Email marketing remains one of the best performing activities available to market your event.  Great news if you are already using email marketing as part of your event marketing strategy, but how closely do you keep an eye on your email analytics? Do you use the data gathered to refine, improve and get your email campaigns working harder for your event? In this post we will look at 5 email marketing analytics metrics and how paying close attention to these can help you keep more subscribers, get more opens, get more click throughs and ultimately sell more tickets.

1. Open Rates

This might be teaching you to suck eggs but the open rate is probably the most important metric when it comes to your email campaigns.  The open rate will give you an idea on how well you have built your relationship with the reader (or non-reader as the case might be).  If this number is low then it means people have started deleting your event emails on receipt or have ignored them.  This could be for a number of reasons but below are a couple of ways you can try to increase your open rates:

Subject line

How effective is this? Is the value defined, could it be more enticing to the reader? Can it tie into what you know about their interests? (test various subject lines to find the best ones). See our post on creating awesome email subject lines for more on this subject.

Timing

Are you sending your emails at the right time? (send at various times to see when your readers are most likely to open your emails) - Often mornings (before work), evenings (after work) or weekends can be good times for event to consumer emails, this isn't an exact science and will vary based on your audience, experiment to see what works best for yours.

2. Click through rates

Again I might be in danger of teaching you to suck more eggs but this is such an important metric.  Your email click through rates start to tell you a story about how you are engaging with your audience.  Are you giving them content about your event that is of interest to them? The fact they have opened the email shows they are receptive to a conversation with you and / or your subject line was effective but click through rates start to show the impact of content and messaging. See below for ways to optimise your email content for improved click through rates:

Targetting

Is your message targeted? The right content isn’t the same from reader to reader try to ensure they you are sending something of value for them.

Closure

Is there a reason to read on? Play on human natures need for closure, the snippets of your content should compel the reader to want to finish reading, entice the click through.

Readability

Is your content easy to digest? When readers consumer your email they will scan the content, their eyes moving from sentence to sentence trying to make the decision whether the content is worth devoting time to.  You should ensure you email is easy to scan as this is what the reader will do.  You can do this in the following ways:

• Conversational writing style
• Short paragraphs
• Bullet points
• Bolding (key information)

3. What is being clicked

Knowing how many readers clicked is great, but knowing where the clicks occur is even greater.  Knowing this tells a story about what your recipient wants and how they are engaging with your email content.

Dot your links throughout your email. Then, watch which links get the most clicks. Do the bulk of your email subscribers click the links closer to the top? Or do they read your entire message before scrolling to the bottom and clicking further? Are they clicking images? Titles? read more links or are the in content links generating the most click throughs?

Knowing where these clicks are happening will help you format future emails to better suit your audience’s wants, needs and expectations.

4. What happens after the clicks

“After the click tracking" is the tracking that occurs once the email reader has clicked through from your email to your website (trumpets sound the email has done it’s job).

This is where your web analytics tracking tool can then take over the tracking.  If this is something you don’t currently do it is worth checking that your email provider offers support for tracking website visitors and automatically tagging email campaigns - otherwise it can be a laborious process, as an example campaign monitor (https://www.campaignmonitor.com) plays nicely with with Google Analytics (https://www.google.com/analytics/) and integration is very simple to do.

If using Google Analytics once your email is tagged with 'campaign tracking parameters', segments can be used to isolate visitors referred from email to understand their journey and behaviours. This data can be used to shape your email campaign and ensure that you do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Lots of event marketers do not practise ‘After the click tracking’ but this is an essential part of the process, it allows you to see the bigger picture and ensure visitors are completing the goals that would deem the email marketing campaign a success.

Unsubscribes
If your unsubscribe rate is high in relation to your opt-in rate, then you have most likely passed the point of building value and writing good content (you have some real work to do and quickly). If you are in this situation, you need to to examine when people are leaving and look to take action based on this data.

If they’re leaving after a certain automated email, then re-visit it. If they’re leaving after marketing messages, then re-work the way you present your offers. If they’re leaving early on in your campaign funnel, then you need to re-visit your original call to action to make sure that it is aligned with the content you are sending.

Email analytics are critical and if you dedicate some time to them, they’ll give you very specific clues as to what you’re doing right and wrong.  You need to take notice of what is happening post send in order to optimise and improve your event email marketing campaigns moving forward and get a better ROI on your efforts and spend. If you want to get your event email strategy up and running click below for our FREE guide.