Yuka Kato
41% of marketers say email is their most effective channel, so you should consider implementing email marketing if you’re thinking of ways to reach your target audience and boost your sales and bottom line. However, succeeding with email marketing requires monitoring your efforts and refining your strategies accordingly. This is where email reporting comes in!
Email reporting gives you a summary of your email performance. It gives you insight into what emails are doing well and how you can get your emails to do better. This blog post will discuss everything you need to know about email reporting, including specific use cases for email reporting and how to create email insights in Gmail.
What are Email Insights and Reporting?
Email insights are information and data about email performance that is obtained from email tracking. Examples of email insights include email opens, link clicks, attachment opens, delivery rates, and bounce rates. These insights can help optimize email marketing campaigns by helping you identify what works and what doesn’t. For example, email open insights can help you identify the subject lines that resonate with your audience.
Email reporting involves centralizing and organizing different information about email performance into an easy-to-read report you can share with stakeholders. These reports include key performance metrics that provide a snapshot of how your emails are performing.
The reports often include visual aids like graphs and charts to make the information easier to understand at a glance. Email insight reports may also include recommendations for improvements.
Also Read: Gmail Stats: Get Your Email Stats and Insights on Gmail.
Use Cases for Email Reporting
Email reporting offers many benefits. Here are a few ways you can use email reporting:
Performance Monitoring
The sales and marketing team can use email insights to monitor their emails’ performance and compare it to that of their competitors. Without email insights and reporting, measuring email performance would be challenging. You would send out emails and not know what happened to them.
Email insights reports allow sales and marketing teams to monitor their emails’ performance. They can evaluate these reports to determine whether recipients are opening the emails, clicking links, viewing attachments, and more.
Also, sales and marketing teams can use email insight reports to set email performance goals when they run campaigns. They can set goals for open rates, click rates, and more. Then, regularly monitoring these reports helps them see how they’re performing, identify their weak areas, and think of ways to improve.
Audience Understanding
Email tracking reports use engagement metrics to provide deeper insights into audience preferences and behaviors. When you see how your audience engages with your email, you’ll understand what resonates with them.
For example, high open rates indicate high interest in the subject matter, while high click-through rates indicate that the recipients found the email content compelling. This gives you an idea of subject lines and content types that will increase engagement and business outcomes.
Content Optimization and A/B Testing
Marketers use email insights reports to conduct A/B tests on subject lines, content, and CTAs to optimize emails for better outcomes. A/B testing involves sending out different versions of an email to a small section of your audience, identifying which version performs better in terms of recipient engagement, and using that one for your email marketing campaign. This way, you send out only email variants that are more likely to perform well to maximize conversions.
However, A/B testing is not possible without email insights reports. After sending out the two versions of the email to be tested, marketers need email tracking reports to determine the best-performing version.
Revenue Tracking
Business owners can use email insights reports to connect revenue generated from email campaigns. Marketers need to measure the ROI (return on investment) of their email marketing efforts for many reasons. One is to demonstrate the profitability of marketing expenditures and justify budget allocations. Another is to assess how well their email strategies are driving sales and conversions.
Marketers can evaluate email insights reports to identify recipients who are clicking through to their landing pages and making purchases. This helps them quantify the direct impact of email marketing efforts on sales.
Comparing revenue generated from different campaigns can help marketers identify high-value campaigns, helping them know where to channel efforts and where to make improvements.
Manage Email List
Email marketers can use email tracking information to gain insights into the quality of their email list. Comprehensive email insight reports include metrics like bounce rates and specific email addresses in the list that cause bounces.
Since invalid email addresses cause bounces, marketers can use this information to clean up their email lists by removing the invalid email addresses and ensure they maintain a good email deliverability rate and sender reputation.
Email Insights and KPIs You Need to Track
Different KPIs (key performance indicators) provide insights into various aspects of your email performance. Some KPIs you should track to understand how your email is performing are:
Email Opens and Clicks
Email opens refer to the percentage of recipients who opened your email, while clicks refer to the percentage of recipients who click on in-email links to get to your landing page.
You need recipients to open and read your emails. In fact, an email marketing campaign fails at one of the first hurdles if recipients do not open the emails. This is because your recipients have to open your emails to engage with the content and take the action you want them to take.
Email opens also help you assess the effectiveness of your subject lines. Generally, a strong subject line grabs recipients’ attention and compels them to open the email.
Email link clicks are also crucial to the success of email campaigns. As you already know, it is not enough for recipients to read your emails. It’s also important that they click in-email links to reach your website and take a specific action (like make a purchase).
Your click-through rate also shows the effectiveness of your email content and CTAs. This is because compelling email content and call-to-action (CTA) would entice people to click your links. Thus, you need to track link clicks to know who’s clicking your links.
Attachment/Document Views and Downloads
Attachment or document views and downloads refer to the percentage of recipients who view and download your email attachment. Email attachments usually contain more detailed or supplementary information about the email content. Therefore, downloading attachments shows a desire to obtain more details beyond what is included in the email, indicating a higher level of interest.
Tracking attachment views and downloads can help you identify recipients who are deeply interested in your content. This information can be used for lead scoring or categorization to identify prospects who are more likely to convert.
Bounce Rate
Email bounce rate is the percentage of emails you send that cannot be delivered to your recipients. A high bounce rate indicates that your emails are not landing in your recipients’ mailboxes. It reflects the quality of your email list, indicating that the list includes outdated or invalid email addresses.
Unfortunately, high bounce rates negatively affect the reputation of email senders. A high bounce rate gives you a bad sender reputation, which will cause Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to stop delivering your emails to recipients’ inboxes, affecting the deliverability of your future campaigns.
Thus, it’s important to track your bounce rate to ascertain the quality of your email list. This can reveal that your list needs cleaning to remove invalid and outdated emails. And doing what is necessary will help your deliverability in future campaigns and make your marketing initiatives more successful.
Subscriber Growth Rate
Subscriber growth rate is the percentage increase in your email subscribers over a specific period of time. It is the net change in number of email subscribers during the period.
Subscriber growth rate provides insights into how well your email list is growing. A positive growth rate indicates successful lead generation, as it shows that your list-building strategies are attracting new subscribers. Conversely, a negative growth rate indicates that your lead-building tactics are ineffective.
Therefore, it’s essential to track subscriber growth rates to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your list-building tactics (such as opt-in forms and incentives). The subscriber growth rate will give you insights into which acquisition channels and methods are most successful at attracting new subscribers. And focusing on productive strategies can help you generate leads.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of your email recipients who opt out of receiving promotional messages from you. Laws governing email marketing (such as the GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act) require that marketing emails include an unsubscribe mechanism to allow recipients who no longer wish to receive these emails from a sender to easily opt-out. So, recipients must receive a marketing email before they can opt out of your email list because they have to click an unsubscribe link or button in the email.
This means that the unsubscribe rate can indicate subscriber engagement. It provides direct feedback on how engaged your recipients are with your content and whether your email is meeting their expectations. When your marketing email meets their expectations, they are less likely to click the unsubscribe button.
Thus, it’s important to track your unsubscribe rate to gain insight into your audience engagement levels. A lower unsubscribe rate indicates a more engaged email list. However, a high unsubscribe rate may indicate that your content is not meeting expectations and needs revamping.
Email Productivity
Email productivity refers to how efficiently you manage email communication. It involves various aspects of email management, including replying to emails promptly, keeping inboxes tidy, optimizing inbox hours, and more.
Tracking email productivity can help you assess your efficiency in managing email communication. For example, in customer-facing roles, email productivity metrics like response time can help gauge how quickly you respond to incoming email communication. This can help you offer timely customer support to enhance customer satisfaction and strengthen customer relationships.
Also, email productivity metrics like unread email rates can give insights into your inbox management. A low unread email rate shows that you promptly review and act on incoming communications. Email flagging or tagging usage can also demonstrate how effectively you manage your inbox. For example, marking emails for follow-up shows how well you process incoming communication to ensure that you do not forget to act on important emails that do not need immediate attention.
Leverage the features of email service providers to enhance email productivity. For example, Gmail allows you to archive emails to ensure a clutter-free inbox and to set up follow-up reminders to ensure you do not forget to act on important emails that do not need immediate attention.
How to Create Email Insight Reports in Gmail
Now that you know what metrics to track to understand how your emails are performing, how do you create email insight reports in Gmail? The best way to do this is using Mailsuite.
Gmail does not have built-in reporting capabilities, so getting email insight reports in Gmail requires using third-party tools. Mailsuite is one of the best in this regard, as it can turn Gmail into a powerful email marketing platform that not only streamlines sending out campaigns but also creates email insight reports automatically.
Here’s a step-by-step approach for creating email insight reports in Gmail using Mailsuite.
1. Download the Mailsuite Chrome Extension
Mailsuite is a Google extension that works in the background of your Gmail account. Empowering Gmail to create email insight reports starts with downloading Mailsuite.
Visit the Chrome Web Store and click the blue Add to Chrome button. Then, follow the on-screen prompts to install Mailsuite.
2. Create and Send Your Email Campaign
Mailsuite creates email insight reports automatically, so you do not need to do anything extra to generate these reports for your email campaigns.
Once you have installed Mailsuite, proceed to create and send your email campaign as you would normally do.
3. Access the Activity Dashboard to View Reports
When you need to view email insights reports, all you have to do is access the activity dashboard.
There are two ways to do this: via the Sent folder or Mailtrack Settings.
To access the activity dashboard via the sent folder, do the following:
- Open your Gmail account.
- Open the Sent folder.
- Find the Sent email whose tracking reports you want to view.
- Place the cursor on the double-check marks before the recipient’s name to reveal the tracking info pop-up
- Click See full tracking history
To access the activity dashboard via Mailtrack Settings, do the following:
- Open your Gmail account.
- Click the Mailtrack Settings icon at the top right of the page.
- Click Email Tracking Report to open the Mailsuite activity dashboard.
- Find and click the email whose tracking information you want to view.
4. Download Reports to Share with Stakeholders
Whether you go through your Sent folder or the Mailtrack Settings, once you land on the Mailsuite tracking information page of the email you are interested in, you can download the report to share with stakeholders. Simply click Download Email Delivery Certificate on the page.
Takeaway: Use Email Reporting to Optimize Your Messages
Using email marketing to boost your business involves sending promotional messages to your target audience. However, succeeding with email marketing requires monitoring the performance of these emails using email insight reports. These reports allow you to track email performance metrics like email open rate, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and email productivity. Then, you can use the information to measure the performance of your campaign, understand your audience better, optimize your email content, track revenue from email campaigns, and more.
While Gmail is not an email service provider that can generate email insight reports on its own, Mailsuite empowers it to do so. When you pair Gmail and Mailsuite, you can go on to craft and send emails in Gmail as you usually do, and Mailsuite will work in the background to automatically generate email insights reports for you whenever you need them. Install Mailsuite and obtain comprehensive email insight reports automatically to enhance your email marketing campaigns and business outcomes.
