Objective:
In this How-To, we will learn about the new Email Metrics Report and how you can use it to gain useful insights into your email campaign metrics. We will explore the following topics:
- How to run an Email Metrics Report within Core iQ
- How to calculate Click Thru Rate (CTR) and Open Rates
- How to best maintain your core email data using Email Metrics exports
What is included in the Email Outcomes Report?
Gaining additional information regarding how often your customers are opening their bank emails and how many are clicking within these communications is extremely valuable. It can help you create a general health metric for each of your customers, giving you an idea of how engaged they are with your brand. Our new Email Metrics Report allows you to do just that. Using this report, you can garner extensive information about each of your email communications, including open percentages, click-through rates, and bounce rates.
In this How-To, we will be looking at some of the features that are specific to this report, including the unique drop-downs that are available. While many of the settings will be familiar to you if you have used Core iQ before, there is a report-specific drop-down that we want to cover. This new drop-down is the Email Outcome field, which includes all the outcomes we currently track within Core iQ. At the end of this tutorial, you will find a detailed list of each option and how they relate to the items that you are sending out. Here, I would like to expand upon the four most commonly used options: Open, Click, Bounce, and Delivered.
- OPEN
- The Open outcome relates directly to whether or not a given user opened the email communication. Each of our emails has an open tracking feature built into it, allowing you to gather information as to which users viewed your email and which did not. This can be extremely useful when attempting to retarget customers who viewed a particular message. Or when attempting to follow up with users who did not open a time-sensitive email that was sent to them. Core iQ measures only unique opens for each customer for a given campaign, meaning that only the first open for an email will be counted by Core iQ reports.
- CLICK
- One metric for finding out what your customers are most interested in is the click metric, which tracks the links a customer clicked on within an email campaign. This can give you an idea as to what a person is most interested in, especially if you are sending that person to pages of your website with specific offers or promotions. Test out offers and URL wording in different emails to see what leads to the most conversions. Core iQ measures only unique clicks for each customer within a given campaign, meaning that only the first click for a URL will be counted by Core iQ reports.
- BOUNCE
- Sometimes emails are not delivered to a customer because of issues surrounding their email address or their email client. If you no longer have a valid email on file within your core, then that is an important piece of information for you to know. Using the Bounce outcome, you can see all emails that were undelivered to customers on a particular campaign. This could queue an outbound phone call or postcard asking for them to update their email address, thus allowing you to more easily communicate with them.
- DELIVERED
- When an email is successfully delivered to a customer, that means it did not bounce. Seeing how many emails were delivered by Core iQ can give you information about the health and relevance of your core data. If you are seeing a low rate of deliverability for your email list, then you will want to check your core import data for outdated email addresses.
Calculating Metrics that Matter
Finding out how often individuals are clicking on buttons or links within your automated communications is an important piece of insight. Not only will you know which customers are at least slightly interested in a product offer, but you will also see if one email is more effective at driving conversions than another. Calculating the rate at which customers are opening and clicking through your email templates is a simple process. First, you will need to know how many communications were sent for a given template, and then you will need to find out how many opens and clicks you saw within that same template. Here, we will walk through calculating three different metrics:
- Step 1: Run the Email Metrics Report using ‘Delivered’ as the metric within your Email Outcome field. This will give you the number of emails that were delivered to customers (didn’t bounce).
- Step 2: Run the Email Metrics Report using either the ‘Click’ or ‘Open’ metric as your only entry within the Email Outcome field. This will give you the total number of opens and clicks within that campaign.
- Step 3:
- Step 3a: To calculate your Open Rate, just divide # of Opens by Total Number Delivered.
- Step 3b: To calculate your Click Thru Rate, divide # of Clicks by Total Number Delivered.
- Step 3c: To calculate your Click to Open Ratio, divide # of Clicks by Total Number Opened.
These three metrics will give you a holistic view of the success for your email campaign. Click Thru Rate is a widely used metric for measuring the effectiveness for a given email campaign, and it will provide you with an idea for how successful your email was. Open Rate will show you how useful your subject line was at driving someone to open the email in the first place. Click to Open Ratio will tell you more about the quality of your content and how well it worked in driving someone to click on an offer link. These three metrics should be used in unison to measure just how compelling your email campaign was.
Calculating the delivery rate for a given campaign is just as easy, all you need to do is divide the # of Delivered by the Total Number Sent. You can use this calculation to measure the health of your email list, as a low Delivery Rate means that you have numerous bad email addresses.
Using the Email Metric Report to improve your core data
One important use for the Email Metric Report is to help you improve the overall health of your customer profiles within Core iQ. By running a report to see which emails are experiencing a bounce to a certain address, you can find incorrect items within your core data. This can help you follow up with potentially valuable customers who are not getting emails because of a simple typo or primary email address change. Cleaning up your email information within your core will also allow you to better gauge how many emails will be sent through Core iQ. With our nightly updates, bounced emails can be removed from Core iQ audiences the next day, as long as they are removed from your core. This can help you improve your communication efforts and increase the number of successful email campaigns that you send out. It is important to follow up on the bounces for any email campaign to ensure that you have a high delivery rate for each of your communication efforts.