The answer to both questions is fairly straightforward: First off, know what you need and secondly, know how to evaluate an ESP\u2019s capability.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Why email campaign analytics are critical to your email marketing<\/span><\/h2>\nThere are several reasons why analytics are critical to your email marketing, and why they factor into your ESP choice. Without the monitoring of your metrics, you can\u2019t know how effective (or ineffective) your email campaigns are. Nor can you know what to change\u2026or how.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/email_health.jpg\" "\\"Example")
<\/a><\/p>\nEmail reporting functionalities will enable you to:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- Track progress<\/li>\n
- Find opportunities<\/li>\n
- Justify budgets to the C suite<\/li>\n
- Recognize small problems before they become big ones<\/li>\n
- Spot trends both up and down<\/li>\n
- Identify your successes so you can replicate them<\/li>\n
- Constantly learn and improve<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
If you\u2019re in the market for a new platform, you need to make sure you delve into the email reporting offered by each email service provider or Marketing Automation system<\/a> you are considering.<\/p>\n<\/span>So\u2026what should those analytics be?<\/span><\/h2>\nYour email reporting<\/a> needs are specific to your business and therefore are determined by you, your email strategy and your business objectives. <\/p>\nI can suggest some email analytics you might want to consider when shopping for a new ESP, especially if your business is growing in size and\/or complexity and you will need to do more with analytics in the future.<\/p>\n
Examples of reporting you might want to start with:<\/b><\/p>\n\n- Compare the performance of different lists.<\/li>\n
- Break out subscribers by attributes like region or postal code.<\/li>\n
- Compare the past week to the past month, or the past week to the same week last year.<\/li>\n
- Compare several campaigns side-by-side.<\/li>\n
- Report on profits and \u201cbeyond the click\u201d<\/li>\n
- See your open rates by time of day, day of week, and day of month.<\/li>\n
- Compare your open rates to your send volume.<\/li>\n
- Discover your best subject line length.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
This is only a sampling of the kinds of comparisons and analysis you might want to make. It is up to you and your team to really delve into what that email reporting should enable.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Sharing your statistics<\/span><\/h2>\nConsider how shareable you need this data (the reports) to be. Do others in your organization need to know and understand the analytics? For example, are you tasked with generating reports for management with side-by-side comparisons? In other cases colleagues will be logging in to the platform independently.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Make sure you\u2019re making a fair comparison of email analytics<\/span><\/h2>\nBefore you make email campaign analytics a priority with your new ESP, make sure you know what those analytics need to be, but also know that you\u2019re comparing apples to apples when talking numbers. Different email service providers have different definitions. For example:<\/p>\n
\n- Open rate could mean the open rate of those sent or of those delivered<\/li>\n
- Your ESP might mean unique opens or cumulative opens<\/li>\n
- Bounce rate might mean hard and \/ or soft bounces<\/li>\n
- A click-through rate (CTR) might count click-throughs to unsubscribe or to the preference center<\/li>\n
- And Click-to-open (CTO) rate confuses many, so be sure you\u2019re clear what that means with any ESP<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Once you\u2019re clarified the definitions for each ESP\u2019s metrics, you\u2019ll be in a much better position to do an email service providers comparison\u2014and ensure you\u2019ll get the email campaign analytics you\u2019re hoping for.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Evaluating email campaigns analytics<\/span><\/h2>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/open_rate_performance.jpg\" "\\"example")
<\/a>Once you\u2019ve determined the email reporting you want to have (and how shareable it must be), it\u2019s time to make those factors criteria in your search for a new email service provider.<\/p>\nThe biggest question you\u2019ll want to explore with any potential ESP is this one: Can you do your email analytics like you do your segmentation<\/strong>? Because you don\u2019t want email reporting on your list as a whole. You want reporting on your segments too.<\/p>\n<\/span>Drill down into email campaign analytics<\/span><\/h2>\nConsider a company selling boots. If you\u2019re using dynamic content so that one email campaign delivers a promotion for men\u2019s boots to men, and a promotion for women\u2019s boots to women, \u00a0you want to be able to dig deeper than just open rate for the whole population.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d probably want to know how the men\u2019s list compared to the women\u2019s list, for example. \u00a0You could gain a lot of insight into these groups, but you won\u2019t know if you don\u2019t have the kind of email campaign analytics that will let you do these kinds of comparisons.<\/p>\n
Knowing who to target<\/strong>
\nThose who open your emails are the ones who have the potential to be the most engaged. And those who don\u2019t offer you an opportunity to re-engage. But if the email reporting is lacking, how will you know whom to target and how?<\/p>\nYou want to know who opened and what they clicked so you can react to that behavior. This is how you dive into subscriber behavior and trends. This is how you learn what you need to know to engage your audiences.<\/p>\n
Or perhaps you saw a fabulous click-through rate of 13%. You want to know not that 13% of the list clicked through on a link. You want to know who<\/span> clicked and on which<\/span> link. Did 8% of those who clicked do so on the unsubscribe button? Did all 13% click on one call to action and not another? This are the metrics you need to know.<\/p>\nWithout sophisticated analytics<\/a> like these, you might as well be advertising on a billboard, because you\u2019re missing out on all the data available to you that enables you to target, react and engage.<\/p>\n<\/span>What if your ESP doesn\u2019t offer the email analytics you want?<\/span><\/h2>\nMaybe you\u2019ve found the best email service provider for your business sans one feature: The email reporting is less than what you\u2019ve determined you need. In that case an option is to see there\u2019s a third-party solution that can enable the kind of email campaign analytics you envisioned.<\/p>\n
Ask the supplier of your Email marketing software. There might be and they might have experience in making an integration between the analytics and the ESP<\/a> too. For example, ExactTarget users can use eMVision<\/a>, a reporting tool based on Tableau Software, to dig deeper into their ExactTarget data. Your chosen ESP might have a similar analytics partner.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s worth asking because if you don\u2019t have the analytics, your email marketing will always fall short.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you\u2019re an email marketer, you\u2019re into analytics. You have to be. Email marketing offers up all kinds of data for analyzing, and it\u2019s only by doing so that you can improve your marketing and your email marketing ROI. But with all the variables of email marketing\u2014and email reporting\u2014how do you know you\u2019re using the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":5938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[183,225],"dealstore":[],"coauthors":[538],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5935"},{"taxonomy":"dealstore","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dealstore?post=5935"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/a><\/p>\nEmail reporting functionalities will enable you to:<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019re in the market for a new platform, you need to make sure you delve into the email reporting offered by each email service provider or Marketing Automation system<\/a> you are considering.<\/p>\n Your email reporting<\/a> needs are specific to your business and therefore are determined by you, your email strategy and your business objectives. <\/p>\n I can suggest some email analytics you might want to consider when shopping for a new ESP, especially if your business is growing in size and\/or complexity and you will need to do more with analytics in the future.<\/p>\n Examples of reporting you might want to start with:<\/b><\/p>\n This is only a sampling of the kinds of comparisons and analysis you might want to make. It is up to you and your team to really delve into what that email reporting should enable.<\/p>\n Consider how shareable you need this data (the reports) to be. Do others in your organization need to know and understand the analytics? For example, are you tasked with generating reports for management with side-by-side comparisons? In other cases colleagues will be logging in to the platform independently.<\/p>\n Before you make email campaign analytics a priority with your new ESP, make sure you know what those analytics need to be, but also know that you\u2019re comparing apples to apples when talking numbers. Different email service providers have different definitions. For example:<\/p>\n Once you\u2019re clarified the definitions for each ESP\u2019s metrics, you\u2019ll be in a much better position to do an email service providers comparison\u2014and ensure you\u2019ll get the email campaign analytics you\u2019re hoping for.<\/p>\n The biggest question you\u2019ll want to explore with any potential ESP is this one: Can you do your email analytics like you do your segmentation<\/strong>? Because you don\u2019t want email reporting on your list as a whole. You want reporting on your segments too.<\/p>\n Consider a company selling boots. If you\u2019re using dynamic content so that one email campaign delivers a promotion for men\u2019s boots to men, and a promotion for women\u2019s boots to women, \u00a0you want to be able to dig deeper than just open rate for the whole population.<\/p>\n You\u2019d probably want to know how the men\u2019s list compared to the women\u2019s list, for example. \u00a0You could gain a lot of insight into these groups, but you won\u2019t know if you don\u2019t have the kind of email campaign analytics that will let you do these kinds of comparisons.<\/p>\n Knowing who to target<\/strong> You want to know who opened and what they clicked so you can react to that behavior. This is how you dive into subscriber behavior and trends. This is how you learn what you need to know to engage your audiences.<\/p>\n Or perhaps you saw a fabulous click-through rate of 13%. You want to know not that 13% of the list clicked through on a link. You want to know who<\/span> clicked and on which<\/span> link. Did 8% of those who clicked do so on the unsubscribe button? Did all 13% click on one call to action and not another? This are the metrics you need to know.<\/p>\n Without sophisticated analytics<\/a> like these, you might as well be advertising on a billboard, because you\u2019re missing out on all the data available to you that enables you to target, react and engage.<\/p>\n Maybe you\u2019ve found the best email service provider for your business sans one feature: The email reporting is less than what you\u2019ve determined you need. In that case an option is to see there\u2019s a third-party solution that can enable the kind of email campaign analytics you envisioned.<\/p>\n Ask the supplier of your Email marketing software. There might be and they might have experience in making an integration between the analytics and the ESP<\/a> too. For example, ExactTarget users can use eMVision<\/a>, a reporting tool based on Tableau Software, to dig deeper into their ExactTarget data. Your chosen ESP might have a similar analytics partner.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth asking because if you don\u2019t have the analytics, your email marketing will always fall short.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re an email marketer, you\u2019re into analytics. You have to be. Email marketing offers up all kinds of data for analyzing, and it\u2019s only by doing so that you can improve your marketing and your email marketing ROI. But with all the variables of email marketing\u2014and email reporting\u2014how do you know you\u2019re using the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":5938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[183,225],"dealstore":[],"coauthors":[538],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5935"},{"taxonomy":"dealstore","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dealstore?post=5935"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
<\/span>So\u2026what should those analytics be?<\/span><\/h2>\n
\n
<\/span>Sharing your statistics<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/span>Make sure you\u2019re making a fair comparison of email analytics<\/span><\/h2>\n
\n
<\/span>Evaluating email campaigns analytics<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/a>Once you\u2019ve determined the email reporting you want to have (and how shareable it must be), it\u2019s time to make those factors criteria in your search for a new email service provider.<\/p>\n<\/span>Drill down into email campaign analytics<\/span><\/h2>\n
\nThose who open your emails are the ones who have the potential to be the most engaged. And those who don\u2019t offer you an opportunity to re-engage. But if the email reporting is lacking, how will you know whom to target and how?<\/p>\n<\/span>What if your ESP doesn\u2019t offer the email analytics you want?<\/span><\/h2>\n