Analysis is definitely not the “fun” part of any sales or marketing campaign. It doesn’t feel creative in the same way that designing or even sending a campaign can feel. Yet once you understand the power of the analysis phase, you may actually look forward to the post-send reports! This is because these reports contain the meat of what you need to know to deliver even better results in your next campaign.
Here are three critical tools you need to effectively analyze the success of any email marketing campaign.
Tool #1: Open Rate
This measurement tells you how many subscribers both successfully received AND opened your email message. In other words, these are the folks who have a strong interest in what you are sending out.
Goal: Your goal for future campaigns is to figure out what enticed these people to open your email and do more of that.
Tool #2: Click-Through or Conversion Rate
This measurement takes a look at the folks who received, opened AND interacted with your email message. Maybe they filled out a form or made a purchase. Perhaps they completed a survey or responded to a poll. Typically this group is a sub-group within your “open rate” group.
Goal: Your goal for future campaigns is to get more of the folks who opened your email this time to interact with it next time.
Tool #3: Unsubscribe and Bounce Rates
This is a less-pleasant part of the analysis, but it can be a great tool to adjust everything from your send frequency, to your subject line and/or to how many links you include in your campaign.
“Bounce” rates refer to subscribers who were unable to receive your email campaign. This may be because their email is no longer valid, because there is a typo in the email address they used to subscribe, because their firewall has settings too strict to allow your email through or for other reasons as well. Ideally, you want to follow up with each “bounced” subscriber and try to get a new, valid email address to send to.
“Unsubscribe” rates include folks who have forgotten they joined your list and now think you are spam and also those who simply aren’t interested anymore. Typically it is best to let these subscribers go
Goal: Your goals here are to lower both the bounce and unsubscribe rates by updating your email database with new, valid email addresses.
By analyzing if and how those on your subscriber lists interact with your email campaigns, you can adjust everything from your CTA (call to action) to your landing page (where subscribers go when they click-through) to improve results for future marketing campaigns.
