Analyzing Campaign Statistics

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Justin Premick

At AWeber we compile subscriber and message statistics into 19 reports that customers can view and download in their accounts.

Sometimes customers overlook the reports because they’re not sure how to use them to improve their campaigns.

Let’s take a look at an example of a report - in this case, the “Follow Up Status - Unsubscribed” one - and what we can glean from it.

This report organizes unsubscribes based on which message in your follow up sequence they were last sent prior to unsubscribing.

In the report, we see that the largest “groups” of unsubscribes are occurring after subscribers get the first message in the sequence (but before they are sent the second one) and after they get the 10th message in the sequence.

Now, in this particular list, there are 10 messages, so the high number of unsubscribes listed in the final column should be taken with a grain of salt: it includes everyone who was sent that 10th follow up, whether that happened a week ago or a year ago.

So What Does It All Mean? Possible Interpretations

We see that many unsubscribes are occurring after the first message (26%). What about that message is driving such a large proportion of our unsubscribes?

A couple ways we could explain this:

The Message Doesn’t Meet Subscribers’ Expectations

Subscribers are upset/confused and may feel that future messages won’t give them what they want either. We’ve done a poor job of telling subscribers what to expect.

To solve this, we could look at our opt-in page and see whether what we are offering is accurately described.

Are we promising something that we’re not delivering? Is there any possible confusion about what subscribers are going to get by signing up?

While we’re at it, we should probably examine the source of our traffic. Who are we targeting? Is that who is actually coming to our site? If not, what changes to our advertising may correct this?

The Message Gives Subscribers 100% of What They Want

This may seem a bit backwards, but consider: if subscribers get everything they want from us after one email, might they see no future value in staying on the list?

For example, say we’re giving away a free download in the first message, and subscribers don’t want anything other than the download.

In this case, we’d look at the opt-in page and ask ourselves: are we promoting the content in the first message as the primary or sole benefit of subscribing? Is that the only benefit we intend to offer? If not, highlight longer-term/ongoing subscriber benefits on the opt-in page.

If offering a download, consider adding and promoting complementary materials for that download (such as a study guide or “how-to-use” tips). Make it clear to the subscriber that these are included. Alternatively, add an unannounced bonus in the first message to build anticipation of more such benefits in the future.

Reports help us to identify what we’re doing well (and not so well). Knowing how to read and draw conclusions from them is essential to effective marketing.

Tags: email statistics, examples

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One Response

Tony
November 17th, 2006 at 3:16 pm

Hi Justin,

Thanks for your latest case study.

It’s a great help to actually see these case
studies come alive, as it will help us more
accurately determine the usefulness of our
soon-to-be-RElaunched website.

We plan to have a whole series of messages
which will help the reader more fully understand
our simple software.

Keep them coming!