Analytics Tools: Are Email Analytics Trustworthy?

When you stop to consider all of the different aspects of your business’s marketing efforts, email marketing probably pops into your head. In fact, email marketing is, perhaps, one of the most cost-effective types of marketing – especially if you have a large or growing email list. With email marketing, you can send quality advertisements and personalized, targeted messages to your current, past and future clients. Email analytics will help you determine the effectiveness of the messages you send. Let’s take a look at the different types of analytics, and discuss how trustworthy these statistics are.

What Are the Different Types of Email Analytics?

Regardless of the email analytics tool you will be using, you’ll probably get the following statistics for different time periods: bounce rate, open rate, unsubscribe rate, conversion rate, clickthrough rate, sharing & forwarding rate, list growth rate, and overall return on investment. Each statistic will provide a different insight into how well your campaign is performing. For example, a low open rate may mean that your subject lines need some work. On the other hand, if your campaign emails have low conversion rates, you may need to work on your call-to-action.

Can I Trust My Email Analytics Stats?

Every email analytics tool functions a little bit differently from a user interface standpoint, but they all work similarly on the back end. Unless you have a reason to believe otherwise, the numbers within your analytics tool are accurate. But the communication between your email platform and your Analytics may track a little differently. Often though they’re close enough together to get a good picture or be able to suss out any variances. We’ve mentioned this before, but this is why it could be important to track the links in your emails via Google’s Campaign Builder to build specific links from your emails that you can track in your Analytics.

To analyze, if your numbers seem lower or higher than usual, you may want to take a look at your unsubscribe or sharing rate. If you see a sudden decrease in open rates, there may be a correlating uptick in unsubscribes or bounces. On the other hand, a sudden increase in open rates may account for better click-throughs and open rates.

Using Email Analytics Stats in Marketing

Analytics tools can be extremely helpful to your marketing strategy, but only if you put in the time and effort to analyze the data that the tool produces; otherwise, it’s just another data stream that becomes irrelevant. In order to make the most of your email marketing analytics, run campaigns and consider A/B testing different subject lines, call-to-actions, and photographs. If you have the time to invest, an email analytics tool is an invaluable tool to help you maximize your time spent writing and putting together email campaigns.

Do Marketing Services Use Email Analytics?

In short, yes – marketing agencies like the team here at Marketing Matters use our own email analytics to help us maximize campaign effectiveness. The reality is that, regardless of how good our writers are, people all respond differently to varied verbiage, images, and call-to-actions. Developing optimized content for every email recipient is impossible, so a better strategy involves taking statistics into account when developing multiple versions of the same email. These versions can be sent, evaluated for effectiveness, and used for future message development.

At the end of the day, you don’t necessarily have to do all of this yourself. You can if you want to; that involvement will lead to a better understanding of your target audience. However, if you don’t have the time to evaluate your analytics statistics, your business may be better off looking to people with the expertise, including perhaps a marketing agency.