When you think about analytics and email, what comes to your mind? Most people will focus only on open rates and click rates. But what about other email marketing metrics that could be beneficial to making your campaigns more efficient?
Working on an email marketing campaign is more than just sending out messages and then looking at who clicked, responded, and converted. Creating a campaign that is successful is also looking at all other metrics, outside forces, and customer behavior in order to see what works best and what brings about a positive response. In case you’ve forgotten what open and click-through rates are, here is a quick reminder:
Open Rate – It is the proportion of recipients who open an email. This metric allows you to see how effective your email campaign is as far as subject lines, and delivery go.
Click-through Rate (CTR) – This metric takes the open rate a step further, as it shows you how many recipients actually clicked over to your website.
Now, both of these values are extremely important as they will show you what you need to work on (subject lines, copy, text/image based emails). They are great things to look at over time and to look as a basis for results in your A/B testing. But what about other metrics?
Conversion
Although the above metrics give you an insight into how you are doing, what might be working and what your A/B tests are bringing in, there are other things you need to look at to be able to laser point your customers’ behavior.
Click-to-open Rate – Have you ever looked at the unique clicks compare to unique opens within your email messages? You should! These unique clicks and opens will help you better understand how, and if, people are engaging with your email.
Sign-up Rate – A very helpful metric that will help you discern if your messages are coming through as convincing. The higher the sign-up rate, the better the indicator that your offer is valuable.
Conversion Rate – If you have set up goals within your analytics panel (for instance, in Google) you can measure just how many of your goals you are meeting by calculating your conversion rate. Goals can vary from completing sing-up forms, downloading a free guide, all the way to purchasing your product or service.
Conversion Obstacles
Your campaign may not always be successful. Whether the fault is with you content, accidental clicks, or simply with unruly inboxes that send your messages to spam. You need to keep an eye on your unsubscribe and bounce rates when you start noticing a rise or odd numbers, it’s time to dig into the root of the problem.
Unsubscribe Rate – it’s only normal that over time subscribers may opt out. However, if you start noticing peaks in unsubscribes it might be an indicator of content that doesn’t resonate with your recipients. This is your free lesson at understanding your customers and crafting future content that does draw them in.
Bounce Rate – A high bounce rate could be a sign that you’re not following email marketing best practices. It could also indicate that you have not cleaned your email list in a long time and you’re “reaching” email addresses that no longer exist.
Both of their values carry a lot of reasons behind them, when you notice spikes it is important that you immediately look at your content, email addresses, and of course – online connection. It could be an internet issue, but it could also be your emails, so you need to investigate and adjust accordingly.
Conversion Cost
As with anything in business, the cost is of utmost importance. Having a clear picture of what you’re spending and how many conversions you’re getting from those costs is necessary to plan for future campaigns.
You don’t want to overspend on content and emails that do not bring any customers. And looking on the flip side of the coin, you don’t want to be cheap when you a message that could potentially be very successful.
Acquisition Cost – A great metric that will shed the light on how much you’re spending to generate conversions. It may be calculated on a per-person or per-group basis.
Tell Me More
Now, these are just definitions and the basics of what each metric is and what it measures. To make sure you’re making the best of them you not only need to identify them, but you also need to know how they can be tracked, prevented (in case of unsubscribe or bounce rates), and why some of them may not always be excellent in their results.
To get a deeper understanding of this subject download our free whitepaper “Measuring and Tracking Email Results: 3 Step Starter”. Inside you will find a colorful table with each metric and how it can be put to life, links to valuable research papers, definitions, and a simple scenario guide that will help you get a better understanding of how measuring and tracking works.
Haven’t we moved beyond email? Quite the opposite, actually. Email remains the greatest way to connect with a customer directly and convert contacts into sales.
At the heart of it, email marketing is a coordinated campaign designed to deliver timely automated emails or an email newsletter inspiring a customer to act — whether that’s buy, sign up, download, or whatever else your business needs.
Your prospects who are interested in your service can join your email list and learn everything they need to know to make an informed buying decision and turn into a loyal customer.
Lead generation begins when you share the essentials with your targeted audience — those most likely to benefit from your product or service — setting up all businesses for sustained success and increased revenue.
Email is the original, and still the best. With GetResponse you get results from email marketing with a set of features from prebuilt marketing funnels to a mobile-optimized landing page builder, automations and an intuitive drag and drop creator included in all of our plans for the best ROI.
How can you use email marketing in your business? The benchmark of a great email marketing campaign is delivering tailor-made offers to your contacts when they’re most active. GetResponse is a data-driven, results-oriented email service, which makes it the perfect choice for your digital marketing campaigns. You get a suite of email marketing tools and plans designed for your business.
Step-by-step, GetResponse empowers you to build an effective email marketing strategy in a just few simple steps, saving you time and money while making more sales.
Cost-effective email marketing implementation means your marketing budget goes further All you need is a basic strategy and the right tools that let you to test out tactics and you’re on your way to running your own professional email marketing campaigns.
Professional, cloud-based email marketing platforms like GetResponse offer plans catered to you to improve everything you do. Based on the size of your email marketing list (number of contacts) and your needs, there’s a plan designed for you.
Basic plans start as low as $15/month, and provide essential tools like email marketing, autoresponders, marketing automation, Facebook ads, signup forms, landing pages, and automated sales funnels – everything you need to start growing your business.
But before committing, you can always try a free plan, review your progress and make sure it’s a good fit. GetResponse accounts are perfectly scalable. You can start with a basic plan and build your email list before you upgrade to more advanced plans as your online revenue grows.
Most marketers are optimists. We hear about how marketing tactics and strategies have worked for others, and we believe, or at least hope, they’ll work for us. The bad news is, though, they may not work. In fact, most of them don’t work. We’d be lucky (and rich) if even half of the marketing tactics we use were working as well we hope they do.
Why you’ll need Google Analytics
Surely you’ve heard the old quote from Henry Ford, the automaker: “I know only half of my advertising works. The problem is, I don’t know which half.” And Henry was lucky – he had a breakout product people were mad to have, in a time when there was far, far less advertising than there is now. And he was, after all, Henry Ford.
Even if you’re a hopeless optimist, it’s important to have proof your marketing efforts are working. Bosses like to see proof, as do investors and even ourselves in a fragile moment.
Almost any entrepreneur will be gripped by worry or insecurity at some point, and it’s nice to have verifiable data to go back to in those moments, just to prove to yourself that what you’re doing is working, and you don’t have to panic, and you’re not about to fail.
There’s another happier reason to track your marketing efforts. Even if you are the exception, and most of what you try works, there’s always room for improvement. Getting a 30% opt-in rate on that landing page? Why not get a 40% opt-in rate? Got pages with less than a 60% bounce rate? Why not aim for less than 50%? Even the rock stars of marketing can improve… and it’s that focus on constant improvement that made most of them into rock stars in the first place.
So if tracking our marketing efforts is a good idea, how do we do that? Easy. All you need is a Google Analytics account (it’s free), and the knowledge of how to set up what are called “goals”.
What Analytics Goals can track
Google Analytics goals let you do all sorts of powerful things. You can track how many people:
Viewed a specific page. This is good for email signups when you’re sending people to a final confirmation page.
Triggered an event (like watching a video or interacting with an online tool)
Stayed on your site for a specific length of time. This is helpful if you sell advertising, or if you want to test how to increase the engagement level of your site.
Viewed more than one page on your site. This is a good way to see which efforts are reducing your bounce rate, for example.
Analytics goals will give you valuable insights about your website, like
Which part of the world people come from when they take specific actions on your site. For instance, say you’re a retail brick and mortar chain with sites around Paris. You only want to be optimizing your site for visitors who can actually go to your stores. You wouldn’t want to optimize your site for visitors from, say, Canada, unless you get business from tourists.
Which websites people are coming from to get to your site (and what they do when they’re there). This can be helpful for your guest blogging efforts. If you’ve got a goal set up on your site for tracking when someone subscribes to your email newsletter, then you’ll be able to see which guest blog posts resulted in the highest number of new email subscribers. This will give you valuable information about where to guest blog, and where to stop guest blogging.
Which browsers visitors are using and other technical details about their Internet setup. To use the email signup example again, if you’re seeing an opt-in rate from desktop users of 4%, but the opt-in rate from mobile devices is only 1%, then clearly your opt-in forms need to be made more mobile-friendly, aka more “responsive”.
How to set up a goal in Google Analytics
One of the best things about goals is that they’re free to set up, and they’re also fairly easy to set up. Once you know what to do, it’s about a five-minute task to create a new goal. Here’s all you have to do:
1) Log into your Google Analytics account, then go to “Admin” in the top navigation row.
2) Then click “Goals” in the third column on the next page. Make sure the two columns to the left, titled “Account” and “Property” have the correct site selected.
3) Click the red “New Goal” button.
4) Choose which goal setup is correct for what you want to track.
I’m going to choose the “Custom” for this example, because I want to track how often visitors complete an email signup and download their free report. If they view the download page, that’s a completed goal (aka a “conversion”).
I could have chosen is “Media Play”, right above “Custom”, if I wanted to track who viewed a video on my site. If you wanted to track a different action, like if someone signed up for your affiliate program, you’d select “Become a partner” under the Revenue section.
5) Enter a goal description. Hint: Be nice to yourself. Make it something you’ll easily understand six months from now, and that you’ll be able to distinguish from other goals you might set up.
6) Specify what the download page is. Then (this is optional) define how much each download is worth to you. Take note that if your download page is “http://yoursite.com/yourdownloadpage.html”, you’ll want to just enter “/yourdownloadpage.html” in this field. Don’t add the full URL or the goal won’t track properly.
If you want, you can also specify how much each action is worth to you. For example, if you know each email subscriber is worth $2 to you, then enter that in the value field and click it to be “on”.
That $2 value will be reflected in many of your Google analytics reports going forward and can give you valuable information about where you’re earning money, and where you’re losing it.
Next, you can define the funnel – the series of pages people have to go through to get to the download page. This is optional (and more complicated) but it can give you some very interesting information. To use our example of tracking new email subscribers, if you were using double opt-in, you could use funnel steps to see how many people see
The first page of your signup sequence, after they’ve entered their email address and clicked “submit”.
The final confirmation page, after they’ve clicked the link in your confirmation email.
After your funnel information is filled out (if you choose to use a funnel), you can click “Verify this Goal” to see how many times your new goal has been completed in the last week.
7) Finally, click the blue “Create Goal” button. You’ll be brought back to the “View Goals” page of your Analytics account, where you can see all the goals you’ve created. If all went well, your goal will be included in that list, and will be marked that the recording is on.
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