Analytics review can help sharpen brand messaging and identify your best prospects.

Email marketing can be a quick and efficient way to deliver your inbound marketing content to select groups and prospects. However, many times marketers do not fully review the email analytics to understand viewer email habits, engagement with content, and how the success of the inbound marketing efforts is affected.

Recently I reviewed the email analytics for my newsletter, Strategic Air Marketing. The objective was to identify best prospects for personal outreach, in this case, recipients that have consistently opened and were actively sharing the newsletter content with their social media network.

What email analytics can reveal

To make large lists manageable, it is best to segment them into manageable sizes. I use annual revenue of the company and location by U.S. time zone. In addition, the newsletter is flighted by time of day and day of the week for delivery. I do this to gauge the acceptance of the content and whether I need to change an article based on open rates and click through.

Comparisons of newsletter mailing cycles reveal that it takes some time for recipients to become comfortable seeing your content, and that readership increases over multiple impressions.

Identifying best prospects

Average response rates for the time zone lists were 10-12% open rate and 15% for social sharing. Compare this to the traditional direct mail response rate of 1-3% or banner ad response of less than .005%, and you get a good idea why your email box is always overflowing.

To identify the best prospects, I established criterias of a minimum three-time open rate and recipients that shared the content on their social network

For example, the east coast time zone list numbers between 700-800 recipients. Using the above criteria identified, 29% of the list members fell into the best prospect list.

Improved response rate

Creating this best prospect list naturally led to producing a special edition newsletter. Content for the special edition featured a slide share presentation on the topic, “How to create a preference for your brand in a specification driven industry.”

Content was delivered to the best prospect list, resulting in a 30% open rate, 22% Facebook likes, 50% Twitter shares and 51% LinkedIn shares.

Continued emailing to additional best prospect lists across different time zones has mirrored the above results.

Inbound marketing analytics provide justifiable ROI for marketing investment

Companies that invest the necessary time and resources toward inbound marketing are reaping the benefits of identifying and engaging with new business prospects. I counsel those companies that hold a negative view of these efforts to take a closer look at the benefits of inbound marketing and integrate these tactics into their existing marketing efforts.

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