Email activity reporting can be troublesome, but it is essential to your email marketing success. This is why it is so important and how to use it properly.
Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective and powerful online marketing tools for direct communication with potential customers and existing customers.
according to A study According to the Data and Marketing Association, the value of email marketing continues to rise:
- For every dollar spent, the return on investment for email marketing is approximately $57; an increase of $13 from the previous study.
- The lifetime value (LTV) of each person in the email marketing database has increased by 33% year-on-year.
- Email marketing has an impact on important business development drivers. The main goals of email campaigns are sales (62%), engagement (50%), brand awareness (47%) and building loyalty (45%).
To achieve this level of return on investment, email marketers need to pay attention to how their audience responds to their activities.
Usually the focus is on sending email rather than reporting and analysis. But without time for analysis, it is almost impossible to improve your results.
In this article, we will introduce why reporting is so important, the components of a great report, and the tools that can be used to make reporting easier.
Measurement results bring better results
As with any digital marketing strategy, the goal is to use insights from available data to get better results. If you want to improve the results of your email marketing campaign, you must analyze the marketing campaign and take action.
Examples of key email metrics you should monitor are as follows:
- Open rate: The percentage of email recipients who opened the email campaign. The main factors affecting the opening rate are the intensity of the subject line and the relevance of the subject.
- Click-through rate: The percentage of email recipients who clicked a link in the email. Directing readers to the landing page can lead to the desired conversion-such as downloading, purchasing, or requesting a demo.
- Unsubscribe rate. The percentage of email recipients who unsubscribed from your email list. The high unsubscribe rate may come from a poorly targeted list or talk about topics that are not of interest to readers. In either case, campaigns with high unsubscribe rates can provide insight into what your audience wants or doesn’t want to read.
- Bounce Rate. The percentage of emails that were sent but could not be delivered. You should monitor and maintain the bounce rate to maintain a high-quality subscriber list.
For a complete list of metrics tracked in email marketing, be sure to check 17 email marketing metrics every marketer needs to know.
By paying close attention to these indicators, marketers will better understand the preferences and interests of the audience. Only with this understanding can we make adjustments to improve results.
For example, if the open rate is low, use subject line A/B testing to determine which topics resonate with your target audience. If you want to increase CTR, try different calls to action or make the CTA more prominent in the email.
Analyze, improve, improve, repeat
As an email marketer, your job is to analyze campaigns and make data-based adjustments to improve results. When putting together your campaign reports, it’s important to keep these tips in mind.
Use comprehensive data. The activity report should include all important indicators so that you can have a clear, complete and timely understanding of activity performance.
Make the report format correct and easy to navigate. Reports should be well organized so that activity data is easy to access and understand.
Add insights to your report. You should be able to add suggestions to the report based on the insights from the data. This is important to allow stakeholders to have a greater understanding without requiring them to analyze all the data themselves.
Generate reports automatically. The typical life cycle of an email activity is about three days after it is sent. After that, it’s time to collect the results.
It is helpful to find a tool that automatically generates reports to align with this cycle. This will ensure that event data is provided to the right stakeholders at the right time, rather than piece something together.
Make distribution easy. Often, there are multiple stakeholders who need to view the results of the campaign (sales staff, marketing executives, customers, etc.). If you can, find a tool that allows you to automatically distribute the report in PDF or web format.
View the context of other activities. It’s helpful to review a campaign, but comparing it to similar recent campaigns can give you a clearer picture of overall performance.
Tools to get the job done
Most email service providers do an excellent job of managing activities and capturing data. But generating and distributing reports on this data can be painful, especially when you want to share these reports with other stakeholders.
Tools like this CM report, However, easily solve this problem. CM Reports is developed by Core Online Marketing and integrated with Campaign Monitor to help agencies and marketing teams automatically generate and distribute detailed reports containing insights and recommendations.
This tool saves email marketers a lot of time and ensures that all stakeholders have transparent access to campaign performance details.
To learn more about CM reports and start a free trial, Go here.
wrap up
If you don’t take the time to report your email activity, it’s hard to succeed. Yes, it sounds tedious, especially for marketers who are pressed for time, but its value is well worth it.
By understanding what you are measuring, building easy-to-read reports, and using the right tools, your email program will be on the road to success.
