Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 Email marketing has rapidly become one of the most widely used communication tactics of the digital era. With minimal costs and content requirements presenting a low barrier to entry, it can be an easy and effective means of reaching a target market with a brand’s message. As email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp and iContact have evolved over time, even the HTML design elements of these campaigns have become a simple “point and click” exercise. The problem is that the bulk of those utilizing email marketing are failing to leverage the most valuable component of their campaigns: the results. If your organization is using email marketing to advance their brand, chances are you’re using an email platform to do a great deal of the heavy lifting for you. Built into these platforms are analytic reporting tools which can tell you how your target audience interacted with your message. This data is utterly important, and can help improve your marketing and sales processes in several ways. If you can understand the value of these specific areas of analysis, you may find yourself with far better marketing results. Metric: Open Rate Meaning: What percentage of your recipients opened your email Lesson Learned: Subject Line Efficacy With each email marketing campaign you send out, you include a subject line. In traditional correspondence, these subjects have been largely informational, but in marketing, it’s about flash. This is literally the first attempt you have at capturing a recipient’s attention. If the subject line is too dull or spam-like, your open rate will suffer. If your subject line is relevant and catchy, your open rate will improve. Why does this matter? You can design the most beautiful email marketing campaign content in the history of the world, but if your audience isn’t seeing it because they never opened your email, it doesn’t matter. In this sense, your subject lines and corresponding open rates may be the most important indicator of whether or not your attempts at message distribution are effective. Metric: Campaign Click-Through Rate Meaning: What percentage of your recipients clicked through to linked content in your email Lesson Learned: Content Efficacy Once you’ve gotten people to open your email, you have a very limited amount of time to catch and keep your attention. There are a variety of factors which go into achieving this goal, ranging from design to copy to substance. The right combination can get you in the door, while the wrong combination can wreak havoc on your branding efforts. In the aggregate, click-through rates can help you experiment with tone, spatial design, and subject matter in an informed manner. By monitoring your click-through rate over time, you will be able to get a feel for what types of messages are resonating best with your audience. In many ways, this is a matter of efficient resource allocation. For instance, imagine that your organization sells a variety of clothing. If your email campaigns about sales are performing with a click-through rate twice the rate of your campaigns which focus on trends in fashion, it would make much more sense to focus on developing marketing initiatives revolving around sales than it would to continue to allocate resources to developing fashion trend initiatives. Metric: Link performance by lead Meaning: Which recipients clicked on which links Lesson Learned: Lead Interests While it’s important to monitor the performance of email marketing campaigns in a broad sense, this information is largely important to marketing departments. For those in sales, a much more valuable measure is based on link performance by campaign. Here, instead of a big picture view of a message’s performance, you’re able to gain an understanding of how your leads are interacting with the content you create on an individual basis. Why does this matter? The cornerstone of effective communication is an understanding of the intended audience. For those involved in sales, this means understanding the psyche of the lead they’ve chosen to target. Some of this information is provided by basic demographics, such as age, gender, and geography. Other pieces of more nuanced information may be volunteered by the lead on registration forms, such as expressed proficiencies, experiences, or preferences. However, as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words, and that’s why looking at link clicks by lead can be particularly revealing. If a lead is demonstrating through their click behavior that they are attracted to content about a specific topic, a sales person can use this information to create a targeted message for individual outreach, increasing the likelihood of that message being well-received. Are your emails working? Are they worth the expense? By using analytic reporting tools and analyzing the data, you can fix a campaign that’s falling apart, or boost a good campaign into a great one. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Kane Pepi.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Kane Pepi Kane Pepi is an experienced financial and cryptocurrency writer with over 2,000+ published articles, guides, and market insights in the public domain. Expert niche subjects include asset valuation and analysis, portfolio management, and the prevention of financial crime. Kane is particularly skilled in explaining complex financial topics in a user-friendly … View full profile ›More by this author:VoIP Basics: Everything Beginners Should Know!Bitcoin Investment, Trading & Mining: The Ultimate Guide for BeginnersIs This a Better Way to Set Your 2020 Goals and Resolutions?