Three Simple Suggestions for Email Analytics

I’m happy to see the increased attention companies are paying to their email analytics, this regular review is helping their programs become more and more sophisticated – here are some suggestions to enhance effectiveness:

1) Don’t just LOOK at the numbers – All too often companies prepare reports for the sake of having reports to review. Apply your learning to your campaigns, studying the numbers to make sure you understand customers better. Pick two or three areas where you can apply the results of your analysis; else you will completely loose the value of your reporting. Simple first steps could be to retarget clickers with a special offer on what was clicked or thanking buyers with personalized emails or asking new subscribers what they expect from you.

2) Set goals – Create short-term, long-term and related goals. For a short term goal, you may pick a segment of prospects and attempt to move more people from opener status to become clickers; a longer term goal might be to use fewer incentives to convert prospects into buyers. Other goals could be to move those who have clicked to take a survey, get those who respond to the survey to into a special buyer category, etc. The goal would be to constantly evaluate different aspects of your program and seek continuous improvement.

3) Assign a value to the numbers – Start monetizing your research to show the value of your efforts; for example, you may have elected to mail fewer paper statements to your members by converting people over to electronic statements. Consider this as money saved through the application of analytics, this money should be applied to hiring resources – both people and technology. If you make an investment, it will help you improve your overall program.