Data-Driven Email Marketing—Key Metrics You Should Be Tracking

Do you need to get a better handle on your email campaign data to make smarter decisions for your email-marketing efforts? Here’s what you need to know about the key email metrics you should be tracking to make data-driven decisions and optimize your email return on investment (ROI).

What Is Data-Driven Email Marketing?

Data-driven email marketing is all about interpreting your data to better understand your prospects and customers. It also involves implementing an email marketing plan with the information and insights you gather to deliver relevant email campaigns that target each customer’s needs, preferences, and interests.

Growing Number of Businesses Adopting Data-Driven Email Strategies

Here are some studies that show that more and more businesses today are using data to impact their email marketing strategies and business decisions:

• In the Econsultancy Measurement and Analytics Report 2016, 64% of marketers surveyed said that they use data-driven customer insights to adapt their marketing strategies and impact business decisions
• In a recent survey of more than 2,000 executives, from 21 countries, and representing various industries, most respondents (55%) reported that their business decisions were data driven.
• As reported in a recent eMarketer article, more marketers surveyed reported that they expected to “increase somewhat” or “increase significantly” their spending on data-driven marketing through the end of 2016. In addition, more than 40% of the survey respondents expected the revenues generated by their data-driven marketing investments to “increase significantly” or “increase somewhat.”
• Research conducted with North American marketing and media executives showed that about half of the respondents said that predictive analytics is among the technologies that will help them get value from data. In addition, the respondents said that cross-channel measurement and attribution (40.6%), as well as campaign measurement tools that helped with segmentation and audience selection (34.8%), were also important.

What Email Metrics Should You Be Measuring and Analyzing?

When it comes to taking your email campaign results to the next level with the help of a data-driven marketing strategy, there are several email metrics that are vital:

Email Campaign Performance

How successful are your email campaigns? Knowing the following metrics will give you a good idea:

• Number of emails sent
• Number of opens and open rate
• Number of clicks and click-through rate
• Click-to-open rate
• Number of unsubscribes and unsubscribe rate
• Number of bounces and bounce rate
• Spam complaints and spam complaint rate.

Inbox Deliverability

Are you having problems getting through the Internet service providers’ spam filters and into the inboxes of your subscribers? It’s important to stay on top of the following metrics to detect and quickly deal with any email deliverability issues that arise:

• Number of emails sent by domain
• Number of unique opens by domain
• Number of bounces by domain
• Number of blocks by domain
• Number of unsubscribes by domain
• Number of spam complaints by domain.

Conversions and ROI

Conversions are the true measure of an email campaign’s success. Depending on the goals of your email-marketing program, the following are the types of the conversion metrics that you should be tracking:

• Conversion rate (the percentage of subscribers that clicked on a link and completed the desired action, such as making a purchase)
• Number of sales by type of email campaign
• Total number of sales by month
• Overall ROI (total revenue from your email campaigns divided by the total spend).

Analytical Tool for Real-Time Email Data Visualization

One of the biggest challenges for companies today is organizing and analyzing email-marketing data. That’s why FulcrumTech developed IntelliSents—an online email analytics platform that presents data in easy-to-read dashboards for real-time tracking and monitoring of email campaign performance.

The IntelliSents platform tracks the email performance trends over time of more than 25 of the most critical email-marketing data points, including the number of emails and campaigns sent, as well as open, click-through, bounce, and unsubscribe rates. In addition, IntelliSents’ email deliverability dashboards display essential inbox deliverability metrics that promptly detect any issues that you are encountering. There’s also a conversions dashboard that ties your email analytics to specific conversion goals, seamlessly incorporating data from other sources such as backend customer-relationship management (CRM) systems and Google Analytics to help create actionable insights for your email-marketing campaigns.

Interested in seeing for yourself how—with just a few clicks—your data can be presented in easy-to-read dashboards that provide insights on how to optimize email conversions and deliverability? Contact us today for a free demo and to learn more about how to implement a data-driven, email-marketing strategy for your email-marketing program.

Other Articles You Might Like

• How to Leverage Existing Data to Improve Performance of your Campaigns
• The Most Important Data Needed to Drive Email Subscriber Engagement and Conversions
• Email Optimization—5 Ways to Give Your Email Campaigns a Big Boost
• Email-Marketing Optimization — How to Retain More Customers and Radically Grow Sales
• Are You Using All the Data You Should to Get the Best ROI for Your Email Marketing?