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Making the most of email marketing with advanced analytics

Making the most of email marketing with advanced analytics

Do you wish to make the most out of email marketing? If yes, employ advanced analytics. In this blog, we have examined certain advanced analytics features that would help you maximize your email marketing campaigns.

Every form of communication is a potential opportunity for marketers to project their brand to consumers.

The rise of technological innovations like the Internet, email, smartphones and social media have enabled marketers to amplify their reach and alliteratively improve their marketing campaigns.

One of the most prominent weapons marketers have in their arsenal is the vast amounts of data at their fingertips, enabling them to use actual numbers and figures to manage their campaigns better. The increasing use of data has slowly turned marketing from an art into a science.

One of the exciting applications of such data usage and application, also known as analytics, is email marketing.

Email remains a primary means of communication between people and brands. And the good news is that, according to data,  it remains one of the effective ones, too, with impressive ROI and engagement.

In this article, we will examine some of the advanced analytics features that would help you maximize your email marketing campaigns.

1. Email engagement metrics

The beauty of advanced analytics is that it lets you see how long your subscribers spend on your email and the immediate reaction of the subscriber on seeing your email.

Examining this factor enables you to explore the impact of your email marketing in the form of an "engagement time distribution." The time distribution comprises:

  • Deleting/ Glancing at the email- 2 seconds or less
  • Skimming the email- 3 to 7 seconds
  • Reading the email- 8 seconds or more

So depending on the distribution of each of these three components, you have reason to be proud, worried, or ambivalent. Take a look at this distribution.

Email engagement

In this example, more than 60% of subscribers are reading your email, and another 12% are skimming through it. While these are reassuring statistics, a worrying quarter of people are deleting their emails immediately.

This calls for a deep examination of your email campaigns to eliminate ineffective practices and introduce innovations to improve engagement time. In addition, the more significant usage of such metrics will enable you to accurately home the positive and the negative factors affecting your campaigns.

2. Tracking email client and device

With the proliferation of mobiles and tablets, emails can be accessed anywhere and anytime. The good news is that you can track the device on which the subscriber engaged the email. Like so.

Tracking email client

You can also track the device on which the emails were accessed, be it desktop, mobile or tablet and get a similar distribution as above.

This enables you to configure your email campaigns for different devices. For example, if your read rates are low on mobile devices, then it means that you have some work to do in your email campaign. For example, it may be email formatting or other design elements for mobile.

Another major factor that can be tracked is your subscribers' email clients (like Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and others).

Given the variety of design templates, you must spend time crafting emails on those email clients most frequently used by your subscribers.

Take a look at this email client distribution.

email

Given the above distribution of email clients between Apple, Outlook, and Gmail, it makes sense to optimize your email campaign for all three clients equally.

Being specific about your email campaigns helps you be precise about the email campaign you want your subscribers to see.

3. Heat Mapping and Click Tracking

This metric is interesting because it shows the correlation between the placement of visual elements (like CTA buttons and text) with the time spent by the subscriber over those elements in the form of a heat map.

In a nutshell, it shows visually what you are doing right or wrong in your email campaign.

Take a look at this heat map.

Heat Mapping

When we examine this heat map, we see that 34.5% of subscribers clicked on the first CTA button ("Get Access"), 38% of the people clicked on the image, but only 1.7% of the people clicked on the 2nd CTA.

This shows that your audience prefers to spend time on the upper half of the email compared to the bottom half. It also reveals that CTAs compete with images for clicks in the upper half, so your campaign would be better served using both.

Another way of seeing the effectiveness of your links and CTAs is to see click distribution. For example, if the link used in the primary CTA isn't receiving enough clicks, it may have several flaws, ranging from its placement in the email to weak text that is not actionable enough.

Please look at this figure which shows the click track as it happens.

Click tracking

4. Subscriber-level reporting and Location

While it is helpful to examine your campaign as a whole using analytics, you can also review your campaign individually. For example, to get an idea of the behavior of your average subscriber.

Combine this with the power of examining the campaign based on Location and time zone, and you can truly personalize your campaign.

This analysis is helpful in multiple ways. First, you can gauge the attention and receptivity of your audience spread across different locations. This would help you judge the optimal time to push forward email campaigns at various locations.

It is also helpful in giving the subscriber relevant local information like your nearest store, links, contacts and offers specific to that Location.

Conclusion

In the race for the consumer's ever-decreasing attention spans and increasing expectations, brands have to adapt themselves should they want a piece of the consumer's attention and wallets.

Fortunately, you have an ally in the vast data available and the means to understand and utilize it. While it takes time to integrate analytics into your campaign, the rewards are worth it in the form of actionable insights.

It is up to you to leverage this powerful technique. Let us know any other way you have been using advanced analytics that we have missed.

This post was submitted by a TNS experts. Check out our Contributor page for details about how you can share your ideas on digital marketing, SEO, social media, growth hacking and content marketing with our audience.

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