Email Marketing Analytics Reporting - Email Deliverability Report

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.

What is EMAIL DELIVERABILITY?

Email deliverability is all about reaching your subscriber's inboxes.

• If you send a message to a subscriber and the message reaches their inbox, the message has been delivered

• If you send a message to a subscriber and the message does not reach their inbox, the message has been bounced (i.e. not delivered)

What are the 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.

Why should I CARE ABOUT EMAIL DELIVERABILITY?

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!

However, 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 is critical to look beyond deliverability to understand whether subscribers are receiving your emails and are finding them to engage with your brand.

Building the Email Deliverability Report

When building an Email Deliverability report (or any report), there are four key components to ensuring you are able to get value from your report.

Report Components

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

1). Data Inputs

Raw subscriber, campaign, or message 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.

Email Deliverability Report Components

1). Data inputs

What data inputs do you need to create this report?

• Sent Emails: The number of emails attempted for delivery to your subscribers' inboxes.

• Soft Bounces: the count of emails that cannot be delivered to a subscribers inbox for a temporary reason.

• Hard Bounces: the count of emails that cannot be delivered to a subscribers inbox for a permanent reason.

• Delivered Emails: The number of emails delivered to your subscribers' inboxes.

• Unique Opens: The number of people (subscribers) who open your email campaign.

• Unique Clicks: The number of people (subscribers) who click your email campaign.

• Unsubscribe Volume: The number of people (subscribers) who unsubscribe from your email campaign.

• Spam (Complaint) Volume: The number of people (subscribers) who report your content as spam.

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2). KPIS

What are the KPIs (key performance indicators) included in this report?

• Soft Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that were not delivered to your subscriber's inbox due to a soft bounce.

Soft Bounce Rate = Soft Bounced Emails / Sent Emails

• Hard Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that were not delivered to your subscriber's inbox due to a hard bounce.

Hard Bounce Rate = Hard Bounced Emails / Sent Emails

• Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that were not delivered to your subscriber's inbox due to any bounce.

Bounce Rate = Bounced Emails / Sent Emails

• Delivery Rate: The percentage of emails that were delivered to your subscribers' inboxes.

Delivery Rate = Delivered Emails / Sent Emails

• Spam (Complaint) Rate: The percentage of emails sent that were marked as spam.

Spam (Complaint) Rate = Spam (Complaint) Volume / Sent Emails

• Open Rate: The percentage of emails that were opened based on the number of emails delivered to your subscribers' inboxes.

Open Rate = Unique Opens / Delivered Emails

• Click Rate: The percentage of emails that were clicked based on the number of emails delivered to your subscribers' inboxes.

Click Rate = Unique Clicks / Delivered Emails

• Click-To-Open Rate: The percentage of emails that were clicked based on the number of subscribers who opened your email.

Click-To-Open Rate = Unique Clicks / Unique Opens

• Unsubscribe Rate: The percentage of subscribers who unsubscribed from your program based on the number of emails delivered to your subscribers' inboxes.

Unsubscribe Rate = Unsubscribe Volume / Delivered Emails

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3). Insights

What insights are created from this report?

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

• Domains with the highest deliverability rates

• Domains with the lowest soft bounce rates

• Domains with the lowest hard bounce rates

• Domains with the lowest spam (complaint) rates

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

• Domains with the lowest deliverability rates

• Domains with the highest soft bounce rates

• Domains with the highest hard bounce rates

• Domains with the highest spam (complaint) rates

Which email domains Generate the best Engagement?

• Domains which produce the best open rates

• Domains which produce the best click rates

• Domains which produce the best click-to-open rates

• Domains which produce the lowest unsubscribe rates

Which email domains Generate the Worst Engagement?

• Domains which produce the worst open rates

• Domains which produce the worst click rates

• Domains which produce the worst click-to-open rates

• Domains which produce the worst unsubscribe rates

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4). Actions

What are the actions you can take from this report to improve your email deliverability?

Clean your email marketing list

• Remove email addresses with a hard bounce from your email list.

• Remove subscribers who have not recently engaged with your content (signed up for email list, opened or clicked an email) or brand (ex: made a purchase).

• Remove subscribers from purchased lists.

Change your Email Subscriber Acquisition Approach

• Require subscribers to double opt-in to begin receiving your email marketing messages.

• Send a welcome email or confirmation email to subscribers immediately after email sign up.

• Clearly outline what your email subscriber is opting into BEFORE the opt-in occurs.

• STOP emailing subscribers from purchased lists.

• START emailing subscribers only if you have consent from them to do so.

Change your email opt out approach

• Make it clearer how to opt out of your email marketing program.

• Ensure your unsubscribe button is functional and processes unsubscribe activities in a timely fashion.

• Give subscribers options on how to only receive content from your program that they care about through an email preference center.

Change your Email Delivery Approach

• Temporarily suppress subscribers from receiving messages at a low deliverability domain unless the subscribers are VERY engaged with your content (i.e. opened or clicked through emails in the last 90 days).

• Update your sender "from name" to create trust with your subscribers.

• Ensure your email sending domain is authenticated.

Warm up Your IP Address to Improve your email sender reputation (if you have dedicated IP address)

• Send your email marketing messages in small batches to start.

• Slowly increase your email marketing frequency to at least once per week.

Segment your email content

• Send relevant content to subscribers based on their attributes, demographics, and past behaviors.

• STOP sending content to subscribers if the content is not relevant to their stated preferences or interests.

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For the last five weeks, I've been outlining the FIVE ESSENTIAL reports you need to drive MORE sales in more detail so you can get a grasp on how to take action! You've now got a FULL toolkit of reports that can help you understand your email program performance and how to take action to drive sales!

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