Future of Tracking, Part III in our Guide to Email Analytics

Increasingly, ESPs are expected to have a  number of user-centric insights in their analytics. Let's take a quick look at some of the most common and useful. If you use google analytics integrated with your ESP, you may also want to consider trying some alternative open source options to it.

The Complete Metrics & Future of Tracking 

Opens by Location 

If you are doing email marekting from the perspective of ecommerce, it's very helpful to know in which countries or states opens & clicks are occurring. Many ESPs offer these kinds of reports and can help you to know where to expand next and where the public seems to respond best to your products, content and marketing campaigns.

In your Email signup subscription process, if this data is relevant to you, include it in the form at the start. This way you'll be able to segment by location (and thus by time-zone) and blast and analyze accordingly.

Opens & clicks by location, is of course a priourity for ecommerce.

Top Links by Unique Clicks

In most ESPs it's easy to see which links were clicked on by whom, if its dashboard doesn't do it automatically, add them up per link by Campaign by blast. This will give you helpful data on which links were most competitive to which segment. Which CTA were followed and by whom! Essential information and numbers to crunch. This will help you refine which segment of your customers respond best to which CTA!

Personalizing the subject lines and CTAs is one of the most important ways we can tweak email Campaigns to boost engagement and conversions.

Time Spend Reading

Litmus tracks a lot of valuable things. Though Email service providers that have some kind of tracking of time read truly give information that is relevant to us as content marketers. As Litmus suggests, this is important to see who glanced, skimmed or actually read the Email. Since as we know, open-rates truly aren't indicative of much. This helps evaluate the efficacy of content. Was it visual enough? Did it hold the audience's interest? Was it informative and useful enough to be engaging?

As such a percentage for Glance/Deleted is a helpful indication of false-positive opens. As our own behavior might indicate, this percentage could be expected to be rather high, since the amount of competition in our inbox (of one of our Email accounts) could be rather high.

Text Reading 

In the industry we know that 43% of Gmail users read email without turning images on. What this means is they did not 'enable images' and thus only the text of your Email counts to the impression of your message.

A useful ESP will have an analytic for what % only text read the blast.

Heat-Mapping of where Email was most Viewed

These quick visual maps of where your audience looked the most on your message can be helpful. They are usually calculated by which links were clicked the most so are a good way to evaluate which CTA or links were the most engaging.

Some ESPs have such visual summaries in their dashboard. This can be good if you don't have much time to study your metrics.

List Health %

Thsi can be evaluated in different ways but can be a measure of the percentage of Emails that do not have a history of temporary or permanent bounce, indications of outdated contacts, representing inactive or deleted email addresses. A list health % is a quick way to tell how up to date and fresh your subscriber list or Email database is.

This figure can also help you identify if your lead generation is replenishing your list with new prospects faster than subscriber are unsubscribing.

Programmable Alerts

We've had a number of admins ask for this, bascially people want the option of triggered alerts to admins about their campaign. This amounts to real-time insights on the analytics themselves. Perhaps one of the CTAs is getting a lot of hits and "trending", an Email can be sent to the Marketing administrator of the campaign to let them know.

If your ESP can't provide this function, you may want to go externally with google analytics or an alternative. 

Subsriber Retention Rate (SRR)

This is a simple statistic, but somewhat overlooked. The SRR is the number of emails in your list minus bounces + unsubs. If your ESP has a percentage for this, so much the better. You will be able to measure retention and loyalty of your list and preferably, of each of your segements.

Active Engagement Percentage

This refers to the number of subscribers who DID something due to the blast. Clicked on links, watched a video, went to a landing page, browsed your eCommerce store, etc....

They followed one of your Call to Actions. You have to evaluate which of your links are active and which are more passive. Not all clicks on links can be considered decent examples of "activev engagement".

You will want to look at unique CTR and clicks by URL and, exclude the links that aren't "active".

Quantifying Optimal Outcomes

It's great to have all these stats and summaries, but it boils down to ROI. You'll want a methodology that allows you to quantify conversions generated from your Email Marketing activities.

Namely, the age-old metric of [the average revenue per email sent]

Total Revenue generated DIVIDED by #of Emails sent.

This is your Return on Email Marketing Investment (ROEMI).