4 Analytics Dashboards to Dominate Your Email Strategy

Let’s start with what you already know … gathering data is essential to developing a successful email marketing strategy. This means, it’s tempting to think more data equals better results. 

The problem is converting your data from analytics to action is hard, especially if you don’t know which email marketing metrics you should pay attention to and look for. On top of that, if you’re not ready to integrate your data, then all the figures in the world won’t help you move forward.

In fact, too much data can be far more paralyzing then too little. So, when it comes to dominating your email strategy, four dashboards are absolutely essential:

1. Your Newsletter
2. Your Segments
3. Your Goal
4. Your All-in-One

1.  Your Newsletter

Want to find out what time of the day, week or month your newsletter is most read? Want to compare two different subject lines? Want to view these email statistics in an array of different email accounts like Yahoo and Gmail?

Well, an email newsletter dashboard like the two below will give you an immediate return on investment (ROI) because you’ll be able to easily analyze and study your metrics over time, compare autoresponder statistics, evaluate social media figures, and produce smart reports that can be observed in Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook and even over mobile.

GetResponse

Here are three tips for turning your newsletter dashboard into action:

• First, determine when subscribers view your emails. Then, configure your preferences to match that time and send your emails during peak hours or days.
• Second, A/B test both individual email campaigns as well as separate campaigns to find out what emails have the highest rates of success. Note the specific subject lines with the highest open rates as well as the calls-to-action (CTA) that generate the most clicks. Once you discover what’s working, then you can optimize the rest of your emails according to those results.
• Third, find out if your email campaign is garnering an ROI. By “tagging” your campaigns, you can calculate how many sales and sign-ups your website is getting through a link in your email itself.

Read more: Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs

2.  Your Segments

A general newsletter dashboard is a great starting point. But what’s missing?

The answer: segmentation.

Whether it’s gender or geography, behaviors or browsers, segmentation allows you to personalize your email strategy based on your audience themselves. Studies have shown that one-click segmentation can drastically improve your conversion rates by as much as 39%.

Here’s an example of what your segments dashboard should look like:

• Opens
• Unique Opens
• Clicks
• Bounces
• Unsubscriptions

How do you turn segmentation data into action? Two tips …

• Customers versus prospects: Customers are far more valuable than prospects. By separating the two, you can send “up sale” or “new product” offers to your current customers while sending “entry level” products, along with content marketing, to you prospects.
• Active versus inactive: Over a period of time, subscribers often get inactive and disengaged. You can separate your email lists into subscribers who are active in your emails and subscribers who haven’t looked at your messages in months. Inactive customers can be a goldmine if you use simple, direct, and short personal emails to connect with them.

3.  Your Goal

Still, discovering what specific marketing tactic is succeeding can be challenging, especially when it comes to your bottom-line.

This is why Google Analytics Goals, also known as funnels, are integral to dominating your email strategy. Without this type of dashboard, you might have a good understanding of your email stats themselves – like open rates, CTRs, and unsubscribe rates.

But what’s actually bringing in money?

The funnel below always you to see where you customers are coming from – i.e., from another page or from your email campaign – and then discover what the drop off rate is for specific stages of your buying process.

Image Credit: MoreVisibility

Moreover, these funnels can pinpoint other valuable insights, including which content marketing pieces drive action, what browsers visitors are using, and where the sticking points are.

Here are three tips using a goal dashboard:

• If you have sent out a series of varying emails and you have several objectives in mind, including the number of new subscribers, then you can locate which ones are meeting your aims and which ones need to be improved upon.
• When it comes to engaging your audience and building a relationship, the length of time a visitor stays on your website is key. This dashboard’s analytics tools can certainly be a tremendous aid because you can gage how and why visitors are staying longer on your webpage.
• Are you a brick-and-mortar furniture store in the middle of New York City? Well, you wouldn’t necessarily want customers from Paris. This means that you should optimize your emails to cater to the needs of New Yorker recipients instead of potential Parisian prospects. Analytics can determine what part of the world your visitors are coming from.

4. Your All-in-One

Jumping from one dashboard to the next is a headache. Not only is it frustrating, it is also inefficient, time-consuming and even costly. An all-in-one dashboard not only allows you to coordinate all your email marketing, it also brings in valuable data on your sales, finances, social media, lead generation, search positioning, and more.

This is why an all-in-one analytics dashboard like this one produced by Cyfe is nonnegotiable.

Image Credit: Cyfe

With this all-in-one dashboard, you can track:

• revenue (top left),
• segmentation by geography (top center),
• sales funnels (left middle),
• keyword rankings (middle center),
• email campaigns (bottom left),
• subscriber rate (bottom right), and even
• social media mentions (top right).

Not only that, but having all of your analytics in one place can allow you to create custom reports on either historical or real-time data as well as combine your social media marketing with onsite performance and even project management..

Here are three tips for maximizing all-in-one dashboard:

• If you want to be more popular on social media then it’s a clever move to highlight your various social media pages in your emails in the Postscript. This can definitely improve your social network standing.
• As previously noted, every email to a subscriber or client should be personalized. This dashboard helps doing this by understanding geography and subscription dates. Without this type of data then you’ll just be sending off a generic email template.
• How many people came to your website based upon an email? You can determine this with this dashboard and calculate how effective your email strategy is in terms of clicks, views and links.

Dominate …

Data overload is paralyzing, headache-inducing, and stressful.

That’s why focusing on these four dashboards won’t just save you time and effort … but will actually enable you to dominate your email marketing.

1. Your Newsletter
2. Your Segments
3. Your Goal
4. Your All-in-One

Pick your favorite, start dominating today, and share your thoughts in the comments below!

Author Bio: Daniel is a freelance writer who happens to be an internet marketing, web development and web design aficionado. When he’s not writing he probably researches the latest trends in the web design and development scene to keep up to date for his various projects.