What Email Reporting Data Points Should You Measure?
Today, marketers have so much data to sort through, that it can be truly challenging to determine what is actually useful and what is a waste of time. The volume can bog you down with countless hours of gathering, analyzing and reporting data. Data analysis is vital, but it is also a terrible way to spend your time when you don’t have a clear goal or understanding of what KPI's are actually valuable to your team.
In a world where Open Rates are less reliable, look at opens only as trend data, and leverage other data points that are reliable to build a KPI analysis. These include List Growth Rates, Spam Reports, Unsubscribe Rates, Read Rates and other behavioral data points.
The Change in Open Rate Measurement
In the world of email, Opens have always been our metric. But since Apple Mail introduced privacy protection protocols in 2021, their servers are now opening the email sent to anyone using their email client. This means that we can no longer determine whether an Open is activated by the recipient, or by the server.
That said, this doesn't mean opens can't be used at all. We can review Open Rates like we analyzed data back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where we had very limited ability to track user behavior. Back then, we looked at Open Rates as reliable trend data. It wasn’t about who opened an email or how many times, we looked at the trends of one campaign’s results compared to another.
Opens can still be used reliably for trend data. This is a useful way to continue to use that metric, especially for those in leadership in your organization who are used to looking at Opens and still want to receive meaningful reporting on that data point.
Pay Attention to Click Data
Your click rate for campaigns is still valuable data. Reliability should still be taken with a grain of salt, as there are going to be bots clicks happening, especially with some industries, such as finance, healthcare, and government. However these can be filtered out, once you’ve run a few campaigns and can find the patterns that exist with your subscribers’ organizations.
Click data can also be analyzed as trend numbers, especially if you deal with industries with many bot opens.
Other Data Points to Measure
Spam reports are something a lot of people don't measure, but are a very valuable number to track for your email program. Combined with your unsubscribe rate, your spam report rate tells you the quality of the list you're working with. List quality is much more indicative of results than opens and clicks. Watch those numbers and use that as a KPI for list sources.
Data points like read rates, conversion rates and revenue per email are also highly valuable points of data, and typically more reliable than Open Rates. Your ESP may provide this data directly, or you may need some additional software to track those points.
Most importantly, try to narrow down your measurement to a few key indicators that the people who are making decisions need to know. e.g. If they're trying to decide what the topic should be for the next email, look at subject lines and relate subject lines to open rates and look at that data. Focus only on those set points that you can track consistently. Don't focus on everything or your focus will be on nothing.
Do you have questions about what data points you should measure? As Mailchimp Pro Partners, we can help you set and track the KPIs that will help your organization understand and improve your email program.
