in features in your reporting tools to generate reports regularly.
Formatting: Use tools like Excel or Google Sheets to format the data if necessary. Apply the new data into your pre-designed report format. Generate new email visuals and update charts, graphs, and tables for clarity.
5 – Analyze Email Report
Reviewing the reports is where the real insights emerge:
Analyze Trends Over Time: Compare current performance with historical data looking at month-over-month or year-over-year trends. Compare your results with organizational and industry benchmarks to see how your emails stack up.
Examine Engagement Metrics: Call out email outliers. Looking at the highest- and lowest-performing emails can help contextualize the month’s email performance. Look further to see if email volume, send days and times, or specific devices and platforms drive unusual engagement.
Evaluate Content and Design: Assess how specific elements such as email subject lines, design and layout, and personalization impact performance.
Identify Areas for Improvement: Based on your analysis, identify content adjustments, design changes, or improvements to list quality and segmentation that will optimize deliverability and engagement.
6 – Act on the Email Report
You’ve seen the numbers. You have analyzed the results. You know what you need to change. After all, the ultimate goal of reporting is to drive improvement.
Take Action: Use the insights from your reports to make informed decisions. If you discover an issue, such as low engagement, act on it by refining your content or strategy.
Continuous Optimization: Implement changes and monitor their impact. Regularly review your reports to ensure your adjustments are having the desired effect.
Email Marketing Report Takeaways
- Focus on Relevant Details: Prioritize the metrics that align with your marketing goals and help your team surface potential problems.
- Consistency is Crucial: Use consistent reporting methods to make accurate month-over-month comparisons.
- Act on Insights: Use the data to address issues and refine your strategy. If your reports uncover an ineffective or broken email, use that data and put it to work to make your content better. A report’s true value lies in the actionable insights it provides.
By following these steps, you can turn email performance reports into a powerful tool for optimizing your marketing automation platform and maintaining healthy email best practices. If you need help getting started, talk to an Etumos consultant about setting up an insightful and actionable report for your email marketing team.
