Sembler Facts Blog

Have you ever taken a look at what happens to your email after the send button was hit? What your contacts thought or found interesting in the email you send out to them every Monday at 1pm? Does it appear your email engagement is decreasing not increasing even though you are sending at the 'correct' time?

Utilizing your post-send email metrics will put you on the path to answering these questions and  better engage your contacts, which allows you to develop a better email marketing strategy, not just one better email. 

Email marketing and being successful at it starts with you and your team dedicating the time to your Email Marketing efforts after you hit send. Implementing the analysis of post-send data will allow you to discover and utilize two huge benefits:

1. Better performing emails each time you hit send
2. Overall better email deliverability for your company and domain

Using HubSpot as an example platform we will explore how to be more impactful with each send based off the Contact data you receive with post-send metrics. 

First, let's put email marketing into a little bit of Inbound context.

The emails that you send out are placed in the 'Close' Stage of the Inbound Methodology and while this is the primary place they appear, emails can be part of the whole journey (makes them pretty important wouldn't you say).

Getting the most information for your email sends can allow you to Delight customers that continually open your emails by:

1. Using Segmentation 
2. Personalization
3. Utilizing last engagement information  

While we will be covering how to use post-send data to create a smarter second email send, HubSpot offers an Email Marketing Certification which allows you to explore all aspects of being a fantastic email marketer, you can start the Certification here!

Contacts, What's the Story? 

What is the story of the Contacts who were sent your email, did they interact or unsubscribe? The story of the contacts are the heart of all your marketing efforts. We will dig into learning from these contacts to become smarter with each email you send out, so how does post-send data help with this? We will look into: 

1. The why and what that is included in post send data 
2. How to look at this data 
3. What to bring together to put actionable steps into place for your next smarter email send

Let's Get Started! What Is Included in Post Send Metrics? 

The two main buckets of post-send metrics are, performance and recipients (your contacts).

Here's what the Post-Send Performance Metrics look like for marketer who has utilized post-send metrics consistently (look at the Sent to Delivered to Opened to Click Rate Metrics) 

Why are Performance Metrics Important You Ask? 

These beginning metrics of how your Email performed is the start of the story that your contacts took with your email.  

Why this is important is because with a quick glance you can see, did you send to a good list because 100% were delivered to the Inbox or was the list older and included email addresses that could not be delivered to. From here, you can start asking yourself the important questions such as, "I had a 100% delivered rate but only 10% opened my email, why? Was my subject line not appealing enough? Did I included a personalized enough From address?"

These  metrics allow you to begin to unearth what occurred on your email send to start moving towards a better second send. From these questions you can run tests to see how to better engage this list of contacts that are reachable but need more reason to open. 

Performance Is Always Tied to Contacts

The second screen that you will dive into is your Recipients Tab. This is where the contact story is and where you can begin to build the bridges between your email, the ROI of that email (did they click and purchase, request a call etc.) and the types of contacts and their personas that engaged with your email. This section of information can include:

1. The  select amount of contacts you sent to
2. Those that were suppressed because they have unsubscribed or bounced
3. The successful sends and delivers 
4. The successful opens (yay!)
5. The ones who clicked (more yay!)
6. Even those that unsubscribed or bounced (Hard Bounce vs. Soft Bounce)
   

Tracking your Contacts progress: The How

This is where the Recipients Tabs helps tell you the story that occurred. 

Focus on the metrics both good and bad, from an Email Deliverability perspective you want to focus on three things:

1. What was the contacts source
2. What was the expectation they had on hearing from you
3. Have they opt-in or given you permission to contact them 

The source of a contact can be which list they are on and how they ended up getting your email, were they on an older list and thus on this email send finally unsubscribed? Or are they a brand new lead not yet ready to receive emails on buying? Looking at the Contacts Source using the actions they took in the email can help you better segment your contacts. 

The expectation and opt-in features are extremely important, were these contacts in the know you were going to email, did you get their permission? If yes, and they unsubscribed then you can look at the content they received vs. if you didn't have permission then you shouldn't have been sending to them in the first place. 

Take a look at this contacts journey through this one email send: 

Using the information above you learn:

1. On what device
2. What time
3. How quickly after the email send did they interact with the email. 

This will allow you to know what this contacts life-cycle was like through this email and can start to build (or continue to build) a persona for them, potentially a marketing  professional at a mid-sized company interested in learning new techniques to make her job easier and more efficient.  

What: The Second Send

Tips and Tricks for the second smarter send: 

1. Use Suppression, do not send to people who do not want your emails this can cause Spam Complaints (and who wants that) 
2. Look at their last engagement with you to better segment or add them to suppression list or a re-engagement campaign (want to learn more about Re-engagement Campaigns? Check out this Blog Post on 5  Steps to Building an Email Re-Engagement Campaign) 
3. Stop sending to your whole list, its so 90's, segmentation is the name of the game 
4. Always (always) be updating your sending lists, put it on your calendar and commit some time to it
5. Most importantly, be willing to take action on the information you find in your post-send data 

Lastly, the hardest part of this is getting started , take it one step at a time and remember that your contacts are the root, the heart, the nervous system of your Email Marketing and without them you would be sending emails to no one. 

Now is the time to learn from your contacts to create a better email marketing life-cycle.  

Still Interested in becoming HubSpot Email Certified? Check it out here!