Deeper Email Analytics for Building Product Marketers

Better Email Intelligence…Beyond Open & Click-Through Rates

In an earlier post, I covered some of the basics of email marketing benchmarking, and now I’d like to share some other ways you can better measure & optimize your email marketing. With this information, you’ll be better equipped to evaluate both the messaging and creative strategy in your building products email marketing programs.

Analytics

Most email marketing platforms offer building product marketers the same basic analytics data?open rate, click-through rate (CTR), unsubscribe rate and deliverability rate –and have for years.

Beyond that, most platforms also include a Forward to a Friend function, which is frequently implemented but rarely used by recipients. Why? Because it’s far quicker and easier to just use the Forward function in your email program.

However, one company has found a way to provide much, much deeper email analytics data. Litmus offers two different toolsets for marketers.

Their original tool allows building product marketers to test how your email messages (and webpages) will render in all the most common email programs, from all the different versions of Outlook to the most common mobile devices to Gmail in Internet Explorer vs. Gmail in Firefox. Testing like that can help a lot, as each program can display your identical HTML a little differently.

Litmus’s newest tool is for Email Analytics. By implementing their analytics tool in your emails via a snippet of code, you’ll have access to information like:

• How many times your email was forwarded, using the Forward function (not the Forward to a Friend functionality)
• How many times your email was printed
• Engagement Report, which breaks down open rate into Read, Skim Read and Glanced/Deleted metrics, based on how long the recipient viewed the message.
  • Marketers can also see this report broken down by the type of device the reader was on in great detail.
  • Email Client report, which gives you excellent technical information to help decide what changes/enhancements can be made to your email coding, based on what readers use to read the emails.

With data like this, you will, as a building product marketer, be much better equipped to test the look & feel and content of your email marketing, knowing you’ll be able to more clearly measure the results. You’ll be able to more accurately measure the engagement of your readers with your content, and you’ll be able to provide designers/programmers with more definitive information to drive the creative of your messages.

All this is available for extremely reasonable annual costs. I’d highly recommend Litmus to anyone searching for deeper email marketing analytics. Check them out at www.litmus.com.

Note: I was not asked to post this by Litmus or compensated in any way. I like their product and haven’t seen a competitor with the depth of data available that they provide, which is why I wanted to share it with you.

Additional Articles:

• Litmus’ website (http://litmus.com/)
• Tracking Email Messages in Google Analytics (http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/03/tips-for-tracking-email-marketing.html)
• MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Report (http://www.meclabs.com/training/publications/benchmark-report/2012-email-marketing/overview)