Email Marketing In The Age of Holistic Analytics: 4 Important Data Insights To Analyze

Things can change very quickly in the world of modern marketing. The moment Google decides to alter its SEO parameters or a new social media platform takes off, the marketing landscape can alter drastically. These changes can be felt heavily when it comes to engaging with leads through email marketing. Holistic data is emerging as the ideal tool to enable marketers to keep up with a constantly evolving environment. 

With so much going on it can be difficult to keep up. Analytics platforms can perform well in helping to provide insights but it’s essential that you can see the bigger picture from all the data your campaigns produce. 

This is where holistic analytics enters the fray. Holistic analytics revolves around getting all of your marketing data in one place and having the ability to tap into comprehensive levels of data to find actionable insights that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. 

Email personalization has become essential in lead generation and the establishing of campaigns. As much as 76% of marketers look to tailor their messaging or promotions based on audience segments. But how can they efficiently find the right audiences to market to? And how do they know what type of content certain types of leads are most responsive to? Holistic analytics can help to deliver many advantages to your email marketing campaigns, such as: 

• Better and more personalized customer experience models, offering a seamless journey from a recipient’s inbox onto your website’s pages.

• Increased value gained from conversions through removing the barriers to purchase to achieve small uplifts.

• Growing a bigger customer base through reaching and converting your website visitors more effectively. 

• Through strategic holistic email testing, you can be better positioned to solve problems and identify opportunities in future marketing. 

• Position your email strategy at the heart of your marketing efforts to best optimize the value of the insights that holistic marketing offers. 

The impact of holistic analytics is far-reaching, especially for conducting off-site campaigns like email marketing. Let’s take a look at four key data insights that holistic analytics can help you to analyze:

1. Metrics to Establish Subscriber Relationships 

Email marketing is a large give-and-take channel. This means that you need to make your subscribers feel great in order to see great results. Establishing strong relationships with your subscribers can show that you are offering a good level of value to your mailing list. 

In the shorter term, email metrics like open rates and click-through rates can indicate positive reactions to your content, while unsubscribes and complaints indicate negative reactions on your mailing list.

However, more holistic approaches seek to measure the longer-term effects of your individual campaigns, and how they affect your relationships into the future. There are many factors to consider when looking at the longer-term effects of your email marketing performance, and holistic analytics can help to identify issues and opportunities where other insights may not be possible. Factors such as those listed below can all be vital in creating subscriber relationships:

• Your active list volume
• Growth and churn rate within your mailing lists
• Inactivity rates
• Length of subscriber inactivity
• Open reach percentage of subscribers who have opened at least one email over a predesignated amount of time
• Click reach percentage of subscribers who have clicked through on at least one email over a predesignated amount of time
• Tracking metrics based on your acquisition sources

One particularly strong metric to follow is the acquisition source for subscribers. In many cases, a larger portion of the negative reactions you will receive will come from the one or two acquisition sources - like email list rental or co-registration, which are among the five most problematic sources for new leads. 

Here, we can see how Trendline Interactive works to provide a simple and powerful visualization into how different acquisition sources can offer significantly different levels of performance in terms of your email campaigns - a valuable metric to keep hold of when such rates can make a huge difference to your bottom line. 

By utilizing holistic analytics to gain a better idea of your website performance based on your acquisition source can help to reveal what larger problems are emerging and whether your approach may need a revamp or revision. 

2. Intelligence-Driven Conversion Funnels

Email marketing is largely used as a cost-effective way of targeting a larger audience of customers with messaging, branding, and promotions. Marketers, particularly those based around retail or CPG industries can rely on email campaigns to deliver greater levels of engagement, brand loyalty, and conversions. 

Where marketers had been mostly focused on click and open rates, as well as metrics like deliverability and unsubscribe rates, it’s becoming clear that they’re lacking in delivering the whole picture when it comes to analyzing campaign performance. 

To take advantage of email marketing campaigns, marketers are increasingly moving towards more holistic measurements and their wider impact on conversion funnels using email marketing dashboards. These overviews don’t simply track key metrics, but they also tap into web analytics and sales data to help to measure business impact and customer journey experience. 

Equipped with a holistic understanding of past and ongoing campaigns, marketers can optimize for business outcomes while campaigns are still taking shape whilst sharing manageable results and gaining greater insights into future campaign planning. 

As we can see from the dashboard above from Datorama, marketers can tap into a wealth of information and visualization regarding customer engagement and segmentation. These insights are just part of a larger email marketing overview that can offer both qualitative and quantitative insights into campaigns. 

3. Acting on Customer Experience Insights

Customer experience is now so heavily part of the digital marketing ecosystem that the journeys your email recipients take from their inboxes can be every bit as important as the wording of your message itself. 

User journeys need to be combined with the level of experience that a consumer would expect if they entered a brick-and-mortar store. Days of cold emailing and hard selling are long gone, and value needs to be demonstrated from the offset. 

In the wake of the pandemic, we’ve seen that customer experience has become more important than ever. Just a matter of months into the pandemic, McKinsey research noted that “indeed, recent data show that we have vaulted five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption in a matter of around eight weeks.”

Although customer experience marketing can be a broad topic, it revolves around putting your customer first throughout their journey. As a big push channel, email marketing can often act as the very beginning of your customer’s journey with you. 

Kathy Pay, CEO of Email Holistic Marketing, believes that she’s identified three key pillars to customer experience marketing: helpfulness, customer-centricity, and personalization. 

“It’s about considering them and their needs and doing what is needed to make their journey as seamless and as easy as possible – not just in removing barriers and simplifying processes, but also can be brought about with your brand’s tone of voice, your messaging and the helpful programs you send to them,” Pay explains. 

Holistic data like that provided by Litmus can help to show how your audience can be broken down by their receptiveness to specific campaigns. This enables you to craft the precise content that can encourage them to take their first steps on their journey with you. 

4. Campaigns Based on Website Interactions

One key aspect of attaining the bigger picture through holistic insights is determining who your customers are and how they behave. Email campaigns can be better optimized if you know how they’re likely to be browsing and what device they’re using to view their messages. 

Data analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Finteza can contribute to the holistic approach to email marketing by providing you with a clearer picture of the audience you have. Using analytics platforms, you’re able to identify how much traffic is generated by email, and most importantly, how that traffic interacts with your website. 

Via insights provided when email recipients click through on to your landing pages, you can learn precisely the device they’re using and even the screen resolution that they have. This helps you to design emails with the knowledge of what they can and cannot view as soon as they open the message - a clear advantage in attracting more clicks. 

Fundamentally, holistic analytics has the potential to modernize email campaigns and to make them far more personalized and engaging than ever before. Although in the age of digital marketing emails are certainly long in the tooth, emerging technology and the power of modern analytics have regenerated campaigns to not only reach the right audience but to inspire them to convert on site. It’s for this reason that holistic analytics has added a new dimension to email marketing.