Many say that email marketing is the most effective marketing practice that drives the highest ROI.
You know what? That is true.
However, mastering email marketing is not easy. To improve the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy, you first need to eliminate the guesswork.
The goal is to invest in the right tools, set clear goals and KPIs, and track the right metrics to measure campaign progress over time. While email marketing analytics may seem complicated and boring, it is also rewarding.
Most importantly, it does not rely on metrics and statistics solely. To understand email marketing analytics, you first need to get to know your customers.
Here are a few simple email marketing analytics tactics to implement.
Analyze User Demographics and Segment Audiences
Email marketing is all about personalization. Your target customers do not care about generic, one-size-fits-all content anymore. They expect you to understand their specific needs and deliver relevant user experiences.
One of the most effective ways to meet the needs of your target audience is segmentation. The goal is to break your newsletter base down into narrower and more specific segments. That way, you will create better emails that resonate with your customers.
Now, one of the most popular email segmentation methods among email marketers is the signup source. For example, users that register on your site using Facebook and your site’s signup form would be separated into different categories.
While this metric is simple and convenient, it does not tell you much about your target audience. There are many effective ways to slice down your newsletter list, including by customer:
- Age
- Education
- Gender
- Family status
- Income
- Occupation
- Location
Sure, that does not mean you should use all of the criteria mentioned above. Choose ones that make sense for your business and audiences. You can create separate segments for different age groups or classify them based on gender.
You can also segment audiences based on psychographic data, such as their preferences, browsing patterns, or previous purchases. For example, say you are running a home décor blog.
Create and Track Lifecycle Emails
The way you communicate with your target audience depends on their position in the sales funnel. For example, when a customer is in the acquisition phase, they are not ready to purchase from you. They only want to learn about your brand and products. Therefore, sending them promotional deals does not cut it.
The idea is to deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time. That is where lifecycle marketing steps in. In other words, you analyze each customer’s lifecycle and tailor your messaging to it. That way, you deliver relevant and personalized customer experiences.
The most wonderful thing about lifecycle marketing lies in the fact that it helps you build meaningful relationships with customers. Most importantly, lifecycle emails will boost recipient engagement and conversions – the common metrics that are easily trackable via your marketing dashboard.
Now, there are a few lifecycle email marketing rules to follow.
First, know when to send your emails, depending on the customer journey. For example, if a customer has already purchased from you, you can send them a birthday card or a loyalty email.
Second, make emails that reach a subscriber at a very specific moment. That is where you should implement the rules of segmentation we mentioned above. The goal is to analyze your base of newsletter recipients and capture their demographic and psychographic data. Based on it, create separate buyer personas that would represent each customer group. That way, you will be able to visualize your target customer and adapt your messages to them.
Measure your Click to Open Rate
What is the most critical metric you know in your email marketing analytics tactics? I bet your answer is the click-through rate. Most email marketers would agree with you. According to a research study, over 70% of digital marketers consider CTR the most useful metric for tracking campaign success.
Another popular metric email marketers rely on is the open rate.
However, those metrics do not reveal a lot about your target customers. For example, the click-through rate only tells you how many people clicked on your link or CTA within the email. The open rate shows the percentage of users that opened the email, compared to your total number of subscribers. It only measures the performance of your subject line.
To get the most out of your email marketing analytics and get better insights into user engagement, you should measure the click to open rate. Simply put, the CTOR compares the number of unique clicks to the number of unique opens. It tells you how many people clicked on your link after opening your email.
The CTOR helps you measure the relevance of your content and user engagement. A low CTOR tells you that not many of your subscribers found a reason to click on your link or CTA.
You can calculate your email CTOR by dividing the number of unique clicks by unique opens and expressing this as a percentage.
Email Marketing Analytics Is Not All About Plain Statistics
Email marketing analytics tactics are complex.
Apart from analyzing email marketing metrics, such as your open rates or conversion rates, you need to understand your customers. The goal is to identify why an email marketing tactic works or does not work.
That is where these tips will help. By getting in the head of your target customers, you will create more relevant content and convert leads faster.