Using metrics in email marketing

- Just like any other marketing method, paying close attention to your metrics and analytics are key with email marketing. By understanding what's working and what's not, you can iterate on your email campaigns so they hit your marketing goals, goals like increasing sales or driving traffic to your website. Important metrics to pay attention to are your overall open rate, that's the number of people who have opened your email, and your overall click rate, the number of people who clicked on the links within the email itself. This will help you understand what emails people are responding to and engaging with while helping you develop great content to send out to your list. All email marketing providers, like MailChimp, will have a reports dashboard. It's here that you'll be able to see some specific measurements that'll help you understand how your email campaigns are performing. Currently, I'm in the MailChimp reports dashboard for Hansel and Petal. I can see a quick snapshot of how the most recent campaigns have performed, but let's dive a bit deeper. I'm gonna select the Holiday Poinsettias campaign. This takes me to the overview dashboard for the campaign, and as I scroll down, you can see some different measurements. The first is if you have integrated your campaigns with your online store, you're able to track the amount of orders, order revenue and total revenue that has been produced from this specific campaign. This is great if you run an e-commerce business. But further down is really what I want to focus on, and that's the open rate and the click rate. Now because this is a fictitious brand and a fictitious email campaign, you'll notice that the open rates aren't very high, but this will still help you see what I'm explaining. The open rate is how many people opened your email. Next to that is the click rate. This is how many times your links in your emails were clicked. Below these metrics, you can see MailChimp provided a list average and industry average, so you can understand and compare how this email performed versus your other campaigns sent to the same list as well as how other people in your industry are performing. Below that, you can see your 24-hour performance so you can track your campaign more closely. Underneath is a top links clicked. This is going to let you know what links in your email campaign have been clicked and how many times. Underneath that, you can see the people that have opened your emails the most, and then we have your social performance, followed by the top locations by opens, so you're able to drill down into more demographic information. Familiarizing yourself with this reporting dashboard will help you truly understand how your emails are performing and how you can make them better. Head over to your reporting dashboard. If you use an email marketing provider other than MailChimp, it may have a different name, but the metrics will be the same. Pay specific attention to your open rates. Ask yourself, can you see any patterns between your highest-performing campaigns?