During the Inbox Expo event in Austin I had the pleasure of being part of a panel on “Why Email Is Still Your Most Valuable Marketing Tool.” At the outset, each of us was asked to summarize the state of email marketing in one word. I chose “reset” which raised a few eyebrows, but likely sounded more ominous than intended.
For context, we have talked at length about the changes implemented by Gmail and Yahoo in Q2 2024, and their implications for email marketers. That in itself was a reset of sorts, bringing back into focus the need to have best practices firmly in place. In addition to good sending habits, we’ve also talked about why it’s important to review performance data on a regular basis.
With the second half of the year just weeks away, and with thoughts of the 2025 holiday season not far behind, now is a good time to check in on the overall health of your email marketing efforts and do your own reset of sorts.
Immersed in the Now
We live in a world of immediacy, in part driven by the nature of social media. It’s not even a case of here today, gone tomorrow; it’s more like here and gone now, what’s next?
That immediacy greatly influences marketing teams as well, so we find ourselves looking at performance from the lens of the most recent campaign (regardless of channel) to help plan the next one. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to step back and look at performance using a wider time period, yet it’s that view that reveals the most about what direction your campaigns should be focused on. .
Think of it this way, each email, social post, SMS message, or other digital campaign is a moment in time and your audience responds (or doesn’t) depending on how they feel or what they’re doing at that moment. You take that feedback and use it for the next campaign, as you should. However, in the process of adjusting and testing based on the last thing, your view of what’s really happening can get lost.
People Change
I find that getting into the habit of stepping back to look at performance data using a 30-60-90 day view, and even a year-over-year comparison, reveals a lot about how your relationship with your customers, subscribers, followers, etc. shifts with time.
The simple truth is that people change, their environment changes, and interests change right along with everything else. What they love today can either endure, become a passing thought, or land somewhere in between.
It’s easier to see these changes over a longer time period than moment to moment, or campaign to campaign if you will. And honestly I understand the latter – marketing teams seem to be forever strapped for time. However I firmly believe that once you start this practice you’ll find the time required is less than you might think, and the insights you gain will be worth every minute.
What to Look For
Assuming your deliverability is healthy, which we’ll discuss more in part 2, engagement is everything with email. We marketers love a good vanity metric, but they don’t drive results. Engagement, or action if you prefer, does.
Look for changes in engagement over time, both positive and negative. Of course we all want to see a trend toward the positive, but the negative can tell you just as much about shifting interests. More importantly, engagement matters to Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft and other inbox providers. Engagement is the best way to ensure your emails land in the inbox more often than not, whereas lack of engagement over time can signal that your emails may be unwanted.
Have a look at your engagement over a longer time period. How are your clicks, conversions, subscribe, unsubscribe and complaint rates looking? If revenue is one of your metrics, have a look at not just total revenue, but average sale value, new vs. repeat buyers and anything else tied to your email campaigns. These are the metrics that can reveal shifts in your audience’s interests and provide insights as to what to do next.
What NOT to Look For
I mentioned vanity metrics earlier, and the biggest shift in email over the last few years is that open rates are now more of a vanity metric than anything that signals engagement. The introduction of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection with iOS 15, and other forms of machine opens, have largely rendered this metric useless in determining performance. Even if you have reporting that separates machine opens from real opens, you’re working with a large blind spot.
Review Data through the Lens of Your Business
The holiday season is a good example of when a year-over-year comparison may be more relevant than the 30-60-90 day view. Some businesses are either wholly seasonal, or they do the bulk of their sales in one time period. That’s not to say that engagement through the rest of the year isn’t important, just that there is one time each year that matters more than most.
Also, it’s important to include context when looking at your numbers. Did the nature of your campaigns change because you ran a promotion for a month, or because you rolled out a new product or newsletter? While it’s important to understand any one-off spikes or drops, those can divert your attention away from longer term trends, so it may be necessary to look at a 6 month period to reveal your true engagement story.
What’s Next?
In part 2, we’ll look at a few of the key challenges to engagement and how to overcome them, and touch on how to keep your sending reputation strong so your emails make it to where engagement begins…the inbox!
