3 Pillars of a Successful Email Program

POST
Use Email Insights to
Optimize Future Campaigns
 53% of brands take 2 weeks or more to produce
a single email. However, the work leading up to
getting an email out the door is only part of the
email marketing equation.

Here at Litmus, we believe there are three crucial pillars to email marketing
success—and only when you master all of them can you build a state-of-
the-art email program that can positively impact your entire marketing mix.

53% of brands take 2 weeks or more to

produce a single email.

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3 Pillars of a Successful Email Program

POST
Use email insights
to optimize future
campaigns

PRE PERFORM
Set your email Share insights to
campaigns up for improve overall
success marketing effectiveness

This is the second in our ebook series, Three Pillars of a Successful Email
Program. You can access the first in the series here.

Now, let’s dive into our second pillar

POST: Use Email Insights to Optimize Future Campaigns

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POST
Use Email Insights to
Optimize Future Campaigns

So you’ve sent your perfectly planned and executed

email campaign—now what?

The second part of the three pillar system is gathering

42%
post-send insights. This stage includes analyzing subscriber
engagement and the performance of each campaign so
you can learn from your work and improve future emails.

On average, teams spend 2.6 hours on post-send analytics

and analysis. However, there are plenty of marketers
devoting less time than that. 42% of organizations spend
42% of
less than an hour on their post-send process. organizations
spend less
Without taking the time to understand how each email
performs, you risk straying away from your audience
than an hour on
without realizing it. You need to learn from your past work their post-send
to create personalized messaging that cuts through the process.
noise of the inbox. So what gets in the way of spending
more time on post-send analysis?

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 While using a third-party analytics tool is common,
marketers’ current setups don’t always give them visibility to
metrics beyond the basics, such as opens and clicks.

Email marketers may also struggle to find the time or

structure to analyze campaign performance properly.
Knowing that email analytics is important is one thing,
but actually doing the work doesn’t always feel easy. Not
to mention the fact that teams are already juggling full
production workflows for multiple campaigns.

You need a real understanding of what messages resonate

with your audience and drive action. Using the post-send
tips that follow, you’ll be able to create a workflow to
analyze your campaigns that will help your email program...
and impress your boss.

What a robust post-send process can do for you

Understand subscriber engagement beyond basic metrics

Open and click-through rates are cornerstones in many email marketer’s analytics, but they
only tell you so much. Leveling up your tools and processes gives you more insights.

Brands that use third-party analytics tools see an email

marketing ROI that’s 10% higher than that of brands that only
rely on metrics provided by their ESPs.

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 Create progressive profiles for better personalization
There’s so much more to email personalization than adding your subscriber’s name.
Information like customer status and preferences make segmentation more powerful.

Litmus Email Analytics allowed us to pivot the client’s

email strategy based on engagement data and create
more effective emails. As a result, they saw a 35%
increase in open rates.

Joe Savitch,
Marketing Manager, Altos

Implement triggered emails

Re-engagement and winback campaigns can go a long way in preserving the subscriber
relationship. Integrated analytics tools make identifying and targeting disengaged
subscribers easier.

Marketers who describe their email programs as successful

are 41% more likely than those at less-successful ones to
send re-engagement campaigns (59% vs. 42%).

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 Measure impact accurately
You know that email is worthy, but sometimes you need to put your data where your mouth
is. Access to metrics such as engagement time, lifetime value, and ROI arm you with proof
that your efforts are paying off.

Marketers who describe their email programs as successful

are 116% more likely than those with less-successful ones
to measure subscriber lifetime value.

Improve future email design and content

Email insights aren’t just for strategists and copywriters. Getting a peek into where your
subscribers live and which email clients and devices they use most often helps your design
team narrow their focus.

Litmus Email Analytics lets us look at which email clients

are the most popular, so we can educate our clients and
be strategic marketing advisors.

Evan Davis,
Manager of Campaign Specialists, DEG, Linked by Isobar

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 Spot deliverability issues before they’re too big
The best deliverability approach is to proactively run spam testing during your pre-send
workflow. Deliverability monitoring tools can alert you post-send to emergencies.

It took us less than 48 hours to identify and fix our issue,

and to get removed from the blacklists. Without Litmus, we
wouldn’t have known where to start.

Melanie Kinney,
Email Marketing Manager at GasBuddy

So, how do you find the insights to

make all of these things happen?
Read on to learn how to find and use
email insights, including: deciding
what to look for, choosing the right
tools, and putting insights into a
usable format.

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 How to find and
use email insights

By taking the time to look back and reflect on past emails,

you make planning future campaigns easier. We understand
that sometimes email analysis feels easier said than done,
though. Perhaps you don’t have a formal process yet because
you just don’t know where to start. Or maybe your team
analyzes some campaigns but doesn’t do it all of the time.

No matter where you and your team are at right now, you
can take positive steps to expand your knowledge. Here’s
how to make sense of your post-send process and find
usable insights.

Decide what to look for

Having an unclear plan when it comes to analyzing your

campaigns can lead to trouble. With so many other priorities
in an email program, and so many potential metrics to track, 47%
it’s easy for some insights to go unmonitored. Only 47% of
email marketers currently track ROI, 39% track revenue per
customer, and 28% track subscriber lifetime value.

So how can you start incorporating more value into your

Only 47% of email
post-send process? It helps to choose priorities and decide marketers currently
what to look for. track ROI.

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 Assess
Rather than opening the floodgates of email analytics and trying to find every insight at
once, you should start chipping away at a new process slowly. If you’ve had success with
a particular type of data before, move more in that direction. Are there any gaps in your
strategy or gray areas of your messaging that could use clarification? Email analysis answers
questions, so start with what you want to know.

Instead of trying to find

every insight, start by
chipping away.

If you’re still unsure where to start, then

begin by calibrating your “baseline.”
Calculate the ROI of past campaigns and
current subscriber values. Then, you can use
your current performance as a benchmark as
you test, learn, and improve in the future.

Finally, consider where the post-send process will fit into your workflow. Who should be
in charge of it? How regularly can you realistically expect to analyze email performance?
Remember that it’s okay to start new habits with small steps.

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 Act
Choose a few questions you want to answer. Looking at any metric for the sake of it
seeming like the “right” thing to do isn’t a solid strategy. Each team is different, and you
should use insights to answer current questions. If you aren’t sure what questions you have
about your subscribers, go back to a past email brief. Are there any areas where greater
customer knowledge or segmentation would help?

Set up a schedule. Knowing what you want to look for is only part of the post-send analysis
equation. You also need to set aside time to do the work. Once you’ve chosen a few
insights you want to uncover, set up a recurring time to assess your metrics. A monthly
review can be a good cadence for teams. It also helps to make it clear who is in charge of
the post-send process so other responsibilities can be shifted to give time for collecting
and analyzing the metrics.

Helpful Resources
The 5 Metrics You Should Add to Your Email Reporting

State of Email Analytics

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 Choose the right tools

If you wanted to plant a small patio garden, you could likely

get away with having minimal tools. However, you’re going
to have to invest in the right equipment to achieve scale.
The same goes for email, which is why choosing the right
email analysis tools is important.

A majority of email marketers use third-party tools to track

their email performance, and Google Analytics is the most
popular choice, with 62% of marketers using it. However,
visibility into metrics falls off drastically beyond simple
numbers like opens and clicks.

While 99% of email marketers

currently track email opens and
clicks, only 71% track email device
and client usage, and 33% track email
Visibility into metrics falls off read times. Having the right tools
drastically beyond simple and integrations would give many

numbers like opens and clicks. email marketers clarity into these
sometimes overlooked, but always
important, metrics.

Litmus gives us the ability to use email meta-data for deeper

insights on behavior and enables Samsung to do a targeted follow
up, directly. Litmus provides us next-level metadata on email.

CV Coen Van der Ven,

CRM Specialist at Samsung

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 Assess
What tools do you currently use to analyze
email performance, and which metrics do
they provide? While opens and clicks can
be useful, they aren’t always going to offer
ground-breaking insights. When choosing
an email analytics tool for your team, think
about who will be using it and where gaps in
current insights exist.

21% of email marketers use a home-grown

or custom email analysis system, which
gives you greater control but requires more
upfront work and long term maintenance.
Third-party email analytics tools are much
easier to implement, and are designed to
provide deeper email insights than what your
ESP alone can show you.

21% of email marketers use

a home-grown or custom
email analysis system, which
gives you greater control but
21%
requires more upfront work
and long term maintenance.

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 Act
List your current visibility. Getting clear about what you’re currently tracking, or could
be tracking, is the perfect first step. If you already have the tools you need, your task
is improving your post-send process. However, you may find that the lack of metrics
available to you with your current tool is holding you back.

Get the tools you need to fill the gaps. If you determine that you’re short on insights, it’s
time to look for a resource to fill the gap. Talk to your team members about their priorities
and needs to find a best-fit solution.

Helpful Resources
Tool Tips: The Third-Party Analytics Tools Marketers Use Most

New in Litmus: Aggregated Reporting Across Campaigns

Identify your most successful campaigns

Accelerate campaign performance with advanced data insights you won’t get Learn more
from your ESP. Fine tune testing efforts and utilize engagement and geographic
data to inform future email campaigns—and other marketing channels.

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Put insights into a
usable format

The final piece of post-send analytics

that has the potential to trip up email
marketers is turning numbers into
usable insights. Being able to translate
metrics into insights and strategy is a
skill that benefits your entire marketing
program and company.

Here are a few examples of turning

email analysis into helpful information
for future campaigns:

• You see that there’s a segment of customers who haven’t converted recently, and create a
win-back campaign

• You compare newsletter performance and see that image-heavy emails get higher
engagement times, so you re-work your template to create more space for photos

• You launch your customer loyalty program with your most engaged subscribers, while at the
same time sending a survey to learn why your disengaged subscribers may be unhappy

Assess
To determine where you might be able to use insights to influence strategy, think about your
current decision-making process. Who is involved in creating new campaigns, and what is
the thought process? Are there any future decisions that you could bolster with data?

Also consider who would benefit from insights, and in what format would it be easiest for
them to consume. For example, your email designers may not need to know every metric
that went into your decision. However, they’ll learn from hearing that you’ve seen a pattern
around what types of design or imagery work best.

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 Act
Pick a few decisions that could use data. You don’t have to run a formal A/B test to start
identifying trends or insights. Look at your email planning process and pick a spot where
it would be useful to know what subscribers like, rather than guess. Once you’ve used
data to reverse engineer what you need to know, you’ll be more comfortable seeing the
insights within data.

Think about who will use your insights. Not everyone on your team or within your
company speaks fluent email, and that’s okay. Everyone has their strengths, and it’s a
useful exercise to describe email insights in terms everyone can understand. Making
yourself simplify and frame your analysis in an easy-to-share format also helps you better
understand what you’ve found.

Helpful Resources
How to Use Email Analytics to Improve Your Email Design

5 Ways You Can Use Email Analytics Data to Power Segmentation

[Slide Template] Your Email Year in Review: Program Performance

Reporting Made Easy

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Wrapping Up

Making time to be thoughtful in analyzing your program

doesn’t have to be hard. With the right framework,
you’ll be using email insights to optimize your future
campaigns, in no time.

Go beyond opens and clicks—

with Litmus Analytics

Brands that use Litmus Email Analytics see a 16% higher ROI than those that rely on data from their email
service providers alone. The reason is simple: Our powerful solution helps you pinpoint important nuances
to improve segmentation, and to ensure each email is error-free.

Get a higher ROI

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