How to Master Email Reporting

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

Not our words, but those of Peter Drucker - widely hailed as the man who invented modern business management (fun fact: he wrote 39 books on the subject). Of course, he is absolutely right, and, when it comes to email marketing and CRM, proficient measurement of performance is vital.

Clearly, having access to relevant and usable data is at the heart of any successful reporting strategy. But for most marketeers, the challenge isn’t a lack of data: it’s a lack of time, and/or a lack of direction on how best to measure performance.

Why email performance measurement is important

It starts with understanding the fundamental need to track metrics, which will enable you to develop your email marketing strategy.

Firstly, you need a clear view of how subscribers engage with your content. In the absence of any tracking, it’s impossible to know how your content resonates with these subscribers. But once you are able to gather these insights, you can focus on making improvements. For example, it could be that your subject lines are attention-grabbing, so subscribers open the email. But then the email body itself may be less impactful, meaning they don’t engage – or, worse still, unsubscribe.

That’s why drilling down to the KPIs and metrics relating to your primary objectives is critical. And by providing effective reporting on goals which matter most to your organisation, you’ll pave the way for targeted optimisations – and, as an extra bonus, impress senior stakeholders too.

Key areas of focus 

Every business will have its own set of objectives that needs to be reported on, and email marketing should ladder up to this. But in order to ensure that you capture the overall picture of email performance, there are a few specific areas you should concentrate on…

Performance: Opens, clicks and unsubscribes tend to be the key metrics marketeers look at when it comes to email performance – with conversion (eg: revenue, sales, sign-ups etc) being the ultimate aim. Bear in mind though, open rate has become a less-reliable metric since the arrival of Apple iOS15. Equally, click rates can be misleading – what if the same customer clicks on the same link multiple times? And what if customers aren’t clicking on the primary CTA(s), and are instead being drawn to links within the email that don’t drive conversion? That’s why it pays to get into the detail, so you get a meaningful view of the relationship between email performance and customer behaviour.

Rendering: Do you know the percentage of your customers who engage with your emails on desktop versus mobile? How about the device they use? Browser? Client? Some ESPs will have this data readily available. Otherwise, there are third-party tools you could use. These insights will help to inform your strategy going forward, so you can focus your time on email rendering where it can generate the most uplift.

Deliverability: No matter how good your emails look, or how well they are targeted, it won’t matter much if they aren’t landing in front of your customers’ eyes. Are they falling into spam folders? Or perhaps your emails aren’t even reaching customers at all? That’s why inbox placement, sender score and other deliverability KPIs are so vital. So it’s best practice to integrate email domain and bounce metrics into your reporting.

Other KPIs to report on

The above provides a good view of what you should be looking at, but there are other KPIs which can also help with performance measurement. Here are some additional examples you may find useful…

Unique metrics: As alluded to above, distinct opens and clicks can often be more insightful than the total number - especially if you dig deeper into other metrics like mobile open rate, mobile click rate or click-to-open rate.

Audience trends: The number of subscribers you have may be increasing, but is this true of active subscribers too? Activity trends help to shape key decisions and targeting. For example, your revenue-driving comms are best aimed at the most-engaged subscribers, while you could look to set up re-engagement campaigns for those who haven’t opened/clicked in a while (to improve the health of your base).

Mobile performance: We’ve touched on it above, but optimising emails on mobile has never been more important. According to third-party analytics website Mixpanel, 68.9% of devices have iOS installed. This is the sort of thing that should be front of mind when measuring engagement and performance.

Conversion rate: Conversion rate is the percentage of recipients that clicked on a link from your email, and completed the desired goal. In effect, it is a second-stage KPI after clicks, but it is the most crucial. So when doing A/B testing, bear in mind that uplift in click rates is not necessarily, of itself, a true ‘win’. You’ll need to validate that it drove an increase in the conversion rate too.

Revenue and LTV per subscriber: It helps to be able to quantify the monetary benefit of each campaign versus the cost of sending it. But you can go one better: calculate the average lifetime value (LTV) of each subscriber. This can be hugely influential in determining success. Let’s take a use case: an email that is overtly ‘salesy’ could drive high revenue, but also lots of unsubscribes. Conversely, an email which has more helpful content may drive lower revenue initially, but helps to re-engage inactive customers and/or has fewer unsubscribes. It’s very possible that the LTV gains in the latter scenario could outweigh the revenue benefits from the former.