Email Campaign Reporting That Drives Value Through Insight

Why insights are critical to your business

These insights will help you dig into the ways your email marketing campaign strategies are performing and where there are areas for improvement. They also help build a broader picture of your growth in subscriber engagement over time.

For your campaign to evolve with your audience and products, you must be able to not only access these insights but also understand their significance.

Insights and KPIs you need to track

Through your initial data, you’ll be able to track the engagement of each campaign and adjust them for optimal results. With your long-term insights, such as engagement trend data, you can change your strategy to maximize return on investment.

Two fundamental insights to track your campaign’s engagement and health are overall email performance and subscriber activity.

Email Performance

The main purpose of email marketing is to build a long-term, loyal relationship with your subscribers. Through email, your team can provide direct information and communication to your audience. But this can only happen if they receive and open the email.

Engaging and relevant content is important, but it doesn’t mean much if it’s never viewed. This is where overall performance data is essential to your marketing strategy. Below are three goals marketers can use to evaluate and ensure improved email marketing insights:

1. Journey Performance

Are your subscribers receiving your emails? This touchpoint is essential to your email campaign performance. By analyzing your inbox placement rate and sender reputation, your team will be able to measure if your emails are being sent to subscriber inboxes and then course-correct accordingly.

2. Content Performance

Successful content needs to be personal, relevant, and informative to engage your audience. Compare metrics like open rates or responses for different emails based on their subject lines. Do shorter subjects increase engagement?

It’s also important to understand content engagement beyond subject lines and click-through rates. In fact, only ¼ of responders engage with campaigns by using a click-through link. Subscribers may choose to interact with a campaign by visiting a social media page, calling a customer service number or even visiting a physical store. It’s critical that email marketers find ways to measure these alternative actions to track content performance.

3. Campaign Performance

Do your KPIs show a broader picture of your campaign performance? Tracking data is only as strong as the insights it can give to your overall campaign strategy. Understanding how your campaigns perform will ensure that your email campaign reporting is working for you through every step of the process.

Subscriber Activity

Subscriber engagement is the cornerstone of email marketing. As a marketing professional, it can be easy to assume that your team’s mailing lists consist of primarily active, engaged subscribers, but it’s critical to do your due diligence and explore potential weak points – for example, mistyped or inactive emails, or unengaged subscribers.

Inaccurate mailing list data can not only hurt your email campaign reporting and strategy but also damage your email deliverability. Your email deliverability is affected by your reputation score, which can be harmed by factors like bounce rates and inactive subscribers.

Below are two factors to consider when analyzing your email list health:

1. Monitor how new subscribers are acquired or maintained

Insight into your subscribers’ “health” will reveal both how well your campaign is doing and how well it could be doing. Is a portion of your mailing list inactive? If so, you can try to “reactivate” these subscribers through personalized content and offers. The greatest sign of email campaign success is interaction.

If that doesn’t work, it may be time to remove them from your list as they negatively affect your data and performance. Similarly, if your emails experience hard bounces where the contact is permanently undeliverable, it’s best to figure out if those contacts were mistyped or do not exist and remove, as needed.

Mailbox providers such as Gmail take note of low engagement rates and deliver your emails to junk or spam folders. These emails might then be technically marked as sent and delivered, but the chance your subscribers will actually read the emails is significantly decreased.

Focusing on active subscribers will increase your team’s productivity and help prioritize return on investment.

2. Track how subscribers are viewing your emails

As technology advances at a rapid pace, so do the devices and email clients that your campaigns will be viewed on. Understanding what devices and mailbox providers your subscribers are using to access your emails is key.

Learn what platforms your customers are using to optimize your content and design for a seamless user experience. If most users are accessing your emails on their mobile devices, learn how to best create content for iPhones or Androids.

It is important to note that recently more mail clients and mailbox providers are protecting privacy at the expense of tracking this type of data. For example, Apple’s plans to introduce Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) for its native Mail client users may require you to adjust how you review open rates and engagement.

Meanwhile, you should also adjust your strategy according to what email service providers your readers use. Not all inboxes will render your email content in the same way. If a large part of your audience uses Gmail, rather than Outlook, you may follow different design methods to best suit that inbox environment.

How to measure email marketing success

Email campaign reporting doesn’t just inform your marketing team when your strategy is successful — it also flags potential weak points that need to be improved.

Through email, your company can create direct relationships with customers that can benefit:

• Sales
• Client loyalty
• ROI
• Productivity

So how can you best use email marketing metrics to measure success? Read below to learn six steps to streamline your email marketing campaign strategy.

Step 1: Understand everything you can measure in email marketing

Every email marketing campaign is unique. Before you begin to create or improve your strategy, you’ll need to recognize what metrics will work best to measure your effectiveness.

Do you know what data your team will need to pull and document for best practice campaign reporting? These are some of the key metrics you should keep your eye on:

• Inbox Placement Rate
• Clickthrough Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Bounce Rate
• List Growth Rate
• Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate
• Overall ROI
• Open Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate
• Complaint Rate
• Microsoft Sender Reputation Data (SRD)

However, your campaign may require different tools to reach your campaign goals. Before you outline your next steps, take a step back and take inventory of what data you need and how you can track it.

Step 2: Set up goals

When building your strategy, start by identifying what the purpose of your campaign is. What do you want to achieve?

Based on your answer — or answers — you can choose which email campaign reporting metrics will best show you how you measure up and where you can improve.

Accurate and campaign-relevant metrics will help your team transform your goals into results.

Step 3: Define KPIs

To optimize your campaign strategy, it’s best practice to use KPIs to establish trends within your audience and evolve as you learn more. Helpful metrics such as unsubscribe rates and click-through rates will help you highlight what changes need to be made.

Once you narrow down which KPIs are imperative to your strategy, your team can start tracking your campaign’s progress.

Step 4: Track Metrics

So now that you’ve determined what metrics your team needs, how do you get those actionable marketing insights?

With Everest, Validity’s fully integrated email success platform, your business can uncover in-depth engagement analytics to increase message visibility and performance. Our platform provides:

• Inbox placement insights that tell you if your message went to the inbox, the spam folder, or went missing;
• Sender reputation monitoring to keep an eye on the signals that impact your reputation and deliverability;
• Data that shows the time of day your emails are opened, what devices they are opened on, and how long people are looking at them; and
• An activity chart that allows you to quickly see short-term trends, long-term trends, and metric outliers over the past 30 days.

With our solution, you’ll get actionable insights to identify problem areas, prioritize goals and evolve your email campaign reporting to achieve your goals. Learn more about Everest here.

Step 5: Evaluate your metrics

Ideally, your metrics will show you where to change your strategy to improve and what areas are succeeding with your audience. If a specific email campaign results in more engagement from subscribers, note what choices you made that you want to reapply to future campaigns.

With a database of metrics for each campaign your business runs, your team can follow engagement trends to create their own best practices.

Step 6: Improve

It may feel tedious to report on your campaigns’ data insights, but the information collected can lead to unpredicted potential. Gather your insights and focus your team’s efforts on improvement. Your strategy is only as strong as its weakest point, so working on this is where you’ll find your greatest results.

After you’ve sent out your campaigns and collected your chosen KPIs, it’s time to assess what the numbers mean. For example, if you have a low delivery rate, you’ll want to figure out what’s causing your emails to bounce.

Ideally, your metrics will show you where to change your strategy to improve and what areas are succeeding with your audience. If a specific email campaign results in more engagement from subscribers, note what choices you made that you want to reapply to future campaigns.

With a database of metrics for each campaign your business runs, your team can follow engagement trends to create their own best practices.

Email Marketing Metrics

Delivery Rate

(Number of Emails Sent – Number of Bounces) / Total Number of Emails Sent

Inbox Placement Rate

Number of Emails Delivered to the Inbox / Total Number of Emails Sent

Bounce Rate

In contrast to the delivery rate, the bounce rate is the percentage of your total emails sent that was not successfully delivered. Below is a formula to calculate your bounce rate:

(Number of Bounced Emails / Number of Emails Sent) * 100

There are two types of bounces to identify:

• Soft bounces occur when there’s a temporary problem, like a full inbox or a user’s server is experiencing issues. This type of bounce can clear up over time, so feel free to attempt to resend your email messages to soft bounces at a later time.
• Hard bounces are when emails are permanently undeliverable. This can happen due to an invalid, mistyped or even non-existent email address included in your subscriber list. These bounces can harm your sender reputation, so be sure to remove these emails from your list.

Open Rate

Your open rate is an estimate of the number of users that open your emails. Most open rates are determined by whether the subscriber has enabled embedded images to load in the email. However, not all emails that are opened will be caught by this metric since many may not have opted to load the image, even if they do open it. Below is a formula to calculate your open rate:

(Total Opens / Total Delivered) * 100

Click-through Rate

(Total Unique Clicks / Number of Delivered Emails) * 100

If your rate is low, don’t panic! Take a deep breath and compare it to the average click-through rate for your industry or business type. Make sure to use this percentage as a comparative metric to track your own benchmark for engagement growth.

Conversion Rate

(Number of People Who Completed the Action / Number of Emails Delivered) * 100

Unsubscribe Rate

However, many subscribers may choose to simply stop opening or clicking your emails instead of formally unsubscribing. Due to this, the unsubscribe rate isn’t the most accurate measurement of disengagement. You should still keep track of this metric at least monthly to help analyze your overall growth rate over time.

Complaint rate

Number of Complaints / Total Number of Emails Delivered to Inboxes

Sender Reputation

Your sender reputation will ultimately determine whether your email campaigns get delivered to subscribers. Every mailbox provider has its own algorithm to determine sender reputation that factors in both domain and IP address reputations, even though they’re independent reputation signals.

Poor sender reputation can cause your email campaigns to end up in the spam folder or — in the worst-case scenario — put you on a blocklist.

The Value of Email Campaign Reporting

Validity’s email campaign reporting solutions will help you realize your marketing objectives.