Email marketing remains a highly valuable channel for marketers. For starters, it offers unparalleled reach, laser-focused targeting capabilities, achievable measurability, and ROI potential. This is all great, but the proof of its effectiveness relies heavily on the ability to interpret data accurately through reports and analysis that goes beyond basic metrics to uncover key findings. To do this well, you need the right reporting tools—the kind that will offer you the insights you need to make informed decisions and set your campaigns up for maximum success.

Far from being just a collection of numbers, a well-structured email marketing report offers visibility into audience engagement and campaign effectiveness. The reports need to provide a detailed analysis of email performance data and include the standard key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions along with behavior experience (BX) scores, average order value (AOV), and channel engagement effectiveness.

In a nutshell, a compelling email report not only visualizes data, but also identifies trends which allows marketers to understand audience engagement, optimize content, and better tailor strategies to increase the impact of their email campaigns.

Build more valuable email reports in 3 easy steps

 

1. Identify your organization’s top key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals. Beyond the basic metric tracking of—open rate, click-through—it’s important to determine what your goals are for the campaign. Are you trying to sell more products? Create brand awareness? Increase total active subscribers? The goal informs the KPI you track.  For more inspiration and examples of how to use KPIs as a way to measure email effectiveness, check out Acoustic’s recently released 2024 Marketing Benchmark Report —a great resource for industry trends around email reporting benchmarks. 
2. Utilize dashboards that specifically focus on automations and touchpoints within them. Dashboards could include ad-hoc emails, specific subscriber segments, and preferences. Marketers can glean a ton of information when comparing different dashboards and pulling out metrics, such as: time of day and day of week sends, conversion by source, opt-out rates, top subject lines, and performance summaries.
3. Designate a standardized naming convention for all emails for easy reporting. Keep separate dashboards for unique lines of business, groups, objective, and frequency. For example, create email names with the letters ONB to look at only onboarding type emails or AUT for automated emails.

How to use email report details to increase campaign success

 

You’ve created what you think is a winning campaign. You’re tracking the metrics and oh no: The email reports you’ve created using Acoustic Insights are painting a different picture of what you think should be happening. Now it’s time to turn those reporting insights into action. Here’s what I’d advise, if your campaign is generating: 

• Low open rate. Consider further segmentation. Offer an opt-down option with a cadence of less emails. Set up an ongoing re-engagement automation to omit those who are truly inactive. Try to alter subject lines. Use the preview text effectively. Experiment with different send times. Test alternative sender names. Apply send-time optimization (STO).
• Low click rate: Nail the call-to-action (CTA), and keep placement above the fold. Always use mobile- friendly templates. Reduce the amount of copy. Leverage GIFs or other interactive elements to increase engagement. Personalize the creative using dynamic content so the message resonates more with each individual.
• High unsubscribe rate: Better segment your list by data attributes and behaviors. Honor preferences and consider offering customized email frequency. Target on other channels (SMS, Push).

Acoustic’s professional services team (I’m a proud member of this team!) can help you optimize email marketing with Insights, our analytics platform, designed for creating, customizing, and better understanding patterns and trends so you can elevate your customer experience and increase your speed to conversion.

Learn more about what Insights can do to help with reporting and fine-tuning your email campaigns here.  Or, contact us for expert assistance in building an email reporting strategy.