Track, report and adapt. Those are 3 crucial keywords for a growing email marketing program. Tracking gets you the numbers, reporting helps you make an analysis and adapting boosts your strengths and eliminates your weaknesses.
But what is the best way to get a clear campaign report? We’ll show you how …
But first, we want to point out the 2 most commonly made mistakes with email reporting:
1. Determining success on benchmarks: some brands compare their email reports with industry benchmarks. This could give a vague indication, but it’s not a solid comparison.
2. Only looking at the results of the last campaign: some brands look at their reports, but do not compare these numbers to determine effective success.
Want to crunch real data? Here’s how to go about it:
1. Determine your time frame
Creating an internal benchmark with all reports, even those dodgy reports from 2004, that’s not the most reliable way. Determine a time frame from 6 months up to 2 years. This time frame will give you a realistic view.
2. Define your metrics
There are tons of metrics, from opens to clicks, but also website behavior, lead scoring,… You can take all these metrics in your overview, but in this example we will focus only on email campaign reports: sent, delivered, bounced, opens, opens/delivered, clicks, clicks/delivers, clicks/opened.
3. Create a crystal-clear matrix
As in the example above, unify all the values and put them in an overview. This is an easy Excel job.
4. Define your report overview
Create 3 additional columns with specific insights:
- Average: the average during the time frame of the metrics you have identified. This is your internal benchmark, and the only solid metric for your brand. And what’s even better, it’s a self-educating metric: meaning, the more data you put in this metric, the more accurate it will be. And also, as you send better campaigns along the way, your average will increase and you will always set the bar higher for your next campaign.
- Last campaign vs average: shows you how your last campaign scores against your averages. Here you can see which metrics scored above or below average.
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Last campaign vs previous: how did the 2 last campaigns do, when compared to each other. Interesting to see if the content and CTA’s had a direct impact on your email’s success.
