Do your email campaign reports only include opens and clicks? That’s not the best approach

If your email campaign report only includes open and click statistics, it may not reflect all the results you’ve achieved.

A good email campaign report can make the difference between being hired for another send or not.

Or between your bosses viewing the campaign’s results more positively or not.

It can even help you see the results more clearly yourself.

Email marketing works; that’s a fact. Now you also need to know how to understand and assess the results.

· Plan from the start

Planning your email campaign carefully before you send it will help a lot.

What do I mean by this?

That when you’re preparing the message you’re going to send, you include elements that let you “measure” the results better.

For example, links your subscribers can click so you can count the results.

Or a phone number (where you can ask people to mention the newsletter’s subject when they call)

And not only that: in your message you can encourage them to:

• Reply to the email about a specific topic
• Or leave comments on your blog or on a social media post
• Or even share something on their social networks

In other words, include elements that will later let you measure the results.

On top of that, we can interpret the data better. We’ll see how now, starting with the basic metric

· Opens, a traditional part of email marketing reports

This is the most commonly tracked figure, and one of the easiest to check, since the email marketing tool itself provides it directly.

Even so, we can offer more information, not just the raw number of opens. You can add the following to your reports:

Average open volume

To put the opens figure in context, it’s a good idea to calculate the average of your past sends and compare it with the current send. This way we can tell whether the send is in line with the average or has performed better or worse.

This figure will help us learn which topics, products or services interest our contacts most.

If we see that certain types of sends perform below average, we already have useful information.

Keep in mind, though, that you’ll see variations throughout the year due to sales seasons, discounts, holidays and other events.

Information about contact acquisition

The open rate can also give us clues about what’s happening with how we acquire new leads or potential customers. Because if acquisition is done properly, the open rate should, in principle, be good and high.

Otherwise, it may indicate that something is being done wrong, such as the database being old or outdated, or containing incorrect email addresses, etc.

If you think this is the case, you can also include it in the email campaign report so its results can be interpreted better.

· Click report

This figure tends to carry more weight than opens, since the two are expected, not always rightly, to be related. Although this should be the case, with more opens bringing more clicks, it doesn’t always happen.

Click volume is the most reliable measure of interest for your reports

Second only to conversions, of course, but that’s another matter.

Clicks show a high level of interest, much more than opens, which makes sense, since the contact is accessing the links we sent them to learn more or to buy.

If we get no clicks, the contact clearly isn’t interested, and as before, it can be useful to calculate the average clicks on previous sends.

This will also help you learn which products or services your customers value most.

Opens vs clicks

This is a figure worth studying and setting out clearly in your email campaign reports, as it opens up a good number of possibilities.

If there are many opens and few clicks, it may be due to several things:

· The campaign’s subject line wasn’t clear about the content inside

· Your contact list is very loyal and does open your emails, but then isn’t interested in the topic at hand

· Or the email wasn’t written in a way that gets contacts to take action

What are your impressions?

Whether the report is for you or for a colleague or boss, it’s a good idea to set out the clicks vs opens result and how you interpret it. That way you can try to correct it in your next send.

This can be a very interesting figure if the report isn’t for you, because if you detail and analyze it, the person receiving the report will understand much better what happened with the campaign, especially if they paid you to send it, since they’ll want to understand as well as possible what happened with their investment.

· A must in your reports: direct conversions

Earlier we mentioned how useful it would be to create conversion funnels in Google Analytics. That way, using Mailrelay’s option to add tags to the links in your email campaign, you can find out the direct conversions the send generates.

This is naturally the figure that will interest anyone receiving your report the most, since it’s undoubtedly “the result” of the send with a capital R, and what most people who invest time and money in sending an email campaign expect.

The thing is, it won’t always be possible to count every direct conversion, and you’ll have to do some extra work.

· Indirect conversions and micro-conversions

For me, this is one of the most important parts of this article, and the thing is that the email marketing tool you use can’t give you this data, because these are things that can’t be measured.

We’re talking about:

· Phone calls

· Blog comments

· Purchases and orders made in physical stores

· Information requests

Ideally, you’d have previous data on these points. In other words, you could compare the situation before sending the email campaign with the situation 3-5 days after it. So you can point out things like:

• After the email campaign was sent, we received 17 calls and 4 quote requests. The usual figures are 3 calls and 1 quote request every two weeks.

This way the client, or you yourself, can appreciate the campaign’s results much better and see to what extent it has benefited the company, even if it hasn’t generated many directly visible sales.

· Why create a good email campaign report?

This can help you analyze your send’s results in depth, but it’s clearly most useful when you have to send this information to someone.

The traditional metrics of opens, clicks and conversions will very likely fall short and won’t show the full reach of the send, which is why you should analyze points like:

· Opens vs clicks

· Micro-conversions

· And indirect conversions

In other words, analyze the send’s impact as fully as possible.

Naturally, if your client or your bosses see all this extra information, they’ll get a better picture of the results generated, and they’re very likely to keep trusting you and see the value of running more campaigns.

With less information, they might not see the point, not because there are no results, but because they haven’t been able to see them.

Beyond basic email marketing metrics, keeping an eye on your conversion rate will give you a much more complete view of your campaigns’ real performance.