At the end of the day, you need leads and conversions. And if any of them come from an email, your email marketing efforts are working.
But it can be tricky to tie leads back to emails. Especially in the long B2B sales cycle, not every prospect is ready to convert, even if they clicked a link in your latest campaign. Often, these leads will go back to your website another time, separate from an email.
This speaks to an important B2B email marketing truth:
The point is to keep your brand top of mind.
So, you shouldn’t look at your email marketing strategy in a vacuum. If you have steady open and click rates, growing website traffic and a nice flow of leads, your email marketing is probably working. Remember, it’s just one piece of the integrated marketing puzzle.
Even so, it’s important to keep a pulse on your B2B email analytics. You can’t improve if you don’t know what is or isn’t working.
To help you figure this out, I’m going to walk you through my own process I follow when I look at email reports.
When you log into your email platform – for many of our clients, it’s Campaign Monitor – navigate to your recent email sends.
The first thing I do is take a look at the open and click rates:
A quick glance at these numbers next to other sends will help you see how the email performed.
Variance is normal. But if you usually get a 15% open rate and the email you’re analyzing had a 5% open rate, that’s a red flag you will want to investigate.
(This is the power of B2B email analytics.)
From here, I will click into the specific email I’m analyzing to dig deeper into the details.
Some emails are designed to drive traffic to your website. Others are just for communicating value, and that’s okay.
But if you sent an email with the intent to get people to click through to your website, you should drill into the click rate by seeing who clicked what.
On the main dashboard of a sent campaign, you will see this chart. This gives you a quick view of how many times a particular link was clicked. But click “full report” for even more information.
There, you will see the amount of unique clicks compared to the total number of clicks. In this example, the 253 clicks to the blog were made by 193 different people. That’s 193 people on our blog. Pretty cool!
Now it’s time to look at the scary metrics in your B2B email reports. In Campaign Monitor, you can get a quick snapshot of your unsubscribes, spam markings and bounces on the main dashboard of a sent campaign.
These metrics don’t have to scare you!
In fact, some list churn is normal. Unsubscribes under 2% are within industry norms, and this can provide you with some good insight on the people reading your emails, what they like (or don’t like), and how you can improve.
At the end of the day, you want to be sending your content to relevant people who are interested in eventually paying for your product or service. So, if you see a spike in unsubscribes, don’t panic. If you want high opens, clicks and conversions, you need a highly targeted list of subscribers. Maybe those who unsubscribed, if they had stuck around, would have otherwise weighed down your other metrics.
When it comes to spam and bounce rates, you want to keep an eye on these to avoid any technical issues that prevent you from sending emails in the future. This all comes down to practicing good email habits and maintaining good list hygiene.
Some basic habits to help you avoid excessive spam markings:
Email lists are constantly in flux. So, list hygiene is really important for effective email marketing. Always make sure you’re keeping your list clean and up-to-date to ensure low spam flags and bounces.
What’s a Bounce Rate?
Your bounce rate is the percentage of your sent emails that could not be successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
Sometimes this is due to invalid, closed or non-existent email addresses (hard bounce). Or, your recipient’s server is automatically classifying your email as junk or spam.
Other times it could be a temporary error due to down servers or full mailboxes (soft bounce).
Having a high volume of email addresses on your list that hard bounce is dangerous to your sending reputation. So, emails that hard bounce should be removed from your contact list (or, find an email platform like Campaign Monitor that automatically suppresses contacts that hard bounce).
Keep an eye on the emails that soft bounce. If they continue to bounce, remove them from your list, too.
The bottom line: When you’re looking at B2B email reports, make sure you’re looking at everything … but be skeptical.
Metrics are important to track, but be careful not to overanalyze them. As long as nothing too crazy is happening in your email reports, you should be okay. Instead, focus on providing value through your email content. Even one more qualified eye on your website from an email is better than nothing.
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