Email Marketing Analytics Reporting - The 5 ESSENTIAL reports you need to drive MORE sales

SalesEmail is dedicated to teaching you to drive sales with email marketing using data as the foundation. But what does that really mean?

The key to driving sales with email marketing is understanding your subscribers.

The best way you can understand your subscribers is to understand what motivates your subscribers to take action with your business. While this sounds like a very elusive concept, it all boils down to one simple formula - The Email Marketing Analytics Equation

The Email Marketing Analytics Equation

DATA + INSIGHT = ACTION

To really understand your subscribers, you need data. Data can be a scary term - and my north star is to rid you of any fear you may have of it and show you the actions you can take to drive positive outcomes for your email marketing program.

Data is the fuel to help you generate insights about what your subscribers are doing in your email marketing program. These insights should translate into clear actions that you can take to positively influence your email program. At the heart of generating consumer insights is email marketing analytics reporting. Email marketing analytics reporting helps you understand how your subscribers interact with your email program so you can achieve your email program goals.

When it comes to setting goals for your email program, GREAT email marketers all have one thing in common - they are out to BUILD A RELATIONSHIP with their customers - just like you would in-person 1:1 with a customer. If you're developing a relationship with your subscribers, you're learning about your subscribers. You're able to understand their needs, desires, and wants through how they engage with your content and the actions they take with your business.

By having an understanding of your subscriber, you can deliver content, experiences, and offers that deliver value to their experience and drive more sales for you! Developing a deep and meaningful understanding of your email subscriber requires you to understand what your subscribers are doing across your ENTIRE email marketing program - not just how subscribers responded when you sent them your annual Black Friday campaign which always will generate sales because of a big discount.

To develop this subscriber understanding, you need a variety of email marketing analytics reports.

Every report has four key components to drive you to take action in your email marketing program.

1). Data Inputs: raw subscriber information used to calculate KPIs, create insight, and drive you to take action. Data inputs are the fuel that drive all email marketing analytics reports. Some examples may include

• Email Unique Opens

• Email Unique Clicks

• Email Subscriber acquisition source

• Sales per email subscriber

2). KPIs: an acronym for "key performance indicator". Qlik does a great job in defining this -a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. The important part about KPIs is the word "KEY". It's not just any metric you can track for your business - it's a metric that helps you create the most impact for your email marketing program - not just any metric that you could measure.

3). Insights: the outcome of analyzing KPIs. Insights create a deeper understanding of your subscribers and/or your email program performance than you had previously. Without insights, you're left to stare at a wall of data inputs and KPIs - unable to take action.

4). Actions: the steps you take to do something different with your email marketing program as a result of your insights. If you're not defining actions, you are not driving change in your email marketing program. Without actions, there's NO POINT IN CREATING EMAIL MARKETING ANALYTICS REPORTING. The problem I see with most email marketing analytics professionals is the inability to deliver recommended actions to take as a result of the insights generated from reports. My goal, if you were to only take one thing away from this content, is to ensure you understand what actions you could take from each of these five reports.

The content below will summarize the five reports you need to understand your email subscribers and how you can take action to drive sales for your email marketing program.

Here are the five essential reports you need to drive sales for your email program:

1). Email Campaign Report

The Email Campaign Report helps you determine which day-to-day email campaigns your subscribers create positive and negative email marketing and business outcomes. Day-to-day email marketing campaigns are the heart of any email program - you need to ensure that your content is resonating with your subscribers to keep them on your list. Failure to do so will result in disengagement from your brand - or worse, a subscriber unsubscribes from your list - or EVEN WORSE, marks your content as SPAM!

It's essential to understand what your subscribers find valuable in the content that you send so you can better tailor their experience for the next campaign. It's also important to note that this may not be the same for all your subscribers. Subscribers are, after all, individual people with individual attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and attributes. Content that resonates with subscribers is content that makes it feel like it was made for them. Creating a regular email campaign report will help you identify what content is creating engagement and sales for your business.

The Email Campaign Report helps you understand:

• Which marketing campaigns generate the best engagement with subscribers?

• Which marketing campaigns generate the worst engagement with subscribers?

• Which marketing campaigns generate the most sales impact?

• Which marketing campaigns generate the least sales impact?

• What are the common characteristics of marketing campaigns that generate the best engagement and most sales impact?

• What are the common characteristics of marketing campaigns that generate the least engagement and least sales impact?

2). Email List Growth Report

The Email List Growth Report helps you determine the rate at which your email list is growing in a given time frame. One of the critical drivers in determining how much in email marketing sales you are able to generate is to figure out how you can reach more subscribers - and more importantly, how you can reach more subscribers that are valuable to your brand.

The good news? There are TONS of ways you can acquire a subscriber to your email marketing list that can be valuable for your brand.

The bad news? There are TONS of ways you can acquire a subscriber to your email subscriber list that can be valuable for your brand - so it's hard to know where exactly to start focusing your email subscriber acquisition efforts.

The Email List Growth Report helps you understand

• Which email acquisition source(s) grow(s) my email list the most?

• Which email acquisition source(s) grow(s) my email list at an increasing rate?

• Which email acquisition source(s) grow(s) my email list the least?

• Which email acquisition source(s) grow(s) my email list at a decreasing rate?

• Which email acquisition source generates subscribers who contribute the most in sales?

• Which email acquisition source generates subscribers who contribute the least in sales?

3). Email Subscriber Retention Report

The Email Subscriber Retention Report helps you understand the rate at which subscribers remain engaged with your email marketing program. Unfortunately for email marketers, your subscribers are probably not going to remain your subscribers forever.

Subscribers can leave your list at any time for a variety of reasons.

• Stop engaging with your content

• Unsubscribe from your email marketing list

• Mark your content as spam

• No longer able to receive emails in their email inbox

The Email Subscriber Retention Report helps you understand

• What are the most common reasons a subscriber will leave my email list?

• How long will a subscriber remain active on my email list?

• When is a subscriber likely to leave my email list?

• What are the attributes of a subscriber who is likely to remain active on my email list?

• What are the attributes of a subscriber who is unlikely to remain active on my email list?

4). Email Journey report

Great email marketers use automation tools to send their subscribers a series of emails based on their subscribers' individual attributes or behaviors - or take their subscribers on an email journey.

The beauty of an email journey is that these multi-step campaigns are triggered to subscribers automatically based on a set of rules you define in your email marketing software. I'll often hear email marketers use the phrase "set it and forget it" when describing email journeys - meaning that the email marketer will set this up once and subsequently forget about the email journey.

This is incredibly common and INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS to do. I've seen all sorts of horror stories in my career, but just a few common scenarios I've seen play out

• A re-brand occurs and the email journey deploys communications to subscribers that do not match any other branded marketing materials.

• An email journey delivers unique coupon codes to subscribers runs out of coupon codes - with the email marketer having NO CLUE this is occurring until customer complaints start filing in.

• An email journey includes content that drives customers to purchase a product that is NO LONGER available for sale!

The Email Journey Report helps you understand how subscribers are engaging with your email journey content. It's imperative to look at the performance of your email journeys at least a few times a year to ensure the content is still relevant to subscribers and you avoid these nightmare scenarios.

Moreover, email journeys are often THE MOST EFFECTIVE email program sales drivers. According to Wunderkind, triggered emails (which deploy based on a subscribers actions or attributes & are often incorporated into an email journey) generate 24X more revenue per send than match & blast marketing campaigns.

That's a whole lot of Cheddar

Cheddar the Cat approves

The Email Journey Report helps you understand

• What are the most engaging emails to subscribers in the journey?

• What are the least engaging emails to subscribers in the journey?

• What are the emails in the journey which generate the most sales impact?

• What are the emails in the journey which generate the least sales impact?

• Are there any emails that require immediate or near-term creative or functionality updates?

5). Email Deliverability Report

The Email Deliverability Report helps you determine whether your subscribers are receiving your email marketing messages in their inbox & whether your subscribers are engaging with the content.

Just because you have an email subscriber's email address and their permission to market to them, doesn't mean your email will be delivered to their email inbox.

There are two key data inputs to understand up front

1. Sent Emails - the number of emails your email marketing software attempts to deliver to subscribers

2. Delivered Emails - the number of emails your email marketing software actually delivered to subscribers.

You may assume that these would always be the same quantity but that's almost never the case. If an email is sent to your subscribers but is not delivered, this is considered a bounce

There are a WHOLE host of reasons why an email may bounce (i.e. is not delivered to the inbox)

For simplicity purposes, I'll boil it down to two types of bounces

1. Hard Bounce - a permanent reason an email cannot be delivered to a subscribers inbox. Permanent reasons may include that the email address doesn't actually exist or the email server has completely blocked the delivery of your messages.

2. Soft Bounce - a temporary reason an email cannot be delivered to a subscribers inbox. Some common reasons that a soft bounce could occur include a subscriber's email inbox being full or inactive or that the email campaign file size is too large to be received by the email server.

Understanding why subscribers are not receiving your email is critical to help you create a plan of action to deliver more messages to a subscribers' inbox. After all, if the email never gets to a subscribers inbox, you can't create engagement opportunities for the subscriber and sales for your business!

Even getting to a subscribers inbox is no guarantee that subscribers are going to engage with your emails - particularly if your emails are getting shuffled into different places like the "Promotions" tab on Gmail or even worse - the JUNK folder. It's critical to look beyond deliverability to understand whether subscribers are receiving your emails and are finding them to engage with your brand.

The Email Deliverability Report helps you understand

• Which email domains deliver to my subscribers' inboxes at a high rate?

• Which email domains deliver to my subscribers' inboxes at a low rate?

• Which email domains generate the best engagement?

• Which email domains generate the worst engagement?

If you have these five key reports, you'll gain a comprehensive understanding of how email subscribers behave with your email marketing program and more importantly, how to take action from the insights you derive from these reports.

Over the next five weeks, I'll be outlining each report in more detail so you can get a grasp on how to take action!

Look out for email marketing analytics report #1 - The Email Campaign Report - next week.

As with all content published on SalesEmail - I need your honest feedback! What did you find valuable? What do you have questions about? What didn't you find helpful?

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