4 Simple Email Marketing Revenue and Engagement Metrics

There is no doubt that there is a mad rush across all industry verticals to collect "big data" and visualize it to try to make business decisions. There is a whole slew of disruptive technologies out there that are enabling analytics on ANYTHING. Email marketing is no exception. However, when I talk with any executive in the email marketing space, they are simply overwhelmed at where to start to get good email marketing analytics. 

Most email service providers have great reporting on email engagement. Most web analytics tools have great reporting on revenue performance for a site. There are integrations out there between all of the major players that give you some visibility into revenue and engagement performance in one tool. However, there are limitations as the integrations and reporting are limited. Usually, marketers find themselves having to download reams of CSV files, manipulate in Excel, and go blind making endless pivot tables to create the required marketing analytics to satisfy a QBR for a client or an executive. 

Getting access to data can also be a nightmare for marketers. IT shops are unwilling to give up, SaaS reporting interfaces may be clunky, and marketers don't sit around writing code for an API. It is painful to hear how some email marketing organizations spend weeks gathering reports and dashboards for a single executive meeting. Having a deep technical background, it is even more painful to hear because I know these problems could be solved in minutes with the right application of technology.

At RapidScaler, we tried to make all of this easy by doing three things with our software:

1. Automatically collect email marketing and web analytics data from popular systems and put it into a database for marketing analytics.
2. Develop a predefined set of email marketing analytics KPI dashboards that consume this data and answer all of the questions analytics should answer.
3. Enable these email marketing analytics dashboards to be shared on a website, in an ESP tool, or in a CRM application like SalesForce.

The end result is a tidy little software solution that gives marketers the following useful marketing analytics quickly:

1. Top 5 Email Performing Campaigns - giving clear performance by CTR, Revenue per Email (RPE), and total revenue by campaign
2. Conversions by Campaign - giving the marketer and idea of what percentage of CTR lead to a conversion
3. Customer Engagement Index - giving a simple and clear indicator on the trend of engagement of your subscribers in your list
4. Revenue Funnel - giving the ability to track conversions and revenue starting at an email campaign through a completed purchase

Putting together these analytics is not rocket science nor is it technically hard to do. Any IT person who tells you otherwise either does not get your needs or does not understand the technology. With the proper application of technology and technical resources who "get" your needs, any marketer can bring these kinds of marketing analytics into their programs cheaply and quickly.

Darren Hoch is the President and Founder of RapidScaler. He founded the company out of a growing lack of integration between email, CRM, social, and analytics tools. The company's mandate and passion is to make data work for marketing programs.