Email is a great tool for strengthening relationships with people who may have first gotten to know your brand via social media or search marketing. Email tracking offers insight into how well you’re doing that via data like open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates. These numbers show you what your target audience wants from your business, so you can deliver that. Once you know what’s working and what’s not, you can better maintain loyal and productive relationships with your customers.
Depending on your business, basic email tracking might start with looking at overall open rates, mobile opens, open rates on desktop versus mobile, which will help you make sure your emails are optimized for all the devices and environments in which your subscribers interact with your emails. After that, you can dig deeper to get an understanding of specific customers’ interests as they concern your business. Oftentimes, delivering what your audience wants requires better segmentation, be that segmenting by location or transaction history.
Before you get started with email analytics however, you need to identify 3 things: 1) your business goals for your email marketing, 2) key performance indicators (KPIs) for your email campaigns, and 3) the email tracking tools you’ll use to assess email performance.
1. Identify your business goals.
It’s crucial to determine exactly what you want to achieve with your email marketing before you begin to send and track emails. It could be anything from attracting more visitors to your site, signing up more blog subscribers, lead generation or converting existing leads into customers.
2. Identify KPIs.
KPIs are the metrics that help you see if and how you’re meeting your business goals. Your business goals dictate your KPIs, so they’ll be specific to your business. Depending on where you landed with #1 above, you might consider the following KPIs for starters:
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- List growth rate
- Email sharing/forwarding rate
- # of new leads generated
- Lead-to-customer conversation rate
- Overall ROI
3. Identify email campaign tracking tools.
Integrated email analytics give you the full picture of how your subscribers are navigating their experience with you—from your emails to beyond the click.
Google Analytics is a good place to start. It can be useful for tracking what happens after subscribers click through from your email to your website. And you can integrate email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor directly with Google Analytics.
Email tracking can help with everything from creating win-back campaigns for subscribers who haven’t interacted with your emails in a while to setting up loyalty programs for people who forward your emails the most. It’s also uber helpful for personalizing email campaigns that speak to customers’ specific interests. In short, email tracking done well will make your email marketing more efficient and productive.
Learn more about Filament and how we help brands create effective emails.
