Strategies To Improve Your Email Marketing Metrics

1. Introduction to the Course: ever heard of the saying, If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else. It's a saying that we use not only in life but also in marketing, because goals are one of your most important allies. When it comes to marketing, goals are important because you need to know where you're going before you start walking. My name is Jenny, and I'm an email marketer and marketing automation consultant. In this course, I'm going to teach you some of the tactics that marketers such as myself used to improve their email marketing metrics. Throughout this class, I will teach you how to identify key metrics in your email marketing, how to set up goals and how to implement key email strategies. Such a segmentation You'll Ben, use thes skills to create your very own email marketing campaign strategy. This class is aimed towards those who have any kind of responsibility having to do with emails. Ideally, you have built or sent out an email marketing campaign at least once in the past. You do not need to be an advanced email marketer. It's on Lee helpful that you set up or managed a campaign at least once before. This will help to provide contacts into some of the terms and examples that I will be using this course. This class is great for anyone who works within or closely with the email marketing team for their company. The skills you'll learn are also great for business owners who are running the email marketing themselves. Another way you can utilize the skills learned in this course is to change the way you look at Marketing Analytics. While you may not be the actual person executing the email marketing campaigns, you may be in charge of analysing and presenting the data. The skills learned in this course will help you to be more insightful with email marketing data. By the end of this class, you'll be able to identify key email marketing metrics, how to set up email marketing goals and then you'll be able to execute and measure against those goals. So with that, I look forward to having you in this course. Let's begin 2. Class Project: your class project will be to create an email marketing plan for your next email campaign. I really like this project because it gets you to think like an actual marketing consultant . Many times as marketers were thinking of the overall marketing goal, However, for this product, I'm goingto have you drill down into creating a highly specific plan for an individual email campaign. Once you get the hang of creating micro gal's and micro marketing plans such as this, it will really get you thinking like a strategic email marketer. This class is working up into lessons that focus on typical metrics that marketers are looking to improve in their email. While I encourage you to watch the entire class from beginning to end, you can choose to watch each lesson based on your metrics of priority or watch, based on the metrics that you're trying to improve. This will make it easier for you when putting together your class project as you can easily rewatch any lesson that will help guide you as you're getting into your project. 3. Email Terms: to begin this course, let's first do a quick recap on email marketing. It's important, and key terms that you should know in this lesson will quickly go over. Why email marketing is such an important marketing channel. Still, to this day, we'll also quickly go over some of the acronyms such as E S, P, I S P, CTR and CVR. I will go over these as a quick refresher. If you've never heard of some of these terms, simply take notes while you're watching. I'm a interchange between the full word and its acronym. Throughout the course. Throughout the course, you will hear me say, E S P, which stands for email service provider. Your email service provider is the actual software vendor that you are using to send out your email marketing campaigns. With all of today's data privacy laws, it's important that you are using an E S p that helps you send emails that are in compliance with those laws. The E S P s go hand in hand with the I S P s or inbox service providers. Your subscribers all haven't e s p that they used to check their mail Gmail, Yahoo Apple Mail. These are all I S. P s. As we get further into the lesson, you will also hear me talk about open rates. Open rates are just a simple calculation that we use an email marketing to determine the rate at which people are opening your emails. The higher the better. When it comes to this number, click. The rates are the rate at which people are clicking your emails. The higher your click through rates. That means more people that are visiting your website Conversion rate is the rate at which people are purchasing your email. Most times the end goal in any email marketing campaign is toe. Have high conversion rates were also going to talk about segmentation. Segmentation is simply a way that you are breaking up your audience into subgroups so that you're not emailing everyone at once. Lastly, we'll talk about our oh I our allies dance for return on investment. Email, remarkably, is still one of the top marketing channels that have a high r a y, and that's why finding ways to improve your email marketing metrics can, in the end proved to be extremely profitable for your overall business. So just remember that email marketing is not dead. It still is a marketing channel with one of the highest our allies. Now that you've gotten a quick little refresher, let's go over to what companies and industries are best for email marketing. 4. Who Should Be Using Email: If you think email marketing may not be for your business or your industry, you may want to think again. We're gonna go over some of the court industries and types of businesses that are using email marketing as a part of their strategy. Let's look through a couple of companies that are doing emails, the most common types of businesses that use email marketing our retail stores. Typically, brands like Ever Lane benefit tremendously off of emails that are based off of user actions . For instance, if a user abandons their shopping cart, ever lean consent an abandoned car email over to that subscriber reminding them to purchase . We even see brands like Pellet in using emails. While they're not a company that sells millions of products, they do use their emails, most especially to stay top of mind. They frequently use their emails to remind subscribers that their bikes make the perfect gift. Also for those brands that are out there wondering if they should bother with emails when they are not a direct to consumer brand, Quick answer. Yes, you should. I love the way Kalua here uses emails to provide recipes for their consumers. What a perfect way to influence your customers, to go out and buy some more kalua. So as you can see, there really isn't any type of business that shouldn't be using emails. Both physical stores and online stores benefit tremendously from emails. Instead of looking at emails as serving one purpose, think of emails as a multipurpose channel. It can be used for communicating updates as well a selling. 5. Why Metrics Are Important: the importance of having goals for your email marketing and not just looking at metrics is so you can have a clear path of where you're going. Essentially, a goal helps us to know which path to take and how to measure. Our progress in this lesson will go over what are some key email marketing metrics, and we'll look at examples off different email, marketing dashboards and how to read those metrics within your own email marketing service providers. Typically, whenever I go into my email dashboards, I'm looking for a few main things to help me determine if my emails performed good or bad. For the most part, I am looking at open rates. I just want to see our people opening my emails. Are they engaging with my emails? Usually from day to day between emails, I can understand if some resonate. Some e mails actually got more opens versus other emails that maybe got less. And then I could think about Was it something like the sun time? Was it something like the subject line or any other variables that could have caused the difference in open rates? I am also looking at Click the rates I like to look at my click through rates just so I can understand our people actually going further than just opening it. Click through rates really tell you if someone is interested in what they saw in the email and wants to explore further. So a click for me is someone saying they are interested. The one of the main things that I want everyone to really pay attention to, especially if you are selling products or selling something from your email that looks for a conversion. Then you want to look for Annie S P. That's able to show you revenue attribution from your emails. So in this dashboard, whenever I go into looking it looking at usually from the individual email standpoint, I'll go ahead and see what was the revenue that that particular email Baden. In this case, I'm looking at it from an average standpoint. But revenue coming in free from your email is a very strong factor that you want to consider. And then here is conversion rate. Ah, so place, order rate or conversion rate that's going to tell you what's the conversion rate from your emails in your platform. There are other metrics that I look for just to see whether my campaigns So my individual broadcast that I send out perform better than my flows. In other words, my automation that go out strictly based on behavior. And usually I look for in each friends that are happening Is it seasonal? Is it by day on whatever it ISS, So get familiar with your email dashboard. Whatever E S. P you're using, there's going to be an analytics dashboard and just get familiar with the metrics that they're showing you and try to explore any and all kinds of metrics that they have. Just so you understand what's capable from that platform. But then you're gonna start to narrow in and start to get a feel for what are the ones that you look to the most. And then you may want to set up some kind of dashboard where it's personalized to, so that way you can look at it daily. Now, every platform or email service providers gonna be different in terms of what they offer you. What I do like about one of the platforms that I use is that there's also metrics on list engagements so listed engagements are really important because I create a lot of segments and we're gonna talk about segments later in this course. And if I'm able to understand which segments our mawr engaged when I send out emails and lead to better open rates when I send out emails are probably gonna want to send to that list more or send them my most important emails first, or send them my product promotions or product previews anything like that, right? So I'm looking at a particular segment, and it's not my largest segment by no means at all. But it's a very engaged segment. Average open rate over 30 days is above 60%. That's huge. That's a segment that I really want. Teoh send us many emails as possible to now. Every email service provider is going to be different, but at the very minimum or at the very basic level, they're going to show you open rates they're going to show you, click through rates and then they're going to show you unsubscribed and bounce rates. So again, just get familiar with your email service providers platform and the dashboards that they provide you, and at the very basic level. You want to make sure you're looking at your open rates, and you want to make sure you're looking at your clicker rates, and then at least you have a basic understanding of the metrics that you can use to help improve your emails. So here are a few tips. Do not look at your metrics in your email dashboard until you have set up your goals. Focus on Onley 1 to 2 max, three metrics at a time, and for a single campaign, focus on one metric or goal in the next lesson will go over how to set up your marketing goals. 6. Creating Your Goals: in this lesson, we'll look at a few example goals, some meaningful goals as lost, some not so meaningful goals. We'll also work on structuring out your goal into a sentence. By the end of this lesson, you'll have the first part of your project completed, which is to set up your email marketing goal Now, as a part of your class project, you were going to be working on your marketing goals. Now Goals air Super important because this is going to help you determine which of those metrics that you just looked at are going to be most important for you and determining how to improve your email marketing. Now, every campaign that I send out has a particular goal. One can't Pain may have a goal to increase open rates, while the next campaign may have a goal to increase clicked raids. The reason why each of my campaigns have individual goals is because it sets up the strategy that I'm going to put in play in order to achieve those goals. For instance, if I want to improve my engagement, then that probably means that I want to improve open rates because engagements with my email first of all means opening those emails and by looking at my open rates, that's gonna help me determine whether I should work on my subject lines or whether I should work on the times that I sent out the emails. I'm gonna work on tactics that actually help to improve those open rates in your workbook. The first exercise is to work on your marketing gold. You'll see an example that I have here. The exercise is basically calling for you to fill in the blanks of this goal sentence. I'm going to read this sentence out for you. Our goal this quarter is to increase or decrease blank to buy blank in order to blank. So what goes in those blanks are the 1st 1 Our goal this quarter is to now noticed that I circled increase because open rates is what I'm filling in for that first point. So I always want my open rates to go higher. So increase now, I want my open rates to increase to 22%. So that's why, of course, a circle, too. There are some cases where you may say I want my sales to increase by $100,000. So in that case, you would circle by and then you would put the actual amount that you're trying to increase that particular metric by and then the last part. In order to blink that blank, you're gonna fill with your overall desire of what the outcome you want to be from this change. So the reason that I want my open rates to increase want this change to happen is because I feel that right now with my emails, I'm getting low engagement rates. Okay, so this sentence, our goal this quarter is to increase open rates to 22% in order to improve overall engagements. Now, my sentence is complete, and now I have a complete formalized email marketing goal. Now, a few things to help you here in these example. Email marketing metrics. If you're not really sure which metric you're trying improve on, just think about what are your problem areas. So if you feel that you have low engagements with your emails, people are not opening your emails. You get really low, lackluster open rates than open rates is the metric that you're gonna look to improve if you have low site traffic coming from your emails than click through Rates are gonna be what you want to improve If you're getting a lot of spam complaints or you see that your emails air going to spam, well, then, of course, you're gonna want it. Decrease your spam rate and then for low sales figures from your email. So your emails are not generating the amount of sales that you think they should. Well, then you're gonna work on improving your conversion rates. So in the exercise here in this box over here, you're going to work on your marketing gold statement and specifically put it in this box. So some key takeaways when setting up your goals, focused on goals that are meaningful for your business don't choose a gold just because other companies air focusing on it. This will ensure that you're setting up tactics that move your bottom line goals forward 7. Industry Benchmarks: in this lesson. We'll look at a few industry benchmarks and determine how to find a baseline for measuring your performance. There are a couple of different places that you can look for industry benchmark reports. One of the first places that I'll tell you to look is in the E s p that you're using. Typically es piece provide benchmark reports yearly that give a breakdown of how clients that use their platform performed over the past year. The advantage of using your E. S. P S benchmark report is that they're typically easy to find. You can simply search the Web type in the name of your GSP, plus the word benchmark, and you report should come up in the top of the results. Or you can simply ask your E S P for their benchmark report. I'm sure they gladly give it to you. Most of the different benchmark reports not only provide you with overall open and click rates, they even go as far as to give you a breakdown off email, automated flows and types of campaigns. The other place to look for a benchmark reports is through third party sources such as trade publications, trade publications, of course, given over over port of benchmarks across all types of industries and all types of E S. P s. The benefit of getting metrics through a trade publication is that you're able to compare your email metrics overall. Also, typically, trademark benchmarks are typically lower because the sample size is much wider and vary than that of the sample size of an individual S P, which only includes their audience. So here are a few tips. When you're looking for benchmarks, remember to check various sources. Don't just rely on one source to set your benchmarks. It may be helpful to take the average of the Varian benchmarks that you found. You should also remember toe. Look for businesses that are more closely aligned to yours and pay attention to business activity more than industry to find those commonalities. Lastly, remember that you can also look at your own current business metrics and use those as a baseline 8. Looking At Your Metrics: The hardest part about figuring out how to improve your email is figuring out where toe look. If there's a problem, it's like looking under the hood and not knowing what to touch. Let's go over some key things to look for and pay attention to in your email marketing. We'll go into a specific email campaign as an example and demonstrate how to form a hypothesis. Let's look at two examples. Email campaigns. The first campaign on the left was sent about three weeks before the campaign. On the right, you can see that there are a couple of differences in the results between the two campaigns . The most striking differences are the clicks and the conversions. I would say that open rates are about the same within 20 to 30% range, while, of course, the second email outperforms more than the first in terms of open rates, I wouldn't necessarily say that had a problem with open rates in the first email. And also, if you look at your benchmark reports, you will see that even 23% urban rate is pretty much on par with industry averages. So the most striking difference is in what caused the subscribers to click more and then eventually purchase more sales. Conversions jumped from one conversion in the first email toe, 47 in the second email. Just seeing this striking difference in sales should make me wonder what happened. What was done differently, since we know that in order for someone to buy, they must click. We also want to look at click rates, and we can see that clicks were extremely high as well. So we could then look into the email itself and see what was it about the content that made the person click. Notice that I'm not mentioning looking at the subject line again because our open rates were not that drastically different. There's no reason toe look at the open rates, and there's nothing to lead me to believe that my subject line had any effect on causing the person toe open the email more. The answer lies in the content of the email itself. I can tell you that from this email, the first email was an mostly image email, while the second email was a mostly text based email, so I could then pose the hypothesis or question. Does a tech space email drive, more clicks and, in effect, more sales than a mostly image based email. Once I have this question, I can then start thinking about looking to prove this hypothesis by running a few more campaigns that have mostly texting them. So remember, use comparisons to help guide you. When looking for problem areas, break down the analysis of your findings and then form questions or head prophecies on items that you suspect are problem areas. 9. Maintaining A Healthy Email List: before fixing any kind of email problem, we want to first make sure that you have a healthy list growing practice. In this lesson, we'll look at way to determine if your list is healthy and also go over ways to grow and maintain a healthy list. Let's look back at the campaign from the previous lesson. There are a few key metrics that you can look at that will tell you whether your subscriber list is healthy or not. Those metrics are unsubscribe rate, delivery rate, spam, complaint rate and bounce rate. We want to keep our unsubscribe rate low. Typically, anything below 0.2% is in the healthy zone. We also want to make sure that our delivery rate is high. Of course, we expect 100% of our emails to get delivered. But typically companies will see that there's always a 2 to 3% variance and emails that don't successfully get delivered. For a number of reasons. Spam completes. We want to keep as low as possible. 30.1% Spam complaint rate is what's acceptable. If you start to see your spam complaint rates rise higher than that, then you'll want to look at your list and make sure that you have subscribers that are truly opted into your list and are receiving the type of content that they originally signed up for. Last but not least, bounce rates are highly important when it comes to healthy list practices. It's normal to have a few emails bounced every time you send out a broadcast email. And this can happen sometimes just because the persons in boxes full. But if you start to notice that your bounce rates are higher than what you're noticing for many of your benchmark reports, then you will want to ensure that you fix that problem I mentioned earlier about understanding the overall engagement of your subscribers as a segment. Now we're going to talk about segments coming up in general, but you want to make sure that you are sending out emails on Lee to people that actually want to receive emails. And these are the people that actually open emails whenever they receive an email. The best way to do this is to use your email platform to build out a segment that targets your most active and engaged users. You can do this by looking for people who have opened your emails at least 34 or five times in the last 30 days or 60 days. You can even go as far as 90 days, depending on what your frequency is. Same thing As clicks, you can go ahead and do a search for people who've clicked on your email at least once before in the last 30 days. If you send out emails daily, then you'll want to have a shorter time frame off when you want to see those clicks and open. So 30 days or 60 days is just fine. If you send out emails once every two weeks or once every three weeks, then it may be just fine toe. Open your parameters to the last 60 days. As a rule of thumb, be sure to check your list quality as the number one step when looking to improve your overall email marketing metrics. Working with an unhealthy list is like trying to clean a dirty pot with the greasy sponge. Follow the steps learned in this lesson, and you'll have conquered one of the most important steps that email marketers use to improve their email marketing metrics 10. Improving Open Rates: open rates, while not always meaningful, are super important to your email list. There is a reason why I pay attention to email open rates, but it's not for the reason that you think the key to improving your open rates is toe Onley. Send to people that actually open emails while everyone that opens your email may not actually equate with people that actually want your emails. Your eyes, peas don't know the difference. They purely see email opens as email interests, and the more opens your emails get, the less inboxes your eyes peas will get. Keep. In a way, this is like tricking the system. Let's use a little analogy here. The reason why I say Onley send to people that open your email is because you're I S P is watching. In a sense, your eyes P acts as a gatekeeper or protector for two recipients. In effect, it actually has the ability to block you the company from communicating with the consumer. Your customer. When your email goes into spam that is happening solely at the discretion of the I S. P. Sure, there are some cases when a person directly marks us spam, but That's not what I'm speaking of here. I s P s deliberately send emails to spam If it perceives that your email is unwanted by the recipient, think about a king and his gatekeeper. If you're trying to enter the King's castle, what friends that you deem the king will love? Yet the king doesn't know you. The gatekeeper is going to be suspicious. Let's say he decides to let you in as a test to see if the king enjoys your company. If only 20% of your audience is entertaining the king, the next time you decide to visit, the gatekeeper will probably say no. Based on this logic, the next time you may decide to get smart and say, You know what? This time I will only bring with me to the party the 20% that entertain the king last time . So this time, when you enter the castle, the gatekeeper notices that a large percentage of your friends are entertaining the king. Let's say 50% this time to the gatekeeper. This is a pretty good number of people. So on all your next visits he will let you in without any interference because he sees that you're a reputable party guests as well as your friends. This logic is what we dio when we segment re carve out on Lee are most engaged people. This way, we can trick the gatekeeper or diess peak. While open race shouldn't be your main metric and email marketing, they are an important part of the email ecosystem that eventually helps to improve overall email, performance and sales. 11. Improving Click Thru Rates: just like open rates. Click through rates Are Onley important? If you're backing them up against a goal that you set, click through rates can help improve sales. But not always. Let's look at ways to measure and improve your clip. The rates click through rates are important when you want the user to take the next step. Not all emails have the intention of bringing the user to another destination, but usually they dio. When we're looking for higher clicks, we're usually looking for the user to either visit a page, view a product on our safe, browse a collection Rita Blawg or poster, watched a video or simply to make a purchase. In order to improve click through rates, you have to look at your content and your call to action. Your content helps to encourage the user to want to click. Typically, the content leaves them wanting to know more, and that more could be wanting to be the product in more detail or wanting to see the price I mentioned before that tax base emails performed extremely well in getting more people to click on my email. Why was this? Well, it was probably because people wanted to know more about the products that they just read about. I encourage you to test out text emails, which your audience as well as copy. See if text emails encourage more second actions. When it comes to the call to action buttons or links, it's important to test what makes people click. You may find it has less to do with the actual call to action and what it says and more to do with where and how the call to action is placed. Within the email. Have a look at thes three particular emails. Uncommon Goods has a very unique way of setting up their content and their called toe actions. Within their emails. They don't always just use buttons that go below below the image or the tax. They also use boxes. Look in the second email, where they show a few options off what can be included in your membership in the email. By wonderfully, I love that they show a preview of each of the books that they have and then allow you to click through to learn more separating each book. So that way you can choose the one that you want to go to make sure your call to action stands out and gives the subscriber and incentive toe want to know more about what's behind that click. So remember, click through rates are another important metric, however. Make sure you are creating micro goals for your click through rates. For example, instead of saying I want more people to visit my site via email, you should say I want to increase product views. This will help you to think more strategically about where you're sending your subscribers when they click on your campaign. 12. Keys To Avoiding The Spam Folder: spam unbalances can be a huge problem in the email marketing world. We'll talk about ways to keep your span rates down and how to avoid the spam folders. Spam is defined as unwanted or unsolicited emails, usually sent in bulk by a sender not personally known by the recipient. The biggest problem with spam is that it is not only defined and prevented by the I. S. P. Spam is also what the recipient perceives you to be. When it comes to spam, think of yourself as guilty as deemed by the recipient until proven Well, let's face it, you may never have a chance to prove yourself innocent once the recipient marks us spam and you're gonna be in their spam folders for good. So in other words, you only have one shot to get it right. You can avoid getting marked a spam by doing a few things. One of the main actions being building a healthy subscriber lists you should Onley ever send to people that explicitly opted to be on your list? You should also respect your recipients inbox and not send emails that feel spammy using all caps in your subject lines or even having subject lines that are misleading from the actual content of the email. These are all things that trigger spam warnings in the eyes of your recipient and your eyes . People remember to get ahead of your spam problem before it gets ahead of you. Span is one of the easiest problems to avoid but one of the hardest problems to get out off . 13. How To Segment Your Lists: I mentioned segmenting several times throughout this lesson. Mount. Let's look at how to build a dynamic segment This wasn't particularly will focus on how to plan out your segments and then eventually build those out in your own E. S. P. Also, you'll use thes segments as a part of your final project, said Minton, is key to any successful marketing plan. In this lesson, we're going to go into your workbook as planning a segment will be part of your exercise. Segments are simply subgroups of your entire lists. Typically, you are grouping people with similar characteristics together. In other words, segments are not random. They're strategically planned. An example of a segment is frequent purchases segment or teddy bear lovers segment. The key is to group people who are likely to behave or react in similar ways. The intention is to assume that they will react to messaging that speaks directly to them. In your workbook, you'll see in this example, I've provided a guide on how to build your segment strategically. First, I want you to group the tributes that you like your segments toe have. This could be a group of your audience that has never purchased from you before but that have opened the past 10 emails and whose interest isn't science. Most E. S P s today collect this data or allow you to build user profiles with this data. As you get to know your audience in the column on the right, I want you to list up the attributes that you don't want this segment toe have. Technically, these will create two different segments for you. From here, you could plan out an email that specifically speaks to people that have never purchased from you the segment of purchasers who never opened emails, I'd say for retargeting those people on another mass marketing platform, as they probably are least likely to ever open your emails in your workbook. I want you to do the same thing that we didn't exercise. And I want you to think about your segment in terms off. What are all the attributes that you want to be included in what they do and how they behave. And then on the right column, you're going to go ahead and put in. What are the attributes that you do not want to include? Once you've done that, I think about your segment and what this segment can easily be called. So that way you can reference it when you're setting up your campaign. And then it will be easily be able to be understood in the planning part of the your workbook who you're sending this audience to. What kind of messaging should you direct at this audience? In other words, what should the subject line say? And then, of course, what should the content have in it? So if you're still sending out email to all of your audience, stop what you're doing today and start segmenting. Now. Planning out your segments is a way for you to speak to your audience on that 1 to 1 marketing level, as opposed to that one too many UN personalized marketing level. 14. Google Analytics vs. Platform Metrics: One of the questions that I get asked a lot is whether you should look at your metrics in Google Analytics or your E S P dashboard. Now, that question is a very valid question. And my answer to that is really No matter where you look, just make sure you're consistent about where you're looking. So when I say that, what I mean is, you don't want to take part of your metrics when you're measuring your email from your Google Analytics dashboard and another part of your metrics for the same cohort in the same timeframe from your E S P dashboard. Because what you're getting there is a mix of two different data sources, which leads to some inaccuracies. Just do two different variables that are coming out of those different analytics dashboards . So if you're going to do, we're a report for your CEO, your CMO for the entire team. Every time you do that report, you're gonna want to choose where you're getting those metrics from month over month. So if you choose Google analytics, stick with Google Analytics. If you choose to use the metrics from your PSP dashboard, stick with those not to say that you can't use or look at the different dashboards you totally can, and you can do your own internal analysis for that. And you may have different reasons for trying to pick through data or finding different data that may be more useful, depending on what dashboard you're using to using. However, just when it comes to a measuring and I'm doing a comparison month over month and trying to understand the different KP eyes that I'm looking at, you're gonna want to use one true source. Now, let me just explain. Ah, little bit of the difference is that you will find within Google Analytics. So Google Analytics does tracked email behavior, and it does track email metrics. When you go into your Google Analytics dashboard under the channels section, you will see email there, and Google automatically tracks that because it's able to tell that someone is coming from an email platform. Whether it's a Gmail, Yahoo, they'll know that someone clicked on your site. Ah, from an email that they receive. That could be a direct email that someone sent to them, um V ah, some kind of email service. Or it could be from any of your marketing campaigns. Now there are two things I'm gonna show you first. So in your Google Analytics dashboard, if you go to the admin section, you will see under the view area. There is a section called Channel Settings. You want to click on that, and you want to go to Channel Grouping under channel grouping. Just go ahead and click on that toe. Open that up and here's where you'll see all of your different channels that you have that you're saying that you have US traffic source. From now, Google has a default for many of these so direct organic search social email. Facebook Messenger. All of those are sorry, not Facebook Messenger, but affiliates refer. All of those are defaults sources that Google has put in the platform already because they're so common, you can go ahead and create your own. So in my case, I had a Facebook messenger as a new source of traffic, and I wanted to separate that because Google doesn't separate that from their regular social traffic. So I separated that you can do the same, so email. Usually that actually doesn't really need to change, but let's say you had two different email sources of how you emailed your your your database. Maybe you have email that comes from your sales teams, and then you have emails that come from your marketing teams. You may, And if there's a way you could distinguish that, you may want to create two different channel sources. So marketing emails versus sales emails now so further explain where that source comes from . So Google looks for gonna open this up really fast for you. Google looks for what it would define as email, and in this case, Google has a system to find. It looks for anything that has a medium that matches email in your email service provider. Pretty much most email service providers today let you customize to some extent the U. T. M tracking you team tracking as a standard digital marketing term that you'll hear, um, in the digital marketing world very often. So look for your you team tracking settings in your email provider. If you can't find them, I would reach out to the support off the SP that you're using and ask them Where can I find my default? You tm parameters. And how can I change them or customize them? Hopefully, the answer is that you can customize them a bit. If the answer is no, you can't customize them. It's not a huge problem. Most of the times I've really don't have to go in and customize any you. 10 parameters by where it's helpful is if you can do some customization, you will be able to define the source you tm source. Google looks. Google analytics looks for the U. T M sourcing, and you will be able to say, Well, I want the flow name or the campaign name to be the source. So if it's coming from a welcome flow, Google analytics will separate where all the email clicks came from. So not just your overall marketing email, but it came from the walk on email in the marketing or the abandoned car email or the on boarding you Now medium, you really usually never have to change and again because that's why you want to keep it as email, cause that's what Really Google's just gonna channel everything under email. But when you drill down, you can go ahead and look by name so usually gonna keep your you tm medium as email and then for campaign. This is where you're gonna specify the individual email that it was so it's not just the welcome email, but here's the actual names. Usually that's like the subject line or the whatever that individual email says. So in the abandoned cart flow, for instance, the third emailed abandoned cart would be last chance to redeem your coupon, and that's what it would say. So it's a way for you to drill down. And when you go into your Google analytics, you're able to open that email section and not only see that it just came from, you know, your overall email marketing campaigns. But you can see Oh, it came from the email that I sent out that had to do with e commerce business. Or it came from the email that I sent out about Facebook Messenger. So that's the importance of being able to define your you TN parameters. If your email service provider does not have a way for you to customize your you TN parameters and you want to, you want to be able to further drill down, by which flow did it come from and which campaign. Did it come from? Which email did it come from? Then what I would recommend you do is create a system to keep track of your you tm links. So any time you put a link into your email, you will upend the U. T. M tracking end of of that link to your link in your email and the U team tracking templates . They're available all over the Internet. You can do a search for you team tracking template. I will provide this one here so you can use it very standard. And the way you use it is you have your link. So google story dot com and you're just gonna use this section to describe what it is that the email is about. So let's just say it is the 15% off email. Find a link that I'm using in that emails. Google store dot com Now everything that goes after Google store dot com This question mark is basically telling Google Hey, everything after this question mark is for tracking purposes. The EU has nothing to do with changing the page source or destination or anything like that . Then the u T M source column page. You'll see. This looks very much. What of what we're looking Appear you, Tim Source. You Tim Medium. You tm campaign. We have all of these in the school sheet. You tim source, You tm meeting meat medium. You team campaign. So you tam source and we're gonna put coupon. So that way I know that this they clicked on the link that had to do with the coupon medium again, we're gonna keep as email No need to customize that you tm campaign. We're gonna name that campaign, which is summer sale. In your case, you would probably put the, you know, smiling emoji email number three, whatever it is to get more specific. So, you know, whenever you look in Google analytics and then you, tim content optional. You don't have to have that in there. Then you're going to get this link this link you're going to copy, and you're going to paste it in your email. And that is how you will get your drill down over here in your emails to be more specific, and it won't show up right here. You see all that gibberish? That's because it doesn't have you. Tm tracking labelling attached to it. If it had everything after that cut, that question mark would say, Well, this came specifically from this welcome email that had 15% off coupon. So now, to answer the question about whether it's beneficial to look in Google analytics for your email marketing metrics or to just use your E S P dashboard. So here's the major differences for me. In my opinion, the Google Analytics Dashboard is a very great, true, reliable single source destination for tracking how your emails doing, especially relative to all the other different channels that you have social, organic, direct traffic. All of that. However, one thing about Google Analytics is that as a default, it tracks by last click. Now there are ways that you can change your attribution preferences. But last click is that is the default. All that means is that Google is looking for the last click that someone did before they made a purchase. So if someone found you through an organic search and then got to your page signed up for your lists, your email list didn't buy just yet, Then got an email open that email clicked on that email found out more about your state on your page, didn't buy just yet and then closed the email. Two days passes, they get another email from you, and it's saying, Hey, last chance to use your coupon. They close that email because maybe they're on their phone and then they go on their chrome or safari browser, and they do a search for your company or your store, and they click on the link to open up the website to your store. And then they go ahead and make a purchase using the coupon that they found in that email. Because any email entice them to buy and they make a purchase. Google is detecting that that purchase that last click off that purchase came from them doing in organic search. Now, mind you, they did find you through organic search in a few days ago. But it was really those two emails that second email in particular, that prompted them to buy. So technically, Gould didn't see that because that's not that's not the last click. What they saw was the organic search. So Google is going to give credit toward the organic search now leads to some debate which one should get credit, the email or organic search? Many really say all should get credit, and I do believe that's true. There are ways that you can kind of adjust the credit level of who gets credit from a limited view. If you don't really change much of the defaults on your Google analytics, Google's not going to show you that. And that's why you'll see that Google actually doesn't really show much. Attribution when it comes to email marketing within their dashboard. If you don't set the customization is up to really reflect that. So you have to be very careful about when you're using Google Analytics. And just to know that there are some some deficiencies now on the flip side, when it comes to measuring within your E S P, there are some concert that too many SPS do let you said an attribution window now mind U. E. S P there, of course, trying to really take all the credit because that's the only thing they're really defending is their turf. So usually that attribution window is set to 45 days now, depending on how often you send emails, you may want to adjust that if you send emails once a week for five days, is probably pretty good. If you send emails daily, then you probably only want a one day attribution. You don't want to be that long for four days, especially since you're sending emails out often. So you have to also ask your E S P what's their attribution and, um, conversion models when it comes to how it's tracking sales with when within its dashboard. So just be cognisant of those differences and why looking at one dashboard over another can have its benefits. But why can also have its cons? And again, like I say, just choose to stick with the platform one reporting your metrics and comparing them over time and you'll be fine. 15. Bonus 1: Stop Sending To Entire List: one of the biggest mistakes I see. An email marketing is when companies air sending email blasts to the entire list. I want to give you a few reasons and a few pointers on why I say Stop sending email blasts out to your entire list. And when I say stop, I mean stop today when you send your emails out to your entire lists, you're digging yourself further down the spam complaint. Rabbit Hole. Remember the 20% of your audience that Maupin most of your emails are going to be the ones that help improve your open rates and overall reputation when it comes to email marketing. Gone are the days that we brag about how big our email lest is. Instead, you should be bragging about how engaged your subscribers are. 16. Bonus 2: Email Frequency: e. I have a saying that less is more, but sometimes more is less. Here's what I mean by that. Less is more and more is less simply because sending to less people who are engaged more often is more effective than sending two more people who are barely engaged less often. So whenever someone asked me how frequent should they send emails, I usually follow up by asking, Well, how engaged is your audience? There's really no magic answer, but to improve on your segmentation so you can develop a really engaged list. I've even seen companies that have such unengaged group of segments that they are able to send out emails every single day. But guess what? Not everyone is receiving that email every single day. Why? Well, because of segmentation segments will on Lee Pullen people that are qualified to receive the email at the time of sending. So if someone stopped opening your emails, they wouldn't qualify for your segment that specifically says that they had to have open 10 of the last emails. Another thing to keep in mind is that you think about whether it's necessary toe have a managed preferences page. While these can sometimes serve as a handy tool for your company. You can run into the risk of not feeling the need to segment. Manage preferences gives you a false sense of segmentation when it comes to email or anything. Marketing, for that matter, I say trust what the user does more than what they say. So a person may mark that they'd like to receive your weekly emails, but that doesn't really mean that they're gonna open your emails each week. Teoh easily plan out your email campaigns, I say. Instead of planning by frequency, period, I prefer to set my emails up as many campaigns or product launches. With this approach, I have a cohort of emails that belonged to the same topic or theme, and they all have a goal of having the user take the same action. This is what I call the campaign launch approach, so my emails will be planned in five part increments that will go out over the course of five weeks. For example, in this example, here you'll see that I have one goal that's basically to have people sign up for my lists, but then also to book a meeting as you can see here I have a goal set up, and each email in the Siris are all geared towards getting people to complete that goal. After a complete the 45 emails in this series, I take a pause and then I don't send any emails out until my next campaign launch phase. This is a different approach than sending out emails based on a weekly cadence or monthly cadence, but I suggest you try it and see if it works for your company or your products. 17. Conclusion: congrats. You've made it to the end of this lesson. I hope that you've gotten some new ideas on how to approach, measure and improve your email marketing throughout this course, we've learned the importance of email in today's marketing world. How to identify key metrics, how to set up your goals for your, you know, marketing and key metrics to pay attention to and how to improve those metrics. Email marketing can be one of the most important marketing channels for your business. If you spend time analysing the metrics that matter and work on improving those, you'll begin to see performance and increase those over time. Go back through any of the lessons that have gone through in this course as a refresher and use them for your class project. I'm really looking forward to seeing your projects. Be sure to upload them to get some feedback and encouragement as you begin improving your email marketing metrics