In a digitized world email marketing is an important digital marketing tactic. However, it is not simply limited to creating great email copy, adding great infographics and sending out these emails to a large number of target audience. In fact, when an extremely well created email marketing campaign fails to deliver, companies may frantically try to replicate other successful campaigns.

The process of understanding successful competitor campaigns is usually reverse engineering. However, that does not yield results. This is because one can only ever try to understand the creative process behind the campaign, however, there is no access to the competitor’s analytics report for the campaign. Thus, a clear understanding of what worked for their campaign may not be possible.

Email marketing delivers consistent results across the industry. However, one needs to have a clear understanding of what’s working and what’s not, even as the campaign is ongoing. This is possible if there is an analytics process built into the campaign. By using data one can easily optimize the campaign.

There are a few steps involved in the building analytics into the campaign:

1. Choose an email marketing software: This is the absolute first step. From among the plethora of options available in the market, you have to choose a software that suits your campaign needs. Considering the size of your campaign and the strength of the vendor you need will help you determine which vendor to choose. However, the software only does so much as to provide an honest view of how he campaign is faring. Analytics has to be used to understand the campaign in detail.
2. Set the campaign goal: You must know what you are looking to achieve through this campaign. Goals are bigger than the metrics you set to achieve them. For example, increased open rate is a metric but Increasing subscriber base is a goal. Hence, deciding the campaign goal will help you determine the metrics and performance indices for the campaign. This will further help in correlating the results and the performance metrics and help in making any ongoing changes to the campaign, if needed.
3. Get advanced data understanding: Data from the campaign can usually be categorized into basic, advanced and expert categories. Basic data refers to direct behavior related to the campaign, such as number of emails opened, number of people who clicked on the links, etc. In advanced data sets, correlations are made to create a deeper understanding. For example, the click-to-open rate informs you about the engagement ability of your email content. So, you know whether the target audience is connecting with your email content. Through advanced metrics you know things such as how many people purchased your product after clicking on the link, the return on investment you generated etc.
4. Get some expert advice: Understanding what is happening is one part of analytics. To go deeper and to understand why it is happening requires expert analysis. This is done by experts who do experience analysis and can tell why people behaved in a certain way for the campaign. This can help you understand buyer behavior at specific time of the day, month or year and in specific conditions.
5. Collate and analyse: Put together a team of experts who can collate all the collected data and provide you with a detailed analysis. Doing an in-depth analysis is important to draw the maximum benefit from your email campaign.
6. Segment the audience: With the data analysis, you will be able to segment your audience and further create personalized content for the follow up emails or offers. Sending targeted, personalized emails can improve the campaign results dramatically.

Follow the above steps to achieve great results with your email marketing campaign.