Sending out campaigns is the easier part of email marketing. Figuring out when to change things up or what to spend more time on can be tricker. However, digging up insights into hits and misses pays off and should be a part of your strategy. Make sure to regularly look at reports to learn what is really working and what needs to change in your email marketing.

What matters most in email marketing are results. Ask yourself the following questions:

• How much revenue is your email marketing bringing in?
• Are your opens at more than 15 percent?
• Is your click to open rate (number of people who click a link vs. just open) more than 20 percent?
• Are your automated emails/flows attracting more revenue than your campaigns?

If one email type is doing much better than another, perhaps you should spend some time improving the under-performer.

Here are some tallying, testing and tweaking tips to improve your email marketing:

• Review your reports – Take some time each quarter to review your overall reports and note what did well and what did not. It’s important to look back at results from the same quarter of the prior year and compare them as well.
• Create a few segments — openers, clickers, purchasers and new subscribers, for example — and look at their numbers over the past 90 days. Are these numbers improving or decreasing? If they’re decreasing, you’ll want to dive deeper and find out why. Take a look at your recent sends to check if people are unsubscribing/bouncing. Are you sending too many emails? Too few? Should you retarget your message to recipients?
• Test different segments – Dig deeper into what content results in higher clicks/purchases. Are people more interested in new products or links related to certain services/products? Adjust your content/promotions accordingly to increase click/purchase rates.
• Mix up campaign types (sales, newsletter, educational, new product, etc). Sales/promotional emails may bring in more purchases overall, but what about the ones that don’t result in a sale? Some duds may result from a skimpy pipeline of non-sales forerunners. It’s important to keep subscribers engaged and informed and also promote brand awareness with regular emails that may not be laser-focused on sales. Get subscribers involved with emails that educate, ask questions and solicit feedback. This way, they will feel more ready to buy when the sales email arrives.
• Set up automations – Email automation is an easy way to send emails regularly without the work of always creating new content. Setting up a monthly tip or spotlight with evergreen info keeps your sending domain from going stale and being flagged, which helps ensure long-term deliverability. Some types of easy automated emails you can set up include:
  • Welcome series – Set your new subscribers up with some evergreen information about your company and information about services you offer.
  • Monthly tips – Remind your readers to do something, or how your business can help them. This can be a short sentence or two that directs them to a blog or service page, or a reminder to subscribe to your social media.
  • Review request – After a subscriber has made a purchase or has been very active (for example, clicked on 10+ links or opened 10+ emails) they’re most likely interested and like your brand. Ask them for a review of your service or content with a friendly opener like, “How are we doing?”
  • Ask for more information – Post some landing pages asking for more info about visitors — for example, a single page asking for location, another for industry and a third for birthday. Also, set up an auto email to be sent after someone subscribes requesting a bit of personal info, or an email with the line: “Let us know your birthday so we can send you a discount!” You could also offer something (a discount, etc.) in exchange for this info, linking to the landing page. This will take a little effort, but you’ll be able to gradually build your subscriber dataset for more targeted campaigns and offers.