Content map
1. Principles Of Measuring Email Marketing Efforts2. Key Email Marketing Metrics3. Email Performance Dashboard4. Download Email Performance Dashboard5. Review Email Analytics6. Wrap Up
The final step in our Beginner's Guide To Email Marketing is, of course, to measure the success of your email marketing efforts! You've built your email marketing strategy, planned an email marketing calendar, created email flows & designed effective emails that convert.
Now it's time to track that success & leverage the data to improve your email performance.
To start, you'll learn the principles of effective email performance tracking & which metrics to track, like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. This will all come together in building an effective email performance dashboard to help you see how well your emails are performing, what's working, and what's not.
Lastly, but most importantly, you'll learn how to use your email data to make better marketing decisions. By understanding your email metrics & regularly reviewing your email performance dashboard, you can figure out what your audience likes and doesn't like, and use this information to make your email campaigns & flows more effective.
With this guide, you'll learn how to measure & apply data from your email marketing efforts to grow your DTC ecommerce brand..
Principles Of Measuring Email Marketing Efforts
Principle 1. Actionable Reporting
Actionable reporting emphasizes the importance of not just collecting data, but also using that data to drive action.
This approach is unique because it goes beyond simply tracking email marketing metrics but actually analyzing the data to identify patterns & trends, to generate insights that can be used to take action on changes to your email marketing strategy. Actionable reporting helps you determine A/B tests to run, what flows to build, changes to your email campaign calendar and different audiences to segment.
The goal is to take action based on what you learn, so you can continually improve your emails and drive better results. Ultimately, actionable reporting helps you make the most of your email marketing by providing a clear roadmap for optimization and growth.
Principle 2. Benchmarking
Benchmarking is another principle of effectively measuring email marketing performance that involves comparing your metrics to a standard or goal.This approach is important because it helps you understand how your email marketing is performing relative to your peers, your own past performance & your own business goals.Benchmarking can be done in a variety of ways, such as benchmarking against industry standards or best practices. For example, you might compare your open rates to the industry average, or your click through rate to those achieved by top-performing brands in your industry.
Alternatively, you can benchmark against your own past performance to track progress over time. This might involve comparing metrics from one email campaign to another, or looking at performance over different time periods.
By benchmarking your email marketing performance, you can gain valuable insights into how your campaigns are performing, where you stand relative to the competition, and which metrics to focus on improving. This helps you set realistic goals, track progress, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your email marketing strategy.
Principle 3. Comparison & Trend Data
Comparison and trend data is a principle of effectively measuring email marketing performance that involves looking at how your metrics change over time.
This approach is important because it helps you identify patterns and trends, and understand how your email efforts are affecting KPIs. By comparing data from different time periods, you can see what's working well and what's not, and make changes to your strategy as needed.
There are several ways to compare and measure trend data, such as looking at week-over-week (WOW), month-over-month (MOM) or year-over-year (YOY) changes in your metrics. For example, you might compare your revenue generated in January of this year to the revenue generated in January of last year.
Alternatively, you can compare data by different types of campaigns, such as comparing the performance of your promotional campaigns to your newsletter campaigns. By analyzing comparison and trend data, you can gain valuable insights into how your email campaigns are evolving, and use that information to make data-driven decisions to improve your email marketing performance.
Principle 3. Flagging & Diagnostics
Comparison and trend data is a principle of effectively measuring email marketing performance that involves looking at how your metrics change over time.
This approach is important because it helps you identify patterns and trends, and understand how your email efforts are affecting KPIs. By comparing data from different time periods, you can see what's working well and what's not, and make changes to your strategy as needed.
There are several ways to compare and measure trend data, such as looking at week-over-week (WOW), month-over-month (MOM) or year-over-year (YOY) changes in your metrics. For example, you might compare your revenue generated in January of this year to the revenue generated in January of last year.
Alternatively, you can compare data by different types of campaigns, such as comparing the performance of your promotional campaigns to your newsletter campaigns. By analyzing comparison and trend data, you can gain valuable insights into how your email campaigns are evolving, and use that information to make data-driven decisions to improve your email marketing performance.
Key Email Marketing Metrics
Obviously it all starts with measuring the right metrics. There are a ton of different ways to look at email analytics but in this section we'll go over the key email marketing metrics and explain why they matter. Most email service providers should allow you to easily track each of these KPIs.
Revenue
The total amount of money generated from email marketing, typically split to be measured separately for email campaigns & email flows.
Measuring revenue from email effectively is important because it directly impacts the bottom line of your business, helps you determine how much to invest in email marketing & helps you identify opportunities for growth. It can also inform other parts of your general marketing strategy such as your target CPA or ROAS.
Most email service providers, like Klaviyo, include revenue tracking, but you can also analytics platforms such as Triple Whale, for more effective revenue attribution.
% of Revenue
This is the percentage of your total ecommerce business revenue that can be attributed to email marketing. This is also typically split to be measured separately for email campaigns & email flows. Most e-commerce brands should have 20-30% of their total business revenue coming from email marketing.
Measuring the percentage of revenue that can be attributed to email marketing is important because it helps you understand the contribution of email to your overall sales. This metric allows you to track the ROI of your email marketing and make data-driven decisions about where to focus your marketing resources.
Recipients
The total number of emails delivered to email subscribers.
Measuring your total recipients is important because it provides insight into your audience segmentation, helps measure whether you're sending the right number of emails & ensures that you are consistently reaching a large portion of your list.
Open rate
This is the percentage of people who opened your email out of the total number of people who received it.
Measuring open rate is important because it helps you understand how well your email is landing in inboxes, the effectiveness of your subject lines & your subscriber engagement. A low open rate can indicate that your subject lines aren't engaging enough, or that your emails are being marked as spam.
Click-through rate (CTR)
This is the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email, out of the total number of people who received it.
Measuring click through rate (CTR) is important because it helps you understand how effective your email content and call-to-action are at driving engagement and conversions. A low CTR may indicate that your email content is not relevant or valuable to your audience.
Purchase rate
This is the percentage of people who make a purchase from your email, out of the total number of people who received your email.
Measuring purchase rate is important because it allows you to understand how well your emails are driving revenue and converting customers. A low purchase rate may indicate that your products, messaging or positioning isn't resonating with your audience.
Pop-Up Opt-In rate
This is the percentage of people who see a pop-up opt-in form and fill it out to join your email list.
Measuring the pop-up opt-in rate is important because this is the primary channel of collecting email addresses. This metric allows you to optimize your pop-ups to maximize the number of new email subscribers.
List growth rate
This is the rate at which your email list is growing over a given period of time, which is the net new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes.
Measuring list growth rate is important because it allows you to track how quickly your email list is growing over time. By understanding the rate at which your list is growing, you can adjust your acquisition strategy and optimize your list building efforts.
Bounce rate
This is the percentage of emails that were undeliverable to a user's email client and bounced from their inbox.
Measuring bounce rate is important because it helps you understand how effectively your emails are being delivered to your recipient's inbox. A high bounce rate may indicate that your email list is outdated or that there are issues with your email deliverability.
Spam rate
This is the percentage of people who marked your email as spam out of the total number of people who received it.
Measuring spam rate is important because it helps you understand how well your emails are being received by your audience. Too many spam complaints may indicate that your email content or sending practices are not aligned with your subscribers' preferences, or you're sending a high number of emails, which can negatively affect your sender reputation.
Unsubscribe rate
This is the percentage of people who unsubscribed from your email list after receiving your email.
Measuring unsubscribe rate is important because it helps you understand how well your emails are meeting the needs and interests of your subscribers. A high unsubscribe rate may indicate that your email content is not relevant or valuable to your audience, or you're sending a high number of emails.
$/recipient
This is the amount of revenue generated per email recipient, on average.
Measuring the revenue generated per email recipient is important because it allows you to understand the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns on a per-customer basis. By optimizing your $/recipient, you can maximize the ROI of your email marketing efforts and improve the overall profitability of your business.
Building an Email Performance Dashboard
Building an email performance dashboard is an effective way to stay on top of your email marketing metrics and track the success of your campaigns.
An effective dashboard allows you to:
• Quickly and easily see all of your email analytics at a glance
• Track progress of email metrics over time
• Deep dive into specific email metrics for flagging & diagnostics
• Analyze individual email campaign & email flow performance
• Make data-driven decisions to improve your email performance
Here are a few useful views to have on your email performance dashboard:
Overall Email Analytics Summar
This view provides a high-level overview of your email marketing performance, including key metrics like revenue, open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate. It's a useful starting point for assessing the overall health of your email program and identifying areas for improvement.
Email Flow Breakdown
This view allows you to see how your automated email flows are performing, such as welcome series, abandoned cart emails, or win-back campaigns. It's useful for understanding how your automated campaigns are contributing to your overall email performance and for identifying specific areas for improvement.
Email Campaign Breakdown
This view shows how each individual email campaign is performing, such as a promotional campaign or a newsletter. It's useful for identifying which campaigns are resonating with your audience and driving the most engagement.
Week-Over-Week (WOW) Analysis
This view compares your email performance over the course of a week to identify trends and patterns in your email marketing data. It's useful for identifying which days of the week or times of day are most effective for sending emails.
Month-Over Month (MOM) Analysis
This view compares your email performance from one month to the next to identify overall trends and patterns in your email marketing data. It's useful for identifying seasonality or changes in customer behavior over time.
Year-Over-Year (YOY) Analysis
This view compares your email performance from one year to the next to identify long-term trends in your email marketing data. It's useful for identifying changes in customer behavior or changes in your overall strategy.
Measure, analyze & grow your email analytics with our free Email Performance Dashboard template. Built to easily export & import data from Klaviyo, or manually input - it's up to you!
How Often to Review Email Analytics
Once you have built an email performance dashboard, it's important to get into a regular cadence of updating your dashboard, reviewing the email analytics & applying the insights to your upcoming email strategy.
Here are some best practices for the frequency of review:
• Review your email analytics with your email marketing team every 1-2 weeks: Depending on the size and complexity of your email program, you may even want to review it on a daily basis during major sales periods such as Black Friday. Regular reviews will help you stay on top of your email performance and make timely adjustments to your campaigns.
• Review your overall email performance with C-Suite & VPs every 1-3 months: This is when you can focus on analyzing how email as a channel is performing for the business, how effective it is at supporting business goals, and high-level strategic changes to make
Once you have established a routine for reviewing your email analytics, it's important to apply your email analytics to inform or pivot your email strategy:
• Inform email layout & content: Track click through rates & conversion rates to see which types of email topics & layouts are resonating with your audience. Use that data to run A/B tests or improve the content of upcoming emails.
• Optimize your email list & segmentation: Use the data you gather from your open, unsubscribe, bounce & spam rates to segment your email list, send more targeted, personalized campaigns & clean your email list
• Identify opportunities to build or optimize email flows: Use the revenue & engagement metrics of your email flows to identify where potential shoppers are dropping off in the customer journey to add additional emails or optimize existing ones
• Optimize send times: Use your email analytics to identify the best days and times to send your campaigns, based on open rates and click-through rates.
• Improve email deliverability: Analyze your email bounce rate and spam rate to identify any issues that could be impacting your deliverability. This will help you maintain a healthy email list and ensure that your emails are reaching your subscribers' inboxes.
By regularly reviewing your email analytics and using that data to inform your email strategy, you can improve the effectiveness of your campaigns and drive better results.
Wrap-Up
Measuring the success of your email marketing campaigns is crucial for any DTC ecommerce brand, and the key to doing that is by understanding and tracking the right metrics.
By focusing on actionable reporting, benchmarking, comparison and trend data, flagging and diagnostics, and other important principles, you can build an effective email performance dashboard that provides you with valuable insights into your email marketing campaigns.
Regularly reviewing your email analytics and using that data to inform your email marketing strategy is equally important. By doing so, you can make data-driven decisions that lead to more successful email campaigns, better engagement with your subscribers, and ultimately, increased revenue.
Using a tool like Backbone can also help you with building an email strategy & email layouts that are optimized to get the most opens, clicks, and conversions.
With these tools and strategies at your disposal, you can take your email marketing to the next level and achieve your business goals.
