Email Analytics Tools

What to track in your emails

Email campaigns can be different. Do you think that metrics should vary from one campaign type to another? For example, should the analysis of email newsletters differ from order confirmation analytics? To figure this out, we will inspect the main email metrics. 

Email delivery

This is the ultimate metric required for campaigns of all types. Whether you are sending notifications about new comments to the blog post or a limited time offer for your special products, you need to know whether they were delivered. Otherwise, what sense does it make to send emails at all? You should be able to track soft and hard bounces and monitor your spam rate. The latter is not an easy task because none of the existing tools is able to report whether your message landed in the main inbox folder or went to spam. 

Open rate

Some resources claim that an open rate should be considered to be unreliable. From one perspective, if your recipients open your messages, it doesn’t mean that they read them. But from the other, monitoring the open rate and reviewing its historical data can help you to understand if something went wrong. For instance, users almost stopped opening password reset messages. Are they going to spam folders? 

Click tracking 

It’s hard to imagine that you haven’t included any links in your email. It’s good to know what attracts recipients in your messages, notwithstanding the email type. If it’s a short notification with a link to more details that requires some actions, you can understand if your message is clear enough. 

Unsubscribe rate

The number of recipients who unsubscribe from your campaign is also quite a popular metric to track. In most cases, it is used for marketing emails like newsletters, promotions, etc. If you follow all the data protection rules, you have to put unsubscribe links in all the campaigns you send, including transactional emails. 

If you analyze the unsubscribe rate for each campaign separately, it may be unreliable as well. You should also look at it historically. This can give you helpful insights about interacting with your users. Was your welcome email series too aggressive? (And so on.) 

Also, you should check whether recipients complain about your messages by marking them as spam. 

Conversion Rate

This is actually the main thing you should track. When you send emails, you need to understand whether they are bringing you good results. Usually, by “conversion” we mean “purchases”, but in fact, your emailing goals might be different. Depending on the aim of your email campaign, the conversion rate might be calculated as the ratio between the number of delivered emails and completed goals (sign-ups, purchases, responses, etc.).

The main metrics mentioned above are important for every campaign type. Also, there are some additional metrics, which refer specifically to email marketing campaigns. They are:

• Email reading time. Some tools allow you to check how much time your recipients spent reading your email (at least, for how long it was open).
• Email engagement. This one includes email forwarding and sharing to social media. 
• Engagement over time. This means monitoring exactly when your emails are opened and clicked, to define the most efficient time for email sending. 
• Device and email client-related open rates, in order to optimize the design of your campaigns accordingly.
• Overall ROI and revenue per email. This is an important marketing/sales metric, which you should calculate based on the email campaign results. But we couldn’t leave it out here. 

As you can see, the main thing is to define the purpose of your email campaigns. This will make it clear which metrics are important for you. But how can you get all those insights and numbers?

Email tracking vs email analytics

When you start exploring this topic and looking for tools for email analytics, you will see a variety of options for email tracking. From the first glance, these two concepts look similar but in fact, they collect different metrics and have different purposes.

Email tracking tools like Mailtrack, Docsify, or the more advanced Bananatag platform, notify you when your email was opened, whether the recipient clicked the link in your message, downloaded an attachment, etc. (the list of options varies from app to app). Mostly, they work as plugins for Gmail and Outlook and help you monitor email conversations rather than email campaigns. 

There is another type of tool that is also called email analytics – email analytics for Gmail, like EmailAnalytics and Email Meter. The main app in this category is EmailAnalytics, and it is designed to analyze the usage of your Gmail account. It provides you with statistics of sent and received emails, overall email traffic, email categories, etc.

Thanks for your interest in the email analytics topic. To know more about free and paid email tools you can check the articleon the Mailtrap Blog.