Do you know what your data is telling you? For this post, I’d like to drill down into what your opens, clicks and conversions are saying. This information will provide you insight into what your subscribers are doing with your campaigns and this blog post series will give you some advice on how to pump up the volume on subscriber engagement! (and hopefully give you some tools to work within the new engagement reputation deliverability measurement.)
When reviewing the open, click and conversion data, ask yourself the following questions:
1. Are the results in line with our goals and benchmark history? Determining where the results fall in your current sending pattern is the first step to analyzing your data. If the send produced results that are out of line, take a look at your campaign and identify what may have caused the spike or dip. You may need to do some testing to make this determination.
2. How many times are your subscribers opening your message? Subscribers that open your email multiple times over a set period of time are more likely to be highly engaged with your brand. Mark Brownlow recently covered this topic on his blog.
3. What are subscribers clicking on? Are they clicking on your preheader, your products, your navigation bar…?
4. How many times are they clicking on each link? This will tell you which links are more sticky and which landing pages provide the most valuable content. It could also be indicative of trouble. If, as you see in the example below, someone is clicking 4 or 5 times on a link to a PDF, that may mean they are having trouble accessing the document.
5. Where are people clicking in your message? Take a look a trend data and see if the patterns you are seeing in one message match the hot spots in previous sends. Based on this data, you will want to test link placement or drop the non-performers.
6. What links are producing conversions? Tying in data from your analytics package and conversion tracking will provide you with the answer to what links are producing results and which aren’t. If a product is not triggering conversions, for instance, you may need to evaluate whether to include in future campaigns.
7. How many times is a subscriber opening a message before they click? Before they convert? Does it take 3 opens before a subscriber clicks through or 5 clicks before they buy? If subscribers are hesitating, you may want to turn up the heat via a re-mail or triggered message, ie. “Need more incentive? Take an additional 15% off at checkout”, to get them over the barriers to purchase.
8. How many messages is a subscriber receiving before they click? Before they convert? Take a look at both how many exposures or impressions the subscriber has had across channels through your analytics package and how many emails a subscriber receives before clicking and/or converting. Both this data and the data from #7 will help you shape your frequency and communication strategy to match each grouping of subscribers. You may want to consider developing a series as Jeanne discusses in this post on ClickZ.
9. What other elements should you be reviewing? Determine if social links lift engagement rates or if they eat into your conversions. Remember, social links take your subscribers to a third party site, so you may be missing out on the immediate sale, but don’t forget to evaluate the long-term value of including and engaging subscribers on these networks. Also remember to evaluate the elements in your navigation bar(s) in the click-through analysis and consider dropping or replacing the non-performers.
The ultimate goal of your email marketing campaign should be to provide personalized, targeted and relevant content to your subscribers. Analyzing your messages’ performance will help you take strides to meet that goal. Go forth. Be the data whisperer!
NOTE: The next post in this series will cover tips and ideas for what to test within your message to lift opens, clicks and conversions. Stay tuned!
For more data analysis recommendations, please refer to the following posts:
Kelly Lorenz
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto
@KNLorenz
Related posts:
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- More Data: Jump On It! Your data is talking to you. If you’re not taking...
- Even More Data! Jump On It! (Part 3) We’ve already explored some of the more obvious metrics...
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