Lots of companies send out email campaigns (with varying levels of success. However, measuring the results of these campaigns is often neglected. When marketing managers are asked if they know how their campaigns performed and how profitable they were, they’ll often dodge the question. Why? Because email marketing solutions usually only offer results for each campaign. Accurate analysis requires comparing results and data against criteria specific to your business, and all this can be complicated to do with the standard tools.
The Importance of Monitoring Performance Over Time
Nevertheless, it’s essential to be aware of, and to monitor, your campaign results. An email campaign’s lifecycle can be between three to five days. Beyond five days, opens and clicks will drop off significantly.
Every week, you could list (in an Excel file, for example) your campaign results. Name your rows after your campaigns, with the columns containing the different metrics in percentages and volumes.
Don’t forget to include conversion in this table! This way, you can monitor your performance campaign by campaign. Also, don’t forget to include the results of your A/B tests (we’ll cover these in the next chapter)!
Then, every quarter, it’s crucial to assess the effectiveness of your email strategy. You could then aggregate your results over time using pivot tables if you use Excel. Then you can carry out an analysis according to campaign type (promotional or relational), target (prospective vs. existing clients, active vs. inactive), etc.
Key Elements to Monitor
Campaign Numbers and Volumes
Measuring the volume of emails sent will give you an idea of your email activity. Is it increasing or decreasing?
Your goal should be to have a relatively stable volume of emails sent without much variation from one week to the next. If this volume varies too much, you risk attracting spam filters and running into deliverability issues.
Looking at the number of campaigns sent will give you an idea of the marketing pressure on your contacts and the level targeting of your campaigns.
Opens and Clicks, in Rates and Volumes
Open and click rates allow you to measure how your campaign performs over time. Your goal should be a consistent increase (especially with your click rate). Look at your unique (not total) open and click rates and ensure that this excludes clicks on the unsubscribe link. The most important thing is not how many overall opens and clicks you got, but how many different people opened and clicked. Many marketers stop with the total open and click rates.
Dissatisfaction and Unsubscribes
Monitoring dissatisfaction and unsubscribes tells you whether your content is of any interest to your contacts. Your goal is for both of these rates to decrease consistently. A good unsubscribe rate is less than 0.2%, while a good dissatisfaction rate is below 20%. You primarily achieve satisfaction through relevance - which comes from good targeting. So brands who maximize their clicks and satisfaction target their campaigns according to their client’s interests.
Sales and Conversions
Use conversions to measure campaign profitability. Desired actions vary from one business sector to the next. It could be a number of things including:
the number of products or services sold
the number of people that responded to a survey
the number of appointments made
the number of subscriptions
It is sometimes difficult to get information regarding conversions from your email delivery solution, but you can monitor it using an Excel table of turnover generated for every 1000 emails sent.
Let’s Recap!
It is best to create an Excel table in which you list your campaign’s KPIs.
Don’t forget to include conversions and results from your A/B tests in your sheet.
Monitor your results campaign by campaign every week to stay up to date on trends.
Use the data to carry out a more in-depth analysis of your email strategy every quarter.
Next chapter, we’ll look at which levers you need to pull to optimize opens and clicks and, in turn, reduce unsubscribes and dissatisfaction.
