It’s hard to measure the success of an email campaign, so we’re
coming up with a better way. This post is an overview of the
process we’re using as we measure and update our own campaigns.
Some of the results are great and some aren’t. We’ve chosen one
with mixed results to share here since there are more takeaways.
Would you like to see a reporting tool like this in Vero?
Drop a note in the comments.
A Better Way to Visualize Email Data
It’s easy to measure the success or failure of a single email,
but what about an entire campaign? The table below is similar to
what most email marketers see when they check their analytics.
It’s useful but it’s essentially raw data. We’ve found a better
way to visualize this data and we’re going to show you how to do
it using our own blog welcome campaign (new blog subscribers
receive this as an intro the blog and our service). Here’s a
look at the campaign. Click the link on the right to see the
actual email.
Note: Not all of the emails in this campaign
contain full articles so there is no incentive for the
recipient to click. Also, you’ll notice a mix of HTML, plain
text, long form and short form. The goal is to collect data on
different formats.
| Email |
Open Rate |
Click Rate |
| 1 |
56.19% |
12.74% |
| 2 |
45.29% |
5.24% |
| 3 |
33.02% |
8.49% |
| 4 |
40.80% |
19.10% |
| 5 |
39.81% |
8.76% |
| 6 |
29.93% |
0.34% |
7 |
29.10% |
1.76% |
| 8 |
31.68% |
7.33% |
| 9 |
24.07% |
1.39% |
| 10 |
31.42% |
6.46% |
| 11 |
26.41% |
6.93% |
| 12 |
27.01% |
10.43% |
| 13 |
19.89% |
4.97% |
This is useful information but we wanted a better way to
visualize it. So we copied it all over to a
Google Spreadsheet and found a cool new way to examine it.
The first thing we did was separate the open rate and click
rate so we could chart each individually.
Next, we highlighted the data and clicked the “Chart” button.
We wanted to use a trend line in our chart, so we selected a
scatter chart.
We did the same thing for open and click rates.
This is a cool way to view the data because it’s very easy to
see which emails are killing it and which need to be cut (or
seriously edited). The next step was combining the data into
one chart.
Looks awesome, right? Now, let’s see what it tells us.
How to Read This Data
Engagement is highest through the first four emails, meaning
that is when we should be using strong calls to action and
maybe even offering extended free trials or deals on the
service. Here are a few other takeaways:
-
Open rates decline throughout the campaign but click rates
stay relatively even. The group clicking through in the
latter stages of the campaign that haven’t already started a
free trial should be sent a special offer.
-
The email with the highest click rate – a whopping 19.10% –
is simply a link to our
Ultimate Guide to Successful Email Marketing. These people want content and we need to do a better job
providing
“epic” resources
like this one.
-
The email with the lowest open rate is also content (link)
but it’s not focused directly on email. People signed up for
email resources and the data is proving that’s what they
want.
-
There are a few significant drops from one email to the
next. Between emails #4 and #5, the click rate drops from
19.1% to 8.76%. We earned trust and threw it away in the
next email. Emails that build trust are the perfect runway
for a strong call to action. In this case, both emails offer
great content but #5 simply isn’t good enough.
Anything else you would take away from this data? Give it a
try on your own campaigns and let us know the results.
