As an entrepreneur or small business owner, have you ever wondered how to figure out if your email campaigns are effective in reaching your customers? In this blog post, we're diving into the analytics from our own recent Shopify email campaign, specifically focusing on the annual privacy notice sent to all our customers. Let's explore the dashboards and metrics that provide valuable insights into the success of our email marketing efforts.
Deliverability Analysis
We pulled the screenshot below from our Shopify store app called Email. This dashboard shows the results of the annual privacy notice we sent out to our email list of 231 subscribers. In the section called Deliverability, the 231 count is shown in the first tile.
The background is we inherited an email list of 246 when we bought the store earlier this year. Only about 91% or 231 emails were actually tagged as subscribers. The challenge was understanding how useful this existing email list of subscribers was going to be for generating new sales. Also we knew there was a legal requirement to provide notice to users about our privacy policy. So this was our first attempt to use the email list for anything. Spoiler alert: we no longer have 231 emails as our total.
On the first row of the screenshot, the second tile is called Delivery Rate, and it shows 84% or 194 email accounts out of the total 231 were successfully delivered to their inbox. Why? Reasons.
One reason is found in the next tile called Bounce Rate, and it shows 16.9% or 39 email accounts were apparently not valid. Our email notice never reached those people. A follow up action for our store is to review the bounced emails and remove them from our email list.
In the second row of the screenshot, the first tile on the left is called Open Rate, and it shows 45% or 103 emails were not only delivered but they were viewed and/or read by the recipient. This is great! At this moment we now have our warm email list, because we've "warmed up" those accounts with awareness. Next step in the near future is to use these 103 emails for email campaigns.
But it's not all sunshine up in here. The adjacent tile is called Unsubscribe Rate, and it shows 3.6% or 8 emails used the instructions in our notice to request that we no longer send them any future emails. Sad, I know, but we would be happy to welcome them back as a new customer.
Somewhat worrying is the last tile on the right called Spam Rate, and it shows 1.6% or 3 emails were delivered but marked as spam. These email accounts likely did not see our notice, or it was automatically moved out of their inbox. This happens frequently with work emails, where they have mechanisms setup to filter incoming email that does not appear to be work related.
Click-Through Rate Evaluation
If we were sending a different type of email, such as announcing a sale, we would be interested in another important metric called the Click-Through Rate, which measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within the email. This metric helps us understand how engaging our content is and whether our call-to-action prompts are compelling enough.
But we really didn't have these kinds of data points because the email was just a privacy notification. By analyzing the click-through rate on our future sales emails, we can optimize our email content for better engagement.
Conversion Tracking
Also in the future, we would look closely at conversion tracking, which allows us to see how many recipients took the desired action after opening the email. For example, one such action might be making a purchase. By tracking conversions from our future emails, we can measure the impact of our email campaign on driving customer actions. This metric is a great example of data that is crucial for assessing the overall success of our email marketing strategy.
Subscriber Engagement Metrics
Admittedly we took a hit on this one. In addition to open rate and click-through rate, we also analyze various subscriber engagement metrics such as bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam complaints (some details were mentioned above). These metrics provide insights into the quality of our email list and the relevance of our content to our audience. By monitoring these metrics, we can maintain a healthy email list and improve the overall effectiveness of our campaigns.
By leveraging the built-in analytics provided by Shopify, we can make data-driven decisions to enhance our email marketing strategy and better connect with our customers. The insights gained from these metrics allow us to continuously improve our campaigns and deliver more personalized and engaging content to our audience. More to come . . .