How to Measure Email Marketing Success: a Super Actionable Guide

No, this is not yet another online article talking about the importance of measuring your open and click-through rates.

We go beyond showing you exactly how to measure email marketing success and use data as your superpower.

And the best part is that you don't have to be an email analytics expert with 10 years of experience to do all that.

This step-by-step guide will teach you how to track your email campaigns so you can optimize your email marketing strategy with the insights you get.

How to measure email marketing success in 5 steps

If you want to understand and improve your email marketing performance, it'd be best to use a dedicated email analytics tool. That's where SEINō steps up.

We've analyzed different marketing and transactional email services, and while they can be great for getting your emails delivered to a larger audience, most of them lack some substantial metrics, such as subscriber list growth or benchmarking multiple email campaigns.

SEINō is a tool you can use on top of your ESP to help you get real-time insights into your campaigns' performance and optimize them.

What's more, it's very user-friendly and intuitive, and you don't need to be an expert to get the most out of it and understand our email campaign reports.

Here's how you can analyze and improve your email marketing efforts with SEINō.

Connect SEINō with Google Analytics

Email marketing is just one part of the digital marketing ecosystem, so it's essential to track how your subscribers interact with your website after reading your emails.

We're starting with a web analytics tool, and there's no better than Google Analytics. You can connect it to SEINō as an integration real quickly, and here's how:

1. Open your SEINō account, click on your name in the top right corner of the screen and select "Manage account."

2. Choose Integrations.

3. Find Google Analytics among the Available integrations and click on the Connect button.

4. Click on Enable.

5. Now, you can choose whether you want to connect a service account or a personal user account. A service account gives you more control over properties that can be accessed by the tool. On the other hand, choosing a personal user account grants SEINō access to all Google Analytics properties you have access to.

6. Select your Google account and log in.

7. You'll be asked one more time to allow SEINō to access your Google account.

8. There you have it! If you've followed these steps, Google Analytics should appear in your Integrations tab, and you'll soon be able to analyze your website traffic.

Connect SEINō with your ESP

Now, if you want to manage your email campaigns, you have to integrate your email service provider with SEINō. The process is similar to connecting Google Analytics and works for most other integrations. Here's what you have to do:

1. Go to your SEINō account, click on your name in the top right corner of the screen and select "Manage account."

2. Click on Integrations.

3. There, you should see all the available integrations and many email service providers among them. You can choose the one you're using, but for the sake of this guide, we've chosen Deployteq. To proceed, click on the Connect button under your chosen ESP.

4. Click on Enable.

5. You'll then be asked to enter your credentials, such as Client ID and Client secret (you should be able to find them in your ESP account or get emailed by your email service provider).

That's all you have to do! Now, it may take up to a couple of hours for all your data to get imported from your ESP to SEINō, depending on how much data you have. Sit back and relax, and use that time to explore our other tutorials.

If you’re more of a video type of person, watch how our co-founder Paul connects SEINō with a chosen ESP and Google Analytics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F41yRGbxNIs

Now, you may wonder which email service providers and marketing tools integrate with SEINō? A lot of them!

Here are just some of the most popular:

• Klaviyo
• Deployteq
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• HubSpot
• MailKit
• Braze
• ActiveCampaign
• Mailchimp
• Selligent
• MailCampaigns
• Spotler
• Copernica

This is not a definite list, as we're constantly adding new integrations and looking for new partnerships. If you don't see your email service provider on the list, write to us at hello@seino.ai, and we’ll see what we can do!

Choose key metrics to track

There are many important email marketing metrics, but you should focus on those that matter to you the most regarding a particular campaign.

Do you want to engage your audience, sell your products or grow your subscriber list? Choose email metrics based on your goals!

Here are some of the most common email marketing KPIs:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Spam complaint rate
• Delivery rate*

*You can check out these transactional email best practices to increase deliverability and avoid spam complaints.

And a great thing about SEINō is that you can see all those metrics in a single dashboard if you want to get general insights on your campaigns' performance. Of course, you can choose other views if you want to go into more detail for any particular campaign or metric, as we'll explain in the next step.

Apart from standard email marketing metrics, SEINō allows you to track transactional, revenue-related metrics and see how much you earn from each campaign. Here are some of them:

• Total revenue
• Revenue per email/campaign
• Revenue per website session
• Average order value
• Total number of transactions, total revenue

Another thing you can do with SEINō is manage your email list and monitor subscriber list growth to see the pace at which your customer base is expanding and developing – an email marketing metric missing in most ESPs.

You can see whether you've attracted new subscribers or lost some and correlate that with email campaigns or lead magnets you used at a particular period.

Finally, SEINō allows you to track your email performance more precisely by setting specific targets for each metric and seeing how your campaigns perform.

Here’s a clickable demo allowing you to set baselines following our instructions:

We use a color-coding method to make it easier for you to visually track multiple metrics in the same dashboard. If a campaign reaches or exceeds a particular target, it will be colored green. On the other hand, if it doesn't reach a target, it will be colored red.

If specific targets are a standard you want to keep, you can create a template with them so you don't have to set it up from scratch every time.

Customize visualization settings

Our performance widget lets you visualize the top five email marketing metrics important to you. Of course, you can change them at any moment, depending on the type of the campaign and your goals.

Let’s try creating a performance overview widget in a few clicks:

This is just the beginning, as SEINō offers many more visualization options:

• Grouping: you can group and aggregate your campaign data with only one click
• Filtering: we have a lot of powerful filters, such as campaign type, campaign name and target audience, allowing you to exclude particular campaigns from the view
• Pivoting: this feature helps you precisely analyze numerical data and get answers to unanticipated questions
• Dashboarding: you can transform all your CRM data into visual dashboards for a better understanding
• Graphs: if you're a visual type, you can turn your data into a graph with only one click for better comprehension

• BigQuery tables: you can synchronize all data from SEINō to your BigQuery table, thanks to integration between the two tools
• Exporting: you can quickly export data as an Excel or CSV file, whatever you prefer, or even download graphs and visuals to add them to the presentations for your clients

We've saved one of the best features for the end. One of the biggest differences between email service providers and an email analytics tool like SEINō is that while most ESPs allow you to see marketing metrics per campaign only, lacking the bigger picture, with SEINō, you can benchmark multiple campaigns in the same email marketing report.

This allows you to compare different email marketing campaigns, discover some patterns and find out what works well and what can be improved.

Activate automatic real-time alerts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFS-I0l37Ow

Who wouldn't like to be notified when their usual email campaign performance drops or something unusual happens?

With SEINō, you don't need to manually check your campaign success or even log into our software, as you can get notified via email whenever a particular metric changes.

Here's how to set and customize alerts:

1. Select Alerting from the top menu
2. Click on Add Alert to add a new one
3. Under Title, add a name to the alert (for example, Click-through rate monitoring)
4. Under Dataset, select Campaigns
5. Add conditions in which you want to be notified (for example, When the open rate is less than 20%)
6. You can customize your alerts by adding filters and intervals:
   • Filters – for example, adding a filter means that the condition should apply only to particular type of campaigns – maybe you want to be alerted only for transactional emails and not for promotional ones
   • Intervals – for example, if most people open your email campaigns within 7 days, you may want to give your campaigns at least 7 days and get alerts only if the success of your email still isn't satisfactory after that time period
7. Type an email address where you want to receive an alert
8. Additionally, you can add a custom message to be sent with the alert

See this feature in action:

Conclusion

We hope this guide will help you identify patterns in your campaign and your audience behavior. Use these insights to improve your existing email marketing campaign or create a new one.

Here are some email campaign ideas to help you out, and you can find more relevant content and useful tips on our blog and YouTube.

If you're still not using SEINō, book a free demo to see how we can help you increase your productivity and create more cost-effective email campaigns.

How to measure email marketing success: FAQ

How do you track email marketing success? To track and measure the success of your campaigns, you'll need an email marketing tool or, even better, an email analytics tool that can give you even more insights. You can segment your email recipients to get more accurate data.

What is KPI in email marketing? KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators or key metrics you should track to evaluate your email marketing effectiveness. There are different KPIs based on your marketing goals, but some of the most common are open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, unsubscribe rate etc.

How do you analyze email marketing performance? To analyze your email marketing performance, decide what your most important metrics are and make sure to enable performance tracking before you send a campaign. You can analyze your performance by comparing how different customer segments reacted, what the most opened campaigns were, what converted the most etc. A/B testing is another excellent tool to analyze the performance of your email campaigns and test every element, from subject lines to CTAs.