Email marketing is actually one of the superstars in the digital marketing world, but are you really taking full advantage of it? To take your email campaigns from good to exceptional, the secret ingredient is in data analytics. It shows how you refine your strategy to engage your audience and bring conversions. Let’s dig into how you can utilize data analytics to supercharge your email campaigns!
Data Analytics: Meaning and Importance
Data analytics is a rather technical-sounding thing but essentially boils down to the same thing: getting to know your audience better. What people are doing with your email, what works, and what does not: the statistics will tell. It’s a goldmine because this kind of information will allow you to make informed decisions that may drastically improve your email performance.
Data analytics isn’t some kind of prediction of what might work. It’s rather the evidence you use to drive strategy. More effective campaigns and more engagement means higher ROI in the future.
Important Metrics to Monitor
Before explaining how to apply data analytics, it is probably time to share the most important metrics you will want to track. They form a basic foundation upon which you improve your email campaigns.
Open Rates
Open rates are the first indicator of performance from your email. It is the percentage of those recipients that had opened your email, out of some number which was sent. The more open rates low is; often it pops up the fact that maybe your subject line is not very engaging or it actually ends in the spam mostly.
To achieve an excellent open rate, create a good headline that causes curiosity or the need to open an email. It is okay to use personalization and emojis. Also, look at what worked the last time and what did not.
Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Once the email is opened, then click-through rates: it is a percentage of the people who have clicked at least once on any of the links within the email. A higher CTR suggests that the content in the email was interesting and relevant to your target audience.
If your CTR is low, assess your CTAs. Are they pop and enticing? Links should pop with the desire to click for reading.
Conversion Rates
They do this by considering a percentage of the number of the receivers who take an action based on a click from one of your emails. Whether it is about registering or buying a product, some action will tell if everything is in good condition at the other end of things. It does so during the process of evaluating just how effective the entire campaign is. Having higher ratios of opens and clicks together with low rates of conversions may be indicating something gone wrong with the landing page.
Use Data to Leverage Improvement on Your Campaigns
Now that we know what metrics to track, it’s now time to discover how to use this knowledge in improving your campaigns.
Segmentation
Segmentation is regarded as one of the best techniques for email marketing. In this way, you are able to segment and make sense of the data pertaining to your subscribers by defining categories such as demographics, purchase history, or degree of engagement, to let you send appropriate messages according to specific target groups.
For example, you can offer your most engaged section of subscribers offers that no one else gets. If a subscriber has gone quiet or isn’t opening or interacting with any of your emails in quite some time, then a re-engagement campaign to get that person activated is probably in order.
A/B Testing
Another great data analytics leverage is A/B testing, also known as split testing. You send one variation of the email to one segment of your audience and another to a second group of audience members. See which works best for the two variations. Apply the same approach to subject lines, designs, and even calls to action.
For example, you can send two subject lines to your recipients and keep a check on which of the subject lines is more frequently opened. Insight derived from A/B testing aids you better in your campaigns subsequently; it makes decisions based on data rather than intuition, which enhances the overall performance of a campaign.
Personalization
Segmentation does go hand in hand with personalization. The better the understanding of subscribers using data, the more personalized content, directly addressing their interests. Personalized emails have the higher open and click-through rates compared to others, which means a more effective leads conversion.
Use dynamic email content in your emails whereby the content of the received emails may be changed. For example, if this person tends to click mostly on articles concerning gardening, take care to make sure that that the information offered to such an email subscriber is usually more related to offering helpful tips about gardening or something related to gardening.
Analysis Tools Needed
It has been found out that achieving the correct usage of the data analysis you have needed the proper tools for getting the work done.
Email Marketing Tools
Most of the email marketing systems already provide pre-made analytic tracking which makes it much simpler to track most critical metrics. Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Constant Contact include a dashboard view into the campaign performance over a set time period.
Review of analytics that will be available within a system: the knowledge of how both better and poor performances of the campaigns in sending emails will help frequently give checks on their improvement open and clickthrough rates by the change made in the emails implemented.
Google Analytics
This will give you more detail because it offers an integration into Google Analytics for your campaigns. Then, by tracking what traffic that came from your e-mail source visits your web site and sees how many visitors can be generated on your particular campaign and where they will end up as a next step on the web.
This data will allow you to understand the value of your email marketing in terms of ROI. For instance, if you come to realize that a campaign that was successful in terms of the high number of website traffic and conversions was the one that performed well, you would carry this across into subsequent campaigns to replicate success.
Third-Party Analytics Tools
For instance, third-party tools like Tableau and Mixpanel will complement your email marketing platform and Google Analytics to help you visualize your data from different angles where you would otherwise not detect the trends. Using this combination of tools will give you a full view of the performance of your email and enable you to make a decision that is informed and wise.
Continual Improvement with Data
Not just an event, but you need to keep on developing your culture for e-mail marketing usage of data analytics.
Time to Time Analysis
Designate a period in a month to check up on your email campaign. You will be checking up on some of the metrics that are very critical in knowing how they are doing. Look at whatever is working and the one that isn’t and give room for improvement. Constant analysis helps you monitor how your email marketing activities will be in case something seems to be going in one direction among your audience.
Tracking Trends
Flexible: The digital world keeps changing as will your subscribers’ behavior. Adapt to the trends you find in your email performance to let it catch on with your tactics. Shift any course in your strategy if and when your interactions change or new trends begin to show themselves in the future.
For instance, if the population responding to your posts comprises mostly of video lovers, then go ahead and introduce videos to your email campaigns so that things do not get stale in the minds of recipients.
Communication of Insight to the Team
Data analytics is a teamwork event. In fact, the presentation of insights before your team instills within your organization a data-driven culture. Report regularly before your team on how email is performing and seek recommendation on the best strategy toward making things right the subsequent time around.
Collaboration can bring in an influx of new ideas and different approaches that actually increase success in email marketing. Finally, when everyone is on the same page, you can have a sound marketing strategy because of the strengths that each member of your team can capitalize on.
Conclusion
Data analytics may actually prove to be that game-changer in improving your email campaign. You will now be able to track key metrics, optimize through segmentation and A/B testing, and even personalize content, which may really end up with having a pretty efficient email marketing campaign.
Just keep up with the latest trends, work with your team to unlock everything that email marketing has to offer, and then leverage data analytics. Your email campaigns are going to bloom.
