Marketing isn’t what it used to be, and thank goodness for that. When traditional marketers once had to rely on a great deal of guesswork and approximation to calculate the ROI of a campaign, online marketers can operate with a much greater deal of certainty—a major paradigm shift that has been observed by many in the field.
Yet even with these leaps and bounds in data-driven marketing, overall email marketing productivity remains a largely underappreciated category of analytics for many practitioners.
If you know better than to monitor the performance of a single email marketing campaign at a time, read on to learn about 5 analytics dashboards that can give your email marketing productivity a holistic boost:
1. Your newsletter
A well-designed newsletter can do wonders for your conversion rates, provided it offers quality content and compelling CTAs over an optimized release schedule—which begs the question: how do you know if you’ve prepared a newsletter with any of the stated characteristics?
Setting up a dashboard to monitor your newsletter’s analytics makes for greater email marketing productivity by allowing your team to assess the two parts of an effective newsletter campaign: your content, and your distribution system.
The bird’s eye view afforded by an analytics dashboard allows a team to compare the performance of various campaigns at a glance, as well as evaluate A/B tests designed to test particular features of a given newsletter.
Likewise, an analytics dashboard lets you assess and compare the performance of various newsletter campaigns en masse by showing you the best times to send out emails, the frequency of CTA follow-throughs, and actions taken using the tracking links and numbers.
Image courtesy of GetResponse
Following these numbers in real time enables flexibility and a data-driven approach to your newsletter that’s bound to translate into a boost in your email marketing productivity.
2. Email list segments
Segmentation, or the practice of classifying and dividing your customer base is useful in a wide range of business matters. When crafting a strategy to maximize your email marketing productivity, segmenting your audience is a must.
Opt for an analytics dashboard that allows you to sort your market into useful demographics (ex. recipients who actively read through your newsletters versus those who need to be won over).
It should also present you with a view of your market segments’ behavioral trends – a team that is prepared with foreknowledge of its various market segments’ behavioral patterns can create effective, custom-made campaigns to take advantage of their audience’s habits.
This saves your business a great deal of time and money on research, since much of the heavy lifting is done by a program which automatically scrapes and organizes your mailing recipients’ data. Rather than hiring a team to crunch the numbers for you, make a smart investment in the right technology; you’ll be glad you did when it’s time to take a final accounting of your ROI.
3. Email marketing goals
It’s critical that a team be able to track how close or far a given campaign is from achieving its target KPIs –that way they can double down on opportunities to recover losses or increase gains.
Your analytics dashboard should let you track your key performance indicators in real time. Most let you track your reach and impressions, and more intricate products like Google Analytics Goals let you track your conversions in real time with a view of your conversion funnels.
Clever visualizations like the ones provided by Google Analytics Goals are welcome features when optimizing your email marketing productivity.
It’s easy to overlook specific points for improvement along the customer journey, especially now that all our collective marketing efforts are set to a backdrop of complexity.
4. Your marketing-at-a-glance
So far, we’ve been pushing the idea of analytics dashboards that give you a granular view of the different facets of your email marketing productivity. However, many marketing managers and agencies find that they benefit from a macroscopic view of their overall performance as well.
Not only that, but switching between dashboard views can be more trouble than it’s worth—especially for marketers who aren’t too tech-savvy.
Image courtesy of EmailAnalytics
Find an analytics dashboard that gives you a holistic view of your marketing operation.
A comprehensive email tool like Email Analytics can give you plenty of insights in one place—your email categories, response time, average word counts, and a bunch of other metrics that show you both a bird’s eye view and a detailed breakdown of your many email campaigns.
There’s so much you can learn when you can, for example, compare your sales against your various marketing campaigns, or your performance on social media.
There’s value in considering a multitude of angles, as this might lead you to discover relationships between your various metrics that you would have otherwise missed. The more data you have to work with, the more robust and informed your marketing activities will be.
5. Your inbox
Finally, you can’t chase after stellar email marketing productivity without perfecting your task management. The right inbox should take care of most of the clerical work associated with curating and replying to emails for you.
It should resemble a cross between an analytics dashboard and a versatile productivity tool. Swinbox offers a multifunctional web app that converts any email inbox into a convenient, self-sorting dashboard while offering an option to represent individual emails as tasks.
Image courtesy of Swinbox
Few people think to make improvements to something as simple as an inbox, but the increments of time that doing so saves you add up to much more efficient and productive email marketing.
Conclusion
Analytics dashboards are powerful tools that can give your business a closer look at the numbers that underlie your marketing wins and losses. For convenience, bring all your analytics data together with an all-in-one email analytics tool.
Having all your data in one place will allow you to save time and a lot of headache, not to mention spare you the difficulties of dealing with too many integrations. After all, you want to be focused on your email campaigns, not software troubleshooting.
And if you’re set on optimizing your email marketing productivity, be sure to pay close attention to your social media with tools offered by specialized providers like Mention. They keep you well aware of your social media reach, and give you the chance to see when your target demographics are giving off signals worth noting.
