Yuka Kato
Have you heard the term “email insights” but aren’t sure what it means or how it’ll help you optimize your marketing efforts? Marketers, business owners, freelancers, and more can benefit from having the right data about their email performance and productivity. In this article, we’ll review:
- The definition of email insights
- The benefits of this data and how it applies to the workplace
- The most important email insights
- Top tools to use to get the best results
By the end, you’ll thoroughly understand how and when to use data to enhance email strategies. Stick around to get all the details.
What Are Email Insights?
Email insights are analytics that help you understand how your marketing campaigns perform or your overall productivity while managing work emails. Understanding the numbers behind your efforts will help you see where you could improve and how your emails impact customers, clients, or business prospects.
Example of How Email Insights Are Used
Let’s look at a real-world example of how email insights can help you. While tracking insights, you see that your email open rate is dropping. Keeping that one metric in mind, you start to generate ideas to improve your marketing emails’ performance.
It might be as simple as creating more eye-catching subject lines that make recipients want to click on your email. Plus, you could buff up your email copywriting to ensure all your content offers value and keeps readers ready to see the next message in their inbox.
After making changes, you could watch the open rate metric to ensure it starts trending up. If it doesn’t, you’d know you need to take other steps, like preventing emails from going to the spam folder, which could also affect open rates.
Other Top Insights That Can Benefit Businesses
You can take a similar strategy with several different insights, including:
- Link clicks
- Attached document views and downloads
- Time until the first open
- Average time until a response
- Email sending per hour
In the rest of this article, we’ll explore these email insights and more to help you see how they can benefit businesses.
The Benefits of Getting Actionable Insights
Now that you understand email insights and how they’re used, let’s take a deeper look at how they benefit different areas of a business.
For Marketing Teams
Marketing teams should gather insights to ensure their efforts generate ROI and positively impact customer retention. This data is especially beneficial for analyzing:
- Newsletters
- Promotional emails
- Sales funnels
- Abandoned cart emails
- Welcome emails
To give you an idea of how this applies, let’s say you sent a promotional email for a new product launch, but it didn’t get the link clicks you expected. From that data, you’d know that you might need to improve your call to action (CTA) or adjust the benefits you’re presenting about the product to better align with current customer needs, making them want to click your link to learn more.
For Support Teams
Email insights provide actionable data that help optimize email productivity, ensuring customer service and IT support teams stay on track. For instance, data like the average time until a response and number of emails sent per hour shows how quickly support tickets are answered. That way, you know you’re operating efficiently to solve customer or company-wide problems.
When you provide excellent service, you’ll have much better customer retention rates that save on long-term costs. After all, it can cost between 5 and 25 times more to replace an existing customer than to retain them, depending on your business’s profit margins. Therefore, investing in top-notch support is always a good idea.
For Business Development Teams
Business development teams communicating with prospective clients or sending cold emails to generate leads can use insights to determine if their messages are getting read and interacted with.
Let’s say you’re emailing pitch decks to potential investors. You could use document tracking to see if they open the pitch deck you sent. Plus, tools that provide stats and insights in Gmail can tell you when it’s a good idea to follow up if you didn’t get a response.
You could even tailor your follow-up message based on the data you have, such as whether they never opened the message, opened it but didn’t view the attached document, or viewed the document but didn’t respond. That way, your follow-up could be more effective for specific needs.
For HR Teams
HR teams can harness email analytics to optimize recruiting, employee onboarding, and internal newsletters.
For example, if you send a document with company processes and procedures to a group of new hires, you could track to ensure they view your attached PDF. Then, you could follow up with any who didn’t open the document to ensure they stay on track in the training process.
The same can be said if you contact job applicants about setting up an interview. You could review the analytics to see who opened your email or took actions like clicking a scheduling link. That data can help you determine whether to follow up or move on from applicants who no longer seem interested in the role.
For Legal Teams
Legal teams can use email insights to avoid missing deadlines when sending legal briefs, after sending documents new hires need to sign, or while finalizing contracts with new clients.
For instance, if you see a contract was opened by the recipient but never signed and returned, you could follow up to see if they have any further questions or concerns you could assist with. If they haven’t opened it, features like a delivery certificate can ensure you know it landed in their inbox.
7 of the Most Important Email Insights
Now that you know what email insights can do for your business or team, here’s a quick list of the most important insights you should track.
1. Does Your Message Resonate with Your Audience?
One of the most effective ways to determine if your message resonates with your audience is by looking at the open rate metric. If your message isn’t engaging or your readers don’t feel like they’re getting value from your content, it’s common to see open rates decline over time.
Trends and consumer needs can also change, so this could also be a sign that you need to do a bit more research into what your audience is currently looking for to regain their interest and get them to open your messages again with a relevant subject line.
2. Is Your Email List Clean?
Another important metric is bounce rates to ensure your email list is clean and full of active subscribers. At times, new subscribers or bots might input a fake email address to bypass requirements, or you might have subscribers who stop using the email they signed up with over time.
Either way, if those messages start bouncing because they can’t reach the recipient’s inbox, it can hurt your engagement. Frequently sending messages that bounce is a common spam signal to email service providers (ESPs). It can result in email providers like Gmail sending your messages to spam, even for active subscribers, so they won’t even see your email in the first place.
Therefore, it is essential to have a tool that notifies you when messages bounce so you can remove inactive email addresses from your list to prevent this from occurring.
3. Should You Segment Your List?
When analyzing email stats, you can determine which customers are interested in specific topics or products you offer and segment them into groups based on their needs.
For example, a fashion brand might offer both men’s and women’s clothing. They could then segment their list based on which subscribers open and click on links in emails about men’s clothing and subscribers who only engage with content about women’s clothing. This will boost engagement rates for both groups since you only send them content they’re interested in.
4. Is Your Email Copywriting Persuasive?
Reviewing link clicks or click rates can help you determine if your email copywriting is inspiring recipients to take action.
Let’s say you’re sending cold emails to prospective clients, and they frequently open your message but don’t click your link to schedule a meeting or learn more about your services. It could be a sign that you should deploy some cold email copywriting best practices to ensure you connect with your recipients and use strong CTAs.
5. Are Your Emails Relevant to Your Audience?
When email insight tools show you that your unsubscribe rate is high, it’s a sign your content might not be relevant to your current audience.
This could be a sign that you need to rework your lead gen strategies to find prospects who better align with what you offer or learn what content your current subscribers would be more interested in.
Even sending a quick questionnaire to your subscribers asking what types of emails they’d like to see could help you understand their interests and needs to make your content more relevant and reduce unsubscribes.
6. Are Your Emails Landing in the Inbox or Spam?
Email deliverability rates play a big factor in your success since messages that go to spam won’t be effective because your subscribers will likely never see them.
If you’re having deliverability issues, following email deliverability best practices like testing your emails before sending them, avoiding spammy language, and ensuring your subscribers opt-in to your list will all help.
7. How Productive Are You When Sending Emails?
Email is a significant part of modern business operations. However, it’s easy to get distracted when you’re frequently receiving new notifications or irrelevant messages. Therefore, tracking productivity metrics like what times you’re sending emails or emails sent per hour can help you determine if you’re optimizing your workday.
Many people find it helpful to limit checking and responding to messages to a couple of dedicated times during the day. That way, you can refocus on other tasks and finish what you need to accomplish in a timely manner. Tools that show you the times when you’re emailing will hold you accountable to that goal.
8. Are You Staying on Top of Deadlines?
Tracking email insights can help you stay on top of your tasks and projects by telling you where to focus your efforts. If you submit a document for client approval and see that it hasn’t been opened yet despite the deadline quickly approaching, you’ll know that you need to call them immediately to follow up on their status.
On the other hand, if your email has been read multiple times without a response, your recipient may have forgotten to reply or there could be an unforeseen reason that’s delaying their response. In this case, it may be better to send a reminder email (and use email insights to confirm they received it and read it).
The Best Tools to Get Email Insights
When you search for email insight tools, you’ll find many options. However, not all of them are effective or provide accurate data. To help you narrow it down, here are a few of the best choices.
Google Analytics
When you’re sending marketing emails with the intention of recipients clicking a link to go to your website, Google Analytics (GA) can help you get accurate data.
Specifically, GA is really good at telling you how customers interact with the web pages you send them to. This will give you essential data like click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, or average time on the page.
For instance, if your emails are getting a lot of link clicks, but your bounce rate on the sales page you send them to is high, it’s a sign you need to rework your sales page rather than your emails.
That said, configuring GA can be difficult. It requires adding HTML tracking code to your campaigns, which requires some technical know-how to do effectively.
Google Postmaster Tools
Google Postmaster Tools is free and provides essential data about your sender reputation to ensure your messages or domain don’t look spammy to ESPs. When you integrate this tool, you’ll get insights into:
- Spam rate
- Domain reputation
- IP reputation
- Encryption
- Delivery errors
- Authentication
- Feedback loops
This tool is useful for seeing general information about your email activity, but it’s important to note that you won’t be able to use it to see any tracking data or insights for individual emails you send.
Mailsuite
Mailsuite offers email analytics that integrates right into your Gmail inbox for your convenience and easy setup. It combines the best of the previous two tools. Plus, you’ll get other essential insights discuemail insightsssed throughout this article, like email open and link click data along with productivity tracking.
Some of the most essential insights you get with Mailsuite are:
- Email open tracking
- Link clicks
- Attached document views and downloads
- Delivery certificates
- Time until the first open
- Average time until a response
- Times of day when you send messages
- And more
One of the best aspects about Mailsuite is that you don’t need to leave your inbox to see your email insights. GA and Google Postmaster Tools are separate platforms you need to log in to, but Mailsuite works right inside Gmail.
Get Actionable Insights Right in Your Inbox
Email insights are essential to keep your business running efficiently and effectively so everything from your promotional campaigns to customer support efforts remains on track for success.
When you need an easy-to-use tool, you can trust that Mailsuite will provide you with all the necessary data.
Get started tracking accurate email insights with Mailsuite today.
