In email marketing, we can take the famous admonition of Cheshire Cat to Alice to heart: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter which way you go, if you are not sure where you are going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Email marketing has many unknowns that can have us travelling blindly, not sure of the path we\u2019re on or even where we\u2019re trying to go. Email analytics can change all that, by giving you insight into what is happening within your email marketing program and helping you find the right path.<\/p>\n
Marketers need to know who did what with your email and when to adjust, tweak, adapt, drop, capitalize on, and ultimately improve.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Email Marketers say they need Reporting Insight<\/span><\/h2>\nMarketers are realizing that reporting insight is not only something they want, but have to have. That is one of the conclusions from our research based on data from our ESPinator tool.<\/p>\n
In response to the growing demand for better email reporting, ESPs are adding analytics to their line-ups or looking for third-party vendors to supply the capability.<\/p>\n
![\"email-openrate-by-time\"](\"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/email-openrate-by-time.png\")
<\/p>\n
<\/span>An actionable email marketing analytics example<\/span><\/h2>\nTake for instance the dashboard above, it shows when an audience interacts with their email. It could be over the entire account, a series of messages, or a single message.<\/p>\n
\n- The X axis is time (Hour of the Day, Day of the Week).<\/li>\n
- The Y axis is open rate (this could be anything \u2013 CTO, Click Rate, Conversions\u2026).<\/li>\n
- The size of the circle indicates sending volume for that time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
You can see that that this client send most of their message during the middle of the day and Tuesday \u2013 Friday. Based on when their audience is interacting with their content, they should consider sending their email on Friday, Saturday, & Sunday \u2013 and between 4pm \u2013 3am. That is clear within just looking at the dashboard.<\/p>\n
Klipfolio, DOMO, Tibco and Tableau Software re just a few of the options now that can be used to spot patterns in email performance data. The example above uses eMVision based on Tableau Software we used to develop it for ExactTarget\/Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other ESPs.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Choosing the right email marketing analytics for your team<\/span><\/h2>\nWhile email reporting is not new, there is an increased effort to make such tools easier to use. It is simply needed because of Cross-channel marketing and amounts of data companies can collect and attribute to their email marketing programs.<\/p>\n
![\"chartofweek-12-02-14-lp\"](\"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/chartofweek-12-02-14-lp.png\")
<\/p>\n
The chart above shows that 78.54% of respondents that rated “an interface that requires very little training” a “must have” also said that robust reporting and analysis tools were a “must have.”<\/p>\n
I am definitely seeing easier-to-use versions of analytics suites hitting the market, including tools that are based on the easy visualization of data and let you drill down on email campaign analytics<\/a>.<\/p>\nHowever, that doesn\u2019t mean marketers should choose email analytics based solely on ease-of-use. Everyone measures things differently, and what matters to one marketer isn\u2019t necessarily useful to another. The analytics offered have to match up to the email marketing analytics needed<\/a> to be useful.<\/p>\nBut even then, there\u2019s a caveat to all of this: Making sure marketers can use the reporting.<\/p>\n
<\/span>The downside to more powerful analytics<\/span><\/h2>\nWe all know the old saying, \u201cGive a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.\u201d That wise saying is relevant to email reporting too. In our experience with email analytics, we\u2019ve realized that\u2014in general\u2014email marketers don\u2019t know how to effectively wield a large dataset.<\/p>\n
Email marketers don\u2019t know how to put this data to use no matter how good it might be. Giving them email analytics tools without teaching them how to use those tools is akin to handing someone a fishing pole and not teaching them how to fish. They will likely figure something out, but they won\u2019t necessarily use the tool to its fullest extent.<\/p>\n
As data grows in source (email, EPR, CRM, POS, DSP) and volume and analytics tools grow in complexity in order to offer insight into that data, we must keep in mind that we might be building tools that aren\u2019t useful if we don\u2019t
\na) keep them user-friendly and
\nb) teach marketers how to utilize them.<\/p>\n
We have realized that even the tool we built to be both powerful and easy\u2014takes training in order to use it to its fullest extent, and we have started to put together a marketer\u2019s email analytics user guide for it as a result.<\/p>\n
Think of it as a how-to manual for investigating and spotting critical patterns that can be acted upon to increase ROI. Sounds simple, right? If you ask nine top marketers what they should be analyzing in their email marketing program<\/a> and why, you will get nine different answers.<\/p>\nAnd with almost infinite possibilities to examine and measure, it is important that a sound methodology is used to achieve desired outcomes.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Selecting an Email Marketing Tool and Reporting<\/span><\/h2>\nMarketers who are evaluating ESPs and reporting capabilities must be mindful that usability should be part of email Marketing software comparison<\/a>, not just the power. In addition to test driving the tools, they should ask a lot of questions about training and support to ensure they will learn to use all of the tool, not just the basics.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nTake for instance the dashboard above, it shows when an audience interacts with their email. It could be over the entire account, a series of messages, or a single message.<\/p>\n
- \n
- The X axis is time (Hour of the Day, Day of the Week).<\/li>\n
- The Y axis is open rate (this could be anything \u2013 CTO, Click Rate, Conversions\u2026).<\/li>\n
- The size of the circle indicates sending volume for that time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
You can see that that this client send most of their message during the middle of the day and Tuesday \u2013 Friday. Based on when their audience is interacting with their content, they should consider sending their email on Friday, Saturday, & Sunday \u2013 and between 4pm \u2013 3am. That is clear within just looking at the dashboard.<\/p>\n
Klipfolio, DOMO, Tibco and Tableau Software re just a few of the options now that can be used to spot patterns in email performance data. The example above uses eMVision based on Tableau Software we used to develop it for ExactTarget\/Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other ESPs.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Choosing the right email marketing analytics for your team<\/span><\/h2>\n
While email reporting is not new, there is an increased effort to make such tools easier to use. It is simply needed because of Cross-channel marketing and amounts of data companies can collect and attribute to their email marketing programs.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nThe chart above shows that 78.54% of respondents that rated “an interface that requires very little training” a “must have” also said that robust reporting and analysis tools were a “must have.”<\/p>\n
I am definitely seeing easier-to-use versions of analytics suites hitting the market, including tools that are based on the easy visualization of data and let you drill down on email campaign analytics<\/a>.<\/p>\n
However, that doesn\u2019t mean marketers should choose email analytics based solely on ease-of-use. Everyone measures things differently, and what matters to one marketer isn\u2019t necessarily useful to another. The analytics offered have to match up to the email marketing analytics needed<\/a> to be useful.<\/p>\n
But even then, there\u2019s a caveat to all of this: Making sure marketers can use the reporting.<\/p>\n
<\/span>The downside to more powerful analytics<\/span><\/h2>\n
We all know the old saying, \u201cGive a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.\u201d That wise saying is relevant to email reporting too. In our experience with email analytics, we\u2019ve realized that\u2014in general\u2014email marketers don\u2019t know how to effectively wield a large dataset.<\/p>\n
Email marketers don\u2019t know how to put this data to use no matter how good it might be. Giving them email analytics tools without teaching them how to use those tools is akin to handing someone a fishing pole and not teaching them how to fish. They will likely figure something out, but they won\u2019t necessarily use the tool to its fullest extent.<\/p>\n
As data grows in source (email, EPR, CRM, POS, DSP) and volume and analytics tools grow in complexity in order to offer insight into that data, we must keep in mind that we might be building tools that aren\u2019t useful if we don\u2019t
\na) keep them user-friendly and
\nb) teach marketers how to utilize them.<\/p>\nWe have realized that even the tool we built to be both powerful and easy\u2014takes training in order to use it to its fullest extent, and we have started to put together a marketer\u2019s email analytics user guide for it as a result.<\/p>\n
Think of it as a how-to manual for investigating and spotting critical patterns that can be acted upon to increase ROI. Sounds simple, right? If you ask nine top marketers what they should be analyzing in their email marketing program<\/a> and why, you will get nine different answers.<\/p>\n
And with almost infinite possibilities to examine and measure, it is important that a sound methodology is used to achieve desired outcomes.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Selecting an Email Marketing Tool and Reporting<\/span><\/h2>\n
Marketers who are evaluating ESPs and reporting capabilities must be mindful that usability should be part of email Marketing software comparison<\/a>, not just the power. In addition to test driving the tools, they should ask a lot of questions about training and support to ensure they will learn to use all of the tool, not just the basics.<\/p>\n