Email Metrics and Reporting

It’s important to set goals that can be measured. So you, as a digital marketer, must understand what is measurable and enable reports that use measurable metrics to show whether a campaign is reaching its goals or falling short.

The most popular email metrics tend to be engagement metrics. Engagement metrics include email opens, clicks, and other intentional interactions such as an email forward. Decades ago we measured email opens by placing a small image in each email, annotated with information that could identify the recipient. Upon opening the email, the email client (mailbox providers such as Outlook, and so on) requested the image from our server, creating a trackable event each time the email was opened (presumed read). But as recipients demand privacy, more and more email clients obfuscate the image request and reduce the reliability of this classic measurement. While there are some new technologies to track opens, a surer sign of engagement is a click from within an email. This makes it pretty likely that the recipient opened the email and (hooray!) clicked on a trackable link.

Here is a partial list of email metrics that are commonly captured:

• Opt‐ins (subscriptions)
• Opt‐outs
• Subscriber activity
• Email sent
• Email delivered
• Email hard bounce
• Email soft bounce
• Email open
• Email link click
• Time of open
• Time of link click
• Email forwarded
• Email client (mailbox type, platform)
• IP address of reader
• GEO IP location of reader
• Spam complaints
• List segment name
• Message type (newsletter, promotion, and so on)

Here are some examples of metrics based on extended activity that can be tracked in web analytics tools or in other integrations (e.g., CRM or ecommerce):

• Revenue
• Conversions
• Goals reached
• Bounce rate
• Pages viewed
• Purchase completed
• Lifetime revenue captured
• Webinar attended
• Meetings completed

We combine these to gain insights and progress toward goals:

• Revenue per subscriber trailing 30 days
• Conversion rate by segment
• Content view rate by campaign
• Unsubscribe rate by message type
• Mobile click rate
• Campaign ROI

Where Email Marketing Fits

Email is rarely used as a sole marketing channel. Often categorized as “owned media,” it integrates well with other channels, including social media, content marketing, and digital advertising. It is a pillar of marketing automation implementation, CRM, and customer support systems.

There isn’t enough room in this chapter to teach the details and implementation of email integrations. But a marketer should be aware of some of the possibilities of channel integrations with email marketing. The OMCA teaching standard requires education programs to teach at least four examples of integrations, and some exam questions cover this area. So here are just a few examples of email channel integrations to pique your curiosity and creativity:

• Content marketing and email: Email can be a great way to distribute free or gated content. Campaigns can be purposed to invite recipients to promote content.
• Social media marketing and email: Many marketers use emails as a channel for broadcasting what happened in their social media channels. Your emails are also opportunities to invite readers to connect or engage on your social media channels. Social channels can be used to announce upcoming emails and create anticipation. It is also a generally accepted practice to use interactions on relevant social media channels as inspiration for email content topics that are important to your audiences. I have seen very effective email campaigns that ask a loaded question in email but direct readers to answer it on the social media channel. By uploading your email subscriber list to social networks like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, you can often connect a name and face to the email address in your list. Many get good results by following their email subscribers to get a clear idea of their preferences and requirements. Plus, if your social media content is engaging enough, you increase the chances of return follows and content consumption and promotion from your audience.
• Mobile marketing and email: Mobile responses can be used for list building. For example, “Text us your email for a special deal.” Consider texting subscribers to let them know an email message is coming and the value within. For recipients who welcome such text messages, this warms them up and increases open and engagement rates. Communication improves when a customer can interact with either an SMS or an email for the same goal, such as tracking a shipment or updates on an event. Note that, like email marketing, SMS marketing requires specific consent and is regulated by region.
• Email and digital advertising: Many top tier advertising platforms can create and target custom audiences based on uploaded email addresses from your list. We have had success creating custom audiences in, say, Google Analytics, based on actions taken in emails, with follow up targeting using custom messages in Google Ads.

Email Marketing Work Within Organizations

The email marketer within a large organization, say with 20‐plus marketers, will coordinate how email marketing interacts with all of these channels and more. This marketer will usually rely on others for content but will establish the formats, measurement systems, data governance, list management, service providers, and integrations. In larger organizations, the in‐house email marketer will work with other technical teams to agree on email marketing implementation, technology choices, data management, and sending practices.

Mid‐size entities, from 3 to 20 marketers, may use an email marketing contractor service to handle the technical side of list management and newsletter campaigns, but the in‐house team must understand and set policies for compliance and data governance. Email service contractors can bill by an hourly rate, a monthly retainer, or by the number of campaigns each month.

And at the smallest businesses, email marketing is one of many tasks that the owner or marketing manager performs. Some choose to outsource to independent contractors or marketing agencies that include email and newsletter services.

Tools for Email Marketing

Gone are the days of sending mass emails using a blind carbon copy (Bcc:) from your personal account. While sending campaigns from your own accounts is certainly possible, the effectiveness will be rightly curtailed by many checkpoints that attempt to filter out unwanted emails from recipients’ inboxes. Enter the era of the email service providers and tools. Many are free for smaller campaigns. You will need to know at least these two basic tool classifications:

• An email service provider (ESP) is a company that provides bulk sending, email formatting, and/or list management. Examples include MailChimp and Constant Contact. Higher email volume may require a transaction email service, also called a deliverability service. Examples include Twilio Sendgrid and SparkPost. The alternative of using your own mail account—your company’s Gmail account or your own hosting service—to send volumes of email is a bad idea, as this can reduce deliverability (how many messages actually reach the inbox and get read) and incur a lot of manual work to handle unsubscribes and remain in compliance with regulations. An ESP can help marketers stay in lawful compliance, handle bounced emails and unsubscribes, and report on campaign effectiveness. List management and segmentation can happen using these tools, in other dedicated list management tools, or in a marketing automation tool. We cover these concepts later in this chapter, but the net‐net is that email marketing tools have become essential to even the smallest campaign.
• Marketing automation tools help track, trigger, and coordinate messaging based on your recipient’s actions, including website behavior, clicks in email, or updates in your sales team’s CRM system. Examples include Hubspot, Salesforce Pardot, and Adobe Marketo. Marketing automation can start and stop timed sequences of messages (auto‐responders and drip campaigns) to a subscriber based on behavior. Your automation tools can coordinate messaging and timing with social media campaigns and sales interactions (via CRM), as well as SMS and mobile campaigns.
• Analytics and reporting capabilities are usually baked into your email service provider toolset, but it is worth mentioning that web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics can be used to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns as it relates to reader behavior on your web pages.

There are many other tools that can enhance your campaign integration, measurement, deliverability, analysis of your servers (I like MxToolBox) and list management that are beyond the scope of this chapter.

Stay Up to Date on What’s Possible

The capabilities and requirements of email marketing tools are constantly evolving. If you are just starting out in email marketing, a nice shortcut into what is possible is to research and compare the current capabilities of email service providers and transaction/deliverability services. Another technique is to follow the social streams of email marketing specialists. One trick to choose whom to follow: see who had been invited back to the same reputable digital marketing conference to present on email marketing techniques—at least twice. This implies that the speaker has survived peer review and consistently stays up on the latest in the practice. It also helps if they are OMCP certified. Lastly, join some active email marketing groups online to see what the more seasoned email marketers are discussing. This is a great way to stay up to date on what is possible.