Email Marketing Reports

Just like the rest of your website, it's important to measure the success of your email marketing campaigns so you can understand your results and tune the next campaign. The success of a campaign is judged by how well it accomplishes your goals, be they to sell certain products, generate inquires or get people to click on certain pages. This is a powerful tool because you can tell what works for your business and your customers and all the data is integrated into your website.

If you send out a email newsletter showcasing specials on rubber ducks what you really want to know is how many people are clicking through to your products and making purchases. Without powerful reporting software working behind the scenes you may as well be closing your eyes and throwing your newsletters into the wind. With the tools to measure and tune built into your site sending off the campaign is just the beginning!  

 

To open the report 

1. Click on the Marketing tab 
2. This displays a list of all your campaigns to date
3. Pick a campaign that's had time to send out and take effect (It will take several days to get accurate stats for your email campaign)
4. Click the Report link on the right hand side of the screen  

If this is the first time opening the report the system will automatically start calculating the stats. Don't worry if this takes awhile, especially for campaigns that have gone out to lots of people.

Viewing the report

Once the campaign is done updating you will see the email campaign report page which displays graphs and stats to help you see the effectiveness of past campaigns, and shows you which areas to work on to improve the next ones.

1. If you've opened the report before you may wish to refresh the data by clicking "last generated" in the top right hand corner of your screen and then clicking "regenerate".

The style of the email campaign report page is very similar to the dashboard, ecommerce and visitors report page's.

1. The graph shows you the visits to your site generated by the email campaign, the title of the campaign is displayed at the top, in this case "June 2011 Newsletter"
2. This lets you see trends - and while this will usually show you a big increase in traffic which eventually slows down to nothing, you can compare how effective different campaigns performed, e.g. a campaign sent on Friday afternoon might cause a larger peak of traffic than one sent out on Monday
3. Like all report graphs you can zoom in to see more detail by selecting an interesting area with the mouse
4. Bellow the graph you can see exactly how many visitors the email campaign has generated
5. For every email campaign you sent you can drill down into the individual ecommerce, visitor and goals reports. This allows you to gather detailed information about every aspect of the email campaign.

 

Goals

A key benefit of the report is the data on goals that you find below the visitor graph.

1. The first goals displayed are the standard 'major' goals that come loaded on your Zeald website.
2. You can see how many orders were placed from people who viewed your campaign as well as the total revenue made and the conversion rate. If your campaign was aimed at increasing sales then the conversion rate is the key metric for measuring the success of a campaign. If you had a lot of click throughs but low orders that could be a sign that your email campaign was successful but your website is leaking potential customers and it could be time to think about booking some results consulting or even a redesign if your site's getting stale.
3. Next you can see data for all the other goals on your website. Think about what you're trying to accomplish with your email campaign. Chances are your major goals will already be loaded on your website, but you should have some good minor goals as well. You can find more ideas for what you can measure in the goals help file

 

What did they click?

The ability to see exactly which pages your customers went to should play a large part in measuring the success of a campaign. If your email newsletter was aimed at getting people to complete a form to sign up for a  competition, but most of your visitors only clicked on the specials page then you can instantly see that your newsletter didn't perform as well as you wanted, and you can start tuning the next one.


 

Technical Info

This lets you you make sure that you're campaign is being sent and viewed. You shouldn't be too concerned about these stats unless there is a very high bounce rate. This could indicate a problem with your customer database or some kind of technical difficulty. Keep in mind that sending out big email campaigns is a very intensive activity that can be delayed for a number of reasons. If 



If your email is being delivered to lots of people but not being viewed by many that could indicate a poor or 'spamy' sounding title. Tune your campaign and try again on the next newsletter that you send out. Remember that being able to measure, tune, repeat and remeasure is what makes a successful website.
 

Email Open Rates

The "open rate" for an email campaign is a measure of how many recipients viewed your email. It is important to note that Email open rates can not be measured accurately. 

An “email open” can only be tracked in HTML emails because they include a tracking pixel, which is a tiny, invisible image that is loaded when the subscriber opens your email. When the tracking pixel image is downloaded from our web servers, the email is recorded as being “opened”.

Some email clients are not capable of displaying HTML with images or some people may choose to read your email without displaying images. In either case, the email might have been viewed by the subscriber but it will not be recorded as “open”

Although it is not 100% accurate, the Email Open Rate metric helps us to measure the engagement through trends, so you know if the engagement is increasing or decreasing. You want to see a steady or increasing percentage rate over time.

Common factors in low, or decreasing open rates might indicate that:

1. You are sending too many, or too few, campaigns.
2. The Subject line is failing to grab people's interest.
3. Your campaign is not targeting unique subscriber segments.