Inbox Performance Tracking

Inboxing is a bit of an art form

Inbox Performance Tracking. Sounds complicated, right? Well, it is! It’s also vital. How else would you sell if your emails never make it across?

What is Inbox Performance Tracking

Put quite simply, while a lot of agencies and brands alike aim to land in peoples’ inboxes time and time again and make that next sale, fewer of them than you’d imagine actually successfully manage to do this on a consistent basis. What’s a good deliverability rate, you ask? It absolutely needs to be in the high 90 percentiles – the closer you get to that golden 100%, the better. Anything less than 98% means that there’s work to do. Anything less than 95% and you really need a pro on your program ASAP.

It’s not easy to hit 100% – in fact, it’s quite hard, and requires constant monitoring along with frequent cleaning. When your list consists of tens if not hundreds of thousands of contacts, poor deliverability could mean that you’re missing out on a small town’s worth of interested customers with every single email that you send.

How exactly does inbox performance tracking help to boost your marketing efforts? Here are a few ways:

Like any strong relationship out there, reciprocation is key. Your customers rely on you to provide them with content that actually matters to them, at the right time. You rely on them engaging with your brand and coming back to buy over and over, but to make that happen, use all the tools at your disposal – inbox performance tracking, for instance.

It Refines Your Timing

Knowing when your audience checks out your emails is the most visible data that we need, in order to get a gauge of what time is most likely to drive a sale The last thing we want is for your messages to get swallowed up by a million other emails in the inbox that aren’t yours. Don’t set yourself up for failure - make sure that your emails arrive in their inbox right when they want it.

There’s no use in playing the long game when someone is actively engaging and showing interest in your content. One obvious proof of this is that your newest contacts are often your most engaged. Did you know that, aside from Cart and Browse Abandonment automated workflows, a simple Welcome Series is consistently one of the highest ROI-generating flows out there? Sometimes, it’s even the number 1 flow, if done well enough. And here you may have thought that it was just a way of saying hi to someone new. Nope, striking a contact while they’re hot - whether it be the beginning of their journey with you or 6 months down the line - can be that all-important factor that determines a sale vs an unsub. Engage with your contacts on their terms, not yours.

You Get a Good Frame of Reference

Want to know what makes your customers tick? We’re talking market research at the click of a button here. Impossible? Nope, not at all. Inbox performance tracking lets us know which headlines work best on your subscribers. Do certain segments prefer short & sweet, while others are word-sponges? What percentage of your lists & segments are comprised of each? With inbox performance tracking, you can actually know the answers, rather than shrugging at your computer screen as you read a blog on some email marketing agency’s website (yeah, we see you).

Get the Needle Moving

It’s important to weed out worthy prospects from not-so-serious ones for more streamlined targeting. How do you do this? Easy. Put on your ‘Big Brother’ hat and track everyone that’s opening your emails and clicking on your links, so you can be sure that your most engaged contacts get those awesome updates of yours and throwing money at you like it’s on fire, while the folks who are unengaged as a teenager at the opera don’t hit that Spam or Unsubscribe button.

Working the Content

Not all emails are read once. Those that do get opened more than once need to be studied. Why does one email get more attention than another? We use data to find out what worked best in past campaigns and double down on that, removing what never does and any redundancies that may affect future performance.

Automated Workflow Creation

Here’s a secret: not all emails are created equally. Some emails are best served hot - on a steaming plate of action-based goodness, rather than on any specific date. These emails, my friend, are called automated workflow messages. These miracles of email are automated - as you’d expect - and triggered based on an action that one of your contacts took on your site. These lower-funnel contacts are prime for messaging, and thanks to inbox performance tracking, we’re able to easily understand and modify when/what to send to these contacts, since they receive a message triggered with the same (or similar) delays as each other, based on a specific action that they take. How cool is that? With data and inbox performance tracking, it’s even cooler than Hansen back in the 90’s. That cool.

Performance Tracking Is a Worthy Investment

How you communicate and present your business can lead to loads of success or failure. Knowing who to approach and how to approach them is just as important.

If Dolce & Gabbana started placing their ads only in bus stations, their brand perception would go the way of the dodo bird. Existing customers and potential ones alike would flock (pardon the pun) to their competitor, and rightly so. Perception is everything, and marketing is your vehicle for creating the presence in your customer’s mind that you desire.

That’s why we track your emails in order to gauge how they’re being perceived and received. If customers aren’t buying, there’s always a reason. Sometimes that reason is external or force majeure, but more often than not, it boils down to how you’re presenting yourself to your customers and how well you’re fulfilling their needs. Inbox performance tracking is one of the best ways to increase delivery rates, bar none. The rhythm of your entire campaign will be determined by what we learn while collecting this data.

When someone unsubscribes, we want to know about it. This is useful information that we can leverage because when it comes to customers, you can’t just say “good riddance” and leave it at that. So we use inbox performance tracking to find out which email prompted that subscriber to turn to the dark side.

Then you’ve got spam reports that let you know when your email is marked as spam. These can help us make your emails less spammy. Sometimes you get issues with your recipient’s address and the email bounces, these are things we need to be aware of before we work on the next campaign. Sales are obviously the most important metric of all, but if you truly want to have your segments built out for maximum performance, the engagement metrics we can gather through analysing open and click rates will greatly surpass any revenue information.

What Metrics Do We Track?

Everybody Wins

At the end of the day, what matters most is that inbox performance tracking helps us to connect your brand with your customers in a meaningful way. We’re able to create an experience that’s especially suited to each individual, but at scale. Email is truly one of the most powerful marketing tools in this regard, and this is one of the most important methods of ensuring that you’re providing your customer what they need, without manually reaching out to every.single.person. As data informs every adjustment we make to the elements in your email, well-crafted messages become your value proposition to the recipient.

Having Your Data and Using It

We always ensure that we’re not just harvesting data but also putting it to good use. We fully digest what the numbers are saying and communicate this to you as clearly as possible, so you don’t need to do any of the grunt work, but get all the insights that matter to YOU. You can actually base your sales strategy on all the facts and figures that come from email tracking. You can gain guidance on what your next product should include or exclude. As we said at the top of this article, email marketing is multi-faceted, and if used properly, can be a strong market research vehicle for your brand. All this data will be provided, in-depth, by our amazing feranada of email experts on our monthly (or bi-weekly) check-in calls.

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Averaging over 1,300% ROI for our clients, our numbers show why we’re a leading email marketing agency.