Email Marketing Analytics: Fight for your right to not be bored
200,000 clicks.
Is that good? Is that bad? Who knows?
At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, Matt Bailey, President and Founder, SiteLogic, compelled marketers to “fight for your right not to be bored” at marketing meetings.
Analytics by themselves, he said, don’t mean anything unless you can apply a meaning to the numbers.
In this excerpt, Matt explained that marketers should ask three questions about analytics:
- Where did your visitors come from?
- What did they see?
- How did they react?
Knowing who your customers are and establishing what prompted customers to make an action can help you better target your audience and further segment them into specialized categories.
Email is highest profit-per-dollar activity
During his consultations, Matt’s team discovered that regardless of industry, “email is their highest profit-per-dollar activity.”
However, he added, companies aren’t leveraging email as effectively as it could or should be used.
When you send the same message to everybody, it doesn’t work
Companies need to determine whether or not customers are opening emails and if they are continuing on to the website through that email send.
Matt found that “when you send the same message to everybody, it doesn’t work.”
Companies should use analytics to analyze customer behavior in emails, and look at specific metrics including:
- Which headlines prompted customers to open an email
- From there, whether or not they were brought to the website, or other content within that email
- How much time they spent engaged with the content
He also added that email is best treated as a conversation.
But when you write a single-send email, “you’re not having a valued conversation; you’re having a one-way announcement,” Matt explained.
The best way to see email numbers improve is by communicating value and relevance to the customer, which enables the customer to continue or initiate a conversation with you.
As Matt said, when it comes to the customer, “it’s all about value.”
Integrating analytics with email marketing provides the marketer with insights into customer behavior and how email marketing strategies can be improved. As a result, the marketer can better serve the customer with that insight, rather than just seeing those metrics as numbers on a page.
You can watch the full video replay of Matt’s Email Summit 2013 session in the MarketingSherpa video archives.
