Email Marketing - Part 5 - Analytics & Tracking

Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Welcome back to our Thursday Deep Dive series, where we are again talking about email marketing and active campaign. So let's get to it.

Today's menu includes every data nerd's favorite subject tracking and analyzing performance for our email marketing. This is actually much simpler than it seems and the reality is that, despite the hordes of data we might be storing about our clients in our email systems, analyzing email marketing performance is actually pretty straightforward. Of course, there are much more complex data analysis things you can do with the information you're collecting in your email system, and while we're not going to talk about a lot of that today, just remember that the numbers we are covering today are still really important. These are the primary indicators of how you're doing with marketing and, while it can be a little tough to stomach sometimes, you need to be engaging with this data to understand how effectively you are communicating with your clients. The marketers who really master email are constantly looking at these metrics, even if they're doing something much more complex to generate, qualify and contact their leads. These metrics we're going to talk about are fundamental and this episode is going to be short, but that's intentional. I don't want to cloud your thinking here. These metrics seem simple, but the inferences and decisions we can make based on this data can be outstandingly significant for us when it comes to revenue. So the big key metrics we need to look at our open rate, click through rate, conversion rate and unsubscribe rate.

We're going to be breaking all of these down individually, but let's start with our open rates. The open rate on each email is a fundamental metric in email marketing. The open rate is measuring the first impression your email makes on your audience. It's that crucial moment when your email lands in someone's inbox and they decide whether or not to actually give it some attention. The open rate tells you the percentage of recipients who actually opened your email out of the total number of recipients who received it. This metric gives you insight into how effective your subject lines are and sender names are in grabbing your audience's attention. A high open rate generally indicates that your email subject line and sender information are compelling enough to pique some interest. It's a crucial, crucial metric to monitor and optimize as part of your emails marketing strategy. This sets the stage for all the subsequent actions in email, like clicks and conversions, and it sets the stage, ultimately, for the success of your email marketing campaigns.

But next we have click through rate, or CTR. With CTR, we're going beyond just gauging whether or not the people on your list opened your email. We're starting to look at how much they actually interacted with the actual content of your email. When someone not only opens your email but also takes the action of clicking on a link, it demonstrates a higher level of engagement. This is a strong indication that your email marketing strategy is hitting the mark. So CTR is the percentage of our email recipients who have clicked on our links within an email, and a high or higher CTR is not only positive for us, but it is again an indication that the emails we're sending are not only being well received, but they're actually compelling enough to prompt someone to take some action For us. At the end of the day, we're going to want this to translate into more phone calls, more form submits and more revenue.

So it's really important for us to pay attention to the CTR for our emails, because this is our pathway to converting those email recipients into sales, and that does lead us to the conversion rate. This is the percentage of our email recipients who are taking a particular desired action after clicking on a link in one of our emails. In an active campaign, we can track this with goals or we can track conversions in analytics or other analytics programs, and that actually may be a little bit easier than an active campaign. But conversion rate like with pay-per-click ads and with most other forms of advertising, this is that rate of people who are actually performing our desired action, whether that's signing up for something or filling out a form or making a call that's connected to call tracking or even making a purchase, and it should be pretty easy to see. But conversion rate is such a critical metric because it directly ties our email engagement to actual business outcomes and revenue Beyond every other metric. This is what we want to be driving our assessments of effectiveness and dictating what optimization and changes we make in accounts. And, of course, higher is better when it comes to conversion rate, but the value of your conversions is certainly going to play apart in things and what you're really looking for is consistency and growth when it comes to conversion rates.

I'm pretty sure I've said it on the podcast before, but conversion rate is king, and that's definitely true in email marketing as well. But last but not least, we have the unsubscribe rate and this should be pretty self explanatory, but our unsubscribe rate is telling us the percentage of people who unsubscribe from our list after receiving a particular email. And, of course, some level of unsubscribes is natural and it's going to happen. But a consistently high unsubscribe rate may signal issues with your content or your frequency, or maybe even your targeting. It's definitely worth avoiding, not only because having a high unsubscribe rate indicates you're doing something poorly with your marketing, but it also because a lot of unsubscribes can lead to issues with deliverability and, in more severe cases, you can get booted out of your email marketing system. So stay very, very cognizant of this metric. If your unsubscribe rate spikes on a particular campaign or a particular automation, you need to investigate ASAP.

Now, I know this episode is on the shorter side, but I really want to keep things simple. Like I said that, these four data points are very much an introduction to email marketing analytics, but unless you've mastered these and few are truly masters of email marketing unless you've mastered these, there's no point in doing much more complicated analysis. We're going to talk about more advanced strategies for tracking and data analysis, in conjunction with some of the segmentation stuff we still need to talk about. We're going to do this in a future episode, and we could stay on email marketing for a long time, but next week we are going to cover these more advanced strategies for actually engaging with our subscribers and what will be the final episode of this section of the email marketing series, because the reality is there are just so many other fun marketing things to talk about that we need to get to. So for this week, that's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosenavertisingcom for more. Thanks.