How to Track Your Email Marketing Campaigns for Better Results
When it comes to successful email marketing it’s all about sending your subscribers the right message at the right time.
In order to determine your campaigns’ success, it’s crucial to track your emails.
So, what data should you be looking at?
Your Email Service Provider (ESP) can provide you with numerous data points to help determine the success of your campaign.
- Click data is crucial to see which articles and calls-to-actions your subscribers are most interested in.
- Open rates are a great metric to understand which types of subject lines, preheader text, and from names encourage the most opens.
- Other metrics you should always keep a close eye on your complaint and unsubscribe rates—if these data points are on the rise, make sure you’re only sending emails to those that have opted-in and try testing the frequency and types of emails your subscribers are receiving.
There are also advanced reporting tools, like Litmus, that go beyond an ESP’s analytics offerings.
- Do you have a large mobile audience?
- Are a lot of your subscribers using Gmail?
- With email client breakdown data, you can see exactly which programs and apps your subscribers use to open emails.
This information is crucial in focusing your testing efforts where they matter most.
If your email doesn’t look good in the inbox, chances are your subscribers won’t be reading it!
With Litmus’ engagement data, you can break down:
- your open rate to see how long subscribers spent reading your messages
- comparing how many glance, skim or just delete.
With this information, you can send content-rich newsletters to your most engaged subscribers and win-back campaigns for those that are frequently deleting your emails.
With engagement data, you can target your emails like never before.
While open, click, unsubscribe, and complaint rates, as well as email client breakdown and engagement data, are important to understanding your campaign’s success, the most important metric depends on the goal of the campaign.
Is the goal…
- to get people to buy a product?
- To update their preference center?
- To upgrade their plan?
Looking at those data points will show you the true success of your email.
Be sure to always test different aspects of your email so you can understand which elements work best for your subscribers.