Q&A: Revamp Your Email Marketing Using Metrics and Reporting

[Caitlin_M]

General best practices are a great starting point, but the real magic happens when you tailor your strategy to your unique audience. Every business and every audience is different, and what works for one might not work for another. That’s why it’s crucial to dive deep into your own metrics to discover what truly resonates with your audience.

Topics covered in this webinar:

• Mastering the top email metrics by learning what the most common metrics really mean and how to interpret them
• Benchmarking your success through understanding industry averages and where you stand compared to your peers
• Discovering proven tips for improvement with actionable strategies to boost your results and engage your audience

You can view the webinar directly through Wistia or right here on the Blog!

• Reporting
• Contacts and Lists
• Delivery
• Email Design
• Scheduling

Reporting

What are the most important KPIs for digital marketing campaigns?

The good news is that there are a lot of analytics you can access to understand your digital marketing efforts. 

Conversions are one of the most important metrics to understand whether people are taking the actions you want them to take (making a purchase, donating, registering, etc.).

Here are a few other metrics for different channels to consider:

• Email marketing: Clicks track whether people are clicking to start to take the action you want. You can then start to calculate your conversion rate from there. 
• Unsubscribes
• Bounce rate
• Spam reports
• List growth
• Social media: Reach, impressions, engagement rate, and click rate are the most important
• SMS: Delivered, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate

Check out this on-demand webinar for more details on understanding and using your digital metrics to improve your results.

I am really interested in learning the metrics for social media like Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin.

Here is a quick overview of important metrics and their definitions (keep in mind each platform may have their own definitions and availability):

• Reach - number of people who see your social media content
• Impressions - number of times your social media content is displayed
• Engagement - number of people who like, share, or comment
• Engagement rate - calculated by the number of likes, shares, and comments divided by the total reach
• Click-through rate - percentage of people who click through to your content
• Conversion rate - percentage of people who donate, buy, sign-up, etc (your call-to-action) divided by the number of clicks

My open rate is much higher than it has been in the past. Is there a reason why this happened?

Apple Mail Privacy which can preload images and content of the emails you send. Because this is also how Constant Contact tracks email opens, this update may affect the accuracy of your email reporting, as we won’t be able to reliably determine which contacts opened which emails when using Apple Mail since their technology is opening the email before your contacts do. You may see an inflated open rate as a result.

This is why going beyond just your opens is so important in today’s world. Clicks are a better measurement for calculating engagement.

Does Constant Contact have a way to filter out bot clicks?

To make sure your email reporting is as accurate as possible, we attempt to prevent these “false opens/clicks” from being recorded in your engagement data. We’ve developed a list of known non-human user agents (security programs and bots), and when one of these agents scans a link in your email, we don’t record the open or click. We make a best-guess effort, but due to the nature of the activity, it’s impossible to say we catch 100% of these. We’re continuing to improve and update this list of known non-human user agents, and we’re actively investigating other ways to determine which clicks are real or from a security program. This work is ongoing as security vendors are constantly changing their tactics so they can catch the elusive scammers and phishers.

Bot opens and clicks traditionally would occur immediately after an email was sent. This, however, may not always be the case. We have also seen them happen as a spike several hours after the send. This can sometimes mean that the security filter noticed something later that caused them to be suspicious of the message. If you notice a higher than-average level of engagement on one of your campaigns, there’s a good chance these are bot opens and clicks. For more information, check out this article.

If we do an email change of address and obtain new, current email addresses for some of the bounced emails, how would you recommend updating that information in our account?

Within your bounce report, there will be a pencil icon next to the bounced email address. You can click that to update the email address directly from that page.

If I send out an email and correct addresses that originally bounced, will those corrected addresses receive the resend email that goes out to unopened emails a few days later?

Yes, the resend to non-openers feature would send to these addresses since they will be considered as new.

I don't see industry unsubscribe rates in the data linked above. Is that info available?

No. Overall, the recommendation is to be less than 1%, and even more ideally less than 0.5%. This is the standard across all industries.

Where do we go to compare campaigns/emails to identify top performing campaigns

Check out this article for steps on finding your top performing campaigns. Please note these reporting features are not available in all Constant Contact plans.

Is it true that if one of my original recipients forwards my email to someone in their network and they click unsubscribe, it will unsubscribe my original recipient?

Yes, it will because it saves the unique unsubscribe link for the original recipient. One way to combat this is by using a Share This Email option within the body of the email to encourage folks to share that way instead. This will limit those accidental unsubscribes.

Contacts and Lists

We have over 8,000 contacts. What is the easiest way to start segmenting? I am just lost on how to start! I guess it depends on the industry, but it’s for a med spa and plastic surgery office

An easy place to start is current and loyal patients and prospective patients (also useful for any other service-based business). You can also segment based on the services people use or have shown interest in, like using click data. For more details on how to do this in Constant Contact, check out this webinar: How to Segment Your Email List in Constant Contact.

Is click segmentation available in my plan? Same with Heatmaps?

You can view your plans and pricing from within your account to see what's included in your current plan. You will be prompted to upgrade your plan if it’s not available.

What's part of regular list maintenance?

For many businesses, you may want to age your list. Do this by finding your least engaged contacts and sending a re-engagement campaign. Some businesses will remove unengaged subscribers after a certain period of time, but the timeline can really vary based on your business or organization.

This also means managing your bounces on a regular basis. Remove the bounces in the Recommended for Removal category within your reports. Once a month or after every email would be ideal. 

It's also best practice to remove role addresses like info@ or sales@. This means an email gets sent to all who are in a distribution list which is problematic for getting unsubscribes and even spam reports. 

Delivery

If an email address has already been filtered by the recipient's account as spam, is adjusting the mentioned areas enough for following emails to not get caught in the spam filter?

In some cases, yes, it can be enough to help. But it also depends on what triggered it in the first place. Sometimes it's just an action that the receiving server does regardless, depending on their settings. 

Are there any specific emojis or symbols that trigger landing in spam? What other things should I keep in mind?

None specifically. Best practices state not to use them excessively. Check out this article for more ideas on what can trigger spam filters.

If we have videos that are uploaded from YouTube, does that count against us since it's not our domain?

No, this doesn't typically affect your deliverability. Just make sure you're creating a hyperlink or using the video option when inserting your video.

What is a good balance for the number of emails if we're only doing an evergreen-type newsletter?

You want to send at least once a month to ensure consistency and so your subscribers don't forget about and then become surprised when they receive an email out of the blue. Many businesses and organizations send at least once a week successfully as long as the content is relevant. Don't forget to test your frequency and watch your metrics to see the impact and make adjustments as needed.

Email Design

What dimension size should we use for images to be both mobile and desktop friendly?

480 pixels will fill the width of the mobile screen, so choose a width of about 150–250 pixels if you would like the image to take up a third to a half of the width of the mobile screen. This size with your template will also adjust to a desktop screen as well.

What is the level of change vs consistency in email layout? We want to have an easily distinguishable email that looks obviously like it's us, but we also want to mix it up to continue to get high engagement. Any advice?

Consistency in your colors and branding is great but so is some change in layout. Create a reusable template with your branding and standard footer and header information for different layouts for emails that serve different purposes.

How many links or photos can affect deliverability?

It's hard to give specific numbers on this. Every spam filter is different. One rule of thumb is that for every image, you have some text typed into your template to help offset the size of the images. For links, don't use the URL within the body of the text. Use a button or list it as a hyperlink.

What are ways to make your email more effective in an era where people read emails less and are being pummeled by lots of emails?

Try segmenting your email list and sending them relevant information. Ask them what they want. Pay attention to where they're clicking or what they're purchasing. Also, keep your emails short and sweet. In most cases, the email would include only one topic to keep the audience focused.

Just thinking about devices used - would the same "guidelines" gone over for everything work when sending out a newsletter to our client lists? Or is there anything you would suggest when sending to clients who use their smaller devices to open emails.

Smaller devices typically need less information since readers may not want to scroll very far. This means one email that includes one topic. These tend to perform better on mobile. Keep it simple!

Content repurposing or re-using seems to be useful in social media. Could it be the same for emails?

Yes, absolutely. Not everything has to be new content. Social content can be used and vice versa. Bonus points, when you start to target your audience via email and automate some of this information. For example, new subscribers get a set of helpful information about your business and working with you."

Scheduling

I’ve heard other marketers say emails should be sent on the same day/time each time. Do you agree? To me, the benefit of varying times is to appeal to people with different behaviors.

In many cases, this can certainly help to have a consistency that your subscribers expect. If you're still getting started and fairly new to email marketing, play around with the timing to see if you can find something that works better.