The success of your email marketing isn't always immediately obvious. More than having a growing list with 1,000s of emails on it, a successful email marketing program also focuses on open rates, click throughs and other key metrics to track its success.
Thinking about sorting through reports and working with numbers can cause even the most mathematically-inclined to develop an eye twitch. Here at FeedBlitz HQ, we work to make this as simple, and headache-free, as possible. Offering a full fleet of metrics you can follow, you're able to decide precisely which metrics are most important and easily track the progress.
Types of Email Delivery Metrics and Reports
FeedBlitz offers three categories of email marketing reports: At-A-Glance, Summary and In-Depth Metrics. All accessible from your Mailing List dashboard, these reports are found in the Mailing Activity section:
At-a-Glance reporting comes in the form of the FeedBlitz Heat Map. This report allows you to quickly see what links were clicked in individual mailings. Learn more about our Heat Maps in this FeedBlitz Quick Tips blog post.
Pro Tip: Want more Quick Tips from FeedBlitz? We cover all sorts of email marketing and FeedBlitz-platform related questions in short, easy to digest posts. Subscribe here to get our next tip!
Summary reports can be accessed by selecting the Monthly Mailing Metrics as highlighted above. This report shows the Subscriber Stats along with Mailing Stats for the month selected. You will also be able to quickly identify which mailings for that month were deemed most and least engaging, opened and clicked.
In-Depth Metrics reports take a closer look into specific target points related to your email marketing. These delivery metrics and reports include:
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Delivery Metrics: The number of emails successfully sent, opened, clicked, bounced (both soft and hard), unsubscriptions and complaints, as well as forwards the email received.
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Click Throughs: Separated into three categories, you are able to see Click Through Rates by article (post), tag (custom field) and reader. For a quick look at this data, you can check out the Heat Map to see which links were clicked in the mailing.
A few additional notes on your in-depth reports:
1. Easily export all data, or a summary of the data, in any of the in-depth reports from the report dashboard.
2. Change the graph format in the second drop down menu to suite your preferences
3. Adjust the length of your report in the third drop down menu to include a few or many days for your data.
Tips for Working with Email Marketing Reports
Working with reporting metrics and data can seem like a large project. We suggest the following steps to ease into the process so your approach is focused and effective.
- Glance through all of the reports to familiarize yourself. Download or export a few of them to make any notes for future reference. When you're ready, select one or two key points of focus, such as open or click-through rate and identify a goal for each metric.
- Carve out some time to dig into the specific reports for your target point of focus. Make as many notes as you'd like, citing any changes in numbers (a bump or a loss can be equally important here!). It's important to view these statistics in historical context before making content decisions based on these stats. There are normal seasonal fluctuations that will affect your list's metrics. With this information in hand, brainstorm a few strategies to increase the success of this metric. When your focus is increasing your list's membership, should you optimize different or new referring pages? Or are you going to reduce churn by focusing on a particular unsubscription response? Use the notes from your research to create 3-5 action steps you can take to achieve your desired goals.
- After implementing your new strategy allow at least 2 months to see to make a determination on the success or failure of your efforts. Don't forget to compare your results with your list's historical performance. If your actions did not move you closer toward your goal, go back to your notes and brainstorm a few more action steps to take and repeat it again. Working in this manner will help you pinpoint exactly what is and is not working for each metric.
- Once you are satisfied with the data on your original focus metric, select the next few metric and repeat, until you have worked your way through the entire list.
It can be tempting to focus on increasing every metric all at once, and trust us, we've tried that in our own email marketing journey, but experience has taught us well! The best success comes with deliberate focus and attention to just 1 or 2 key targets before moving on to the next set, and we're positive many of our publishers will agree with us.
If you use our delivery metrics and data reports on a regular basis, we would love to hear about your experiences! Send an email with your feedback to support@feedblitz.com. Thank you in advance as we look forward to hearing from you!
Interested in using reporting metrics to boost your email marketing, but not sure which report to follow first? Send our support team an email to support@feedblitz.com. You can also chat, check out our Help Forum, or give us a call at 1.877.692.5489. Our Support and Sales Desk is available Monday – Friday from 9 am to 5 pm EST.
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