How to Make the Most of Data-driven Email Marketing

If you're one of those people suffering from headaches at the mere thought of looking at numbers and graphs, stick with us for a second! We'll prove that data-driven email marketing can be pleasant (you read that right!) AND wildly profitable.

One study shows that targeting specific customer groups and using behavior-triggered emails achieves an open rate between 25 and 46%, while the 2023 average hovered around 10-20%. Similarly for the click-through rate – personalized messages based on real subscriber data help to get it up from the 2-3% average to as much as 11%.

One thing is clear – emails that address your audience’s specific wants and needs see the highest engagement. Let us guide you through the essence of data-driven email marketing – what meaningful numbers about your subscribers and campaigns to collect and how to use them to get the highest ROI from your strategy.

What is data-driven email marketing?

If you’re launching email campaigns, chances are you aim to generate leads, nurture client relationships and convert prospects into paying customers.

Data-driven email marketing has the same goal but can achieve it more effectively because it is based on subscriber behavior data rather than guesswork. Data that can tell us more about subscriber behavior includes email metrics, such as open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate etc., engagement levels or mobile devices usage.

With a data-driven approach, you can learn how to optimize your email marketing strategy to effectively engage your audience using segmentation, personalization and optimal timing.

Why is data-driven email marketing important?

Every person on this planet is different – so, naturally, their habits and interests as email subscribers vary. Even if you read every post and publication from all the biggest email marketing gurus, you still won't know your audience. The only way to get the best possible results (i.e., high engagement, conversion rates and overall marketing effectiveness) is to test, analyze and refine your tactics.

Consider these possibilities that data-driven email campaigns give you:

• Testing and optimizing emails – A/B testing is a huge chunk of the data-driven email marketing process and campaign success. With this approach, you compare how two emails (with the same goal, sent to the same target group or separate segments) fare against each other. When A/B testing, you can play around with a different subject line, content type (videos, GIFs, storytelling etc.), CTA, text formatting and more. Pick the one that gets you better results, and A/B test again, with a new idea in place of the "loser" from the previous round. This is one of our favorite ways to get the most juice from your email campaign ideas.
• Setting benchmarks and goals – When you know your current results, you can set achievable objectives for future campaigns. Compare your key metrics to your historical data and industry standards to set realistic growth goals. Then, regularly monitor your results to determine whether you're on track or need to adjust anything.
• Segmenting subscribers – A one-size-fits-all approach is no longer effective in email marketing (let's be honest – was it ever?). Almost 60% of email marketers confirm that personalization is vital in cost-effectively engaging subscribers. This is where segmentation comes in. When it's based on data-driven insights, it lets you break down your subscriber list into small, targeted segments sorted into similar demographic data, purchase history or behavior. Delivering highly relevant emails to each segment increases your audience's engagement, satisfaction and conversion rate.
• Allocating resources more effectively – By acting on facts instead of guesswork, your email marketing strategy becomes more successful, meaning your actions lead to the best results. When you focus on the most effective tactics, you free up resources (time, budget, manpower) and get the highest possible ROI. Don't just optimize once, though. Make polishing your data-driven marketing an ongoing process. Identify new opportunities for improvement, prioritize and optimize actions to see your results skyrocket.

Now that we have the "why" out of the way, let's dive into the "how."

How to make the best of data-driven email marketing with SEINō

SEINō is the email analytics tool that tracks all aspects of your email performance and customer engagement. This highly customizable system identifies areas for improvement and lets you tailor your strategy to your (and your subscribers') needs and preferences.

Connect SEINō with GA4 and your ESP to combine all data

Be careful not to step on the data silos mine when operating with information. The best way to avoid this common trap is to connect SEINō with your ESP and Google Analytics, removing the need for manual data entry (and the excess working hours and error risk that go with it). It's as easy as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F41yRGbxNIs

These are all the ESPs SEINō currently integrates with:

• Braze
• Klaviyo
• ActiveCampaign
• Deployteq
• Copernica
• MailCampaigns
• Mailkit
• Spotler
• HubSpot
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Intuit Mailchimp
• Selligent

Don't see your email service provider on the list? Don't hesitate to contact us at hello@seino.ai to let us know. We're constantly looking for new partnerships and would be happy to work on a new, seamless ESP connection.

You can integrate SEINō with more than ESPs, though. It's just as easy to connect it with Google Analytics, SMTPeter and Google BigQuery, to name a few.

Choose key metrics and targets

SEINō is unique in its ability to monitor transactional metrics. These include revenue per email, average order value and total revenue generated from a single campaign. This feature makes it much easier to track the revenue goals of your email marketing campaigns and stick to recommended transactional email best practices.

Another uncommon characteristic of this tool is the ability to track the subscriber list and see the development of your customer base. SEINō gives you near real-time insights about your audience and even lets you set up alerts for worrying scenarios, like a sudden unsubscribe rate increase.

That's not all – here are the main email marketing KPIs you can track with SEINō (with screenshots of what they look like in our email marketing dashboard):

• Conversion rate

• Revenue

• Session duration

• Open rate

• Sent all

• Sent unique

• Average order value

• Complaint rate

• Email deliverability

• Click-through rate

• List growth rate

• Bounce rate
• Forwarding rate

Our tool lets you set specific targets and benchmarks for each metric and visualize how each campaign performs over time. Because without set goals, how would you measure your email marketing success? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b97ZTBxHwHg&ab_channel=SEIN%C5%8D%7CEmailAnalytics

Set up alerts

We've mentioned alerts that SEINō sends out when triggered by undesirable results of your email marketing efforts. Let us expand on that, as it's a super helpful feature for avoiding costly errors.

Here's a step-by-step tutorial for setting up custom notifications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFS-I0l37Ow&ab_channel=SEIN%C5%8D%7CEmailAnalytics

You'll be glad to know we recently upgraded our alerting feature with a "Group By" option. This means that you don't have to set up tens of separate notification triggers for each email campaign or country. Instead, you can set an alert for, let's say, open rates dropping below 30% and group by market. You'll get notified when the open % drops below this target in any market you're emailing.

Segment your subscribers based on engagement

So... your numbers went down? Now what? If you're prone to panic, it might be tempting to scramble to any action, so you at least feel like you're doing something to counteract it. Based on our experience, that's rarely the best move.

Here are our Kaizen-inspired tips for learning why and how undesirable results happen:

• Understand your subscriber inflow:
  • How many people do you attract every period?
  • Where are they coming from?
  • What is the average conversion or engagement time?
• Know your engaged subscribers:
  • What percentage of your audience frequently engages with your email campaigns?
  • Is this frequency weekly, monthly or different?
  • What are the main characteristics of this group? Consider demographic customer data to help you attract more similar people.
• Know your churned subscribers, too:
  • Which customers churned and why?
  • How many subscribers have disengaged or unsubscribed?
  • What was the last message you sent before this undesired effect?
  • How long were they active before changing their behavior patterns?

When you have this information, you'll be less likely to act based on emotions. Start with the big picture of your email list and work your way down more precise aspects of each customer group. This way, you'll be able to identify what activities and content types cause these negative reactions in particular audience segments.

Before you ask – yes, we have features for understanding and grouping your subscribers, so you can accurately tailor emails to each group. We use an engagement model for analyzing data about user interactions and behavior. Here's what it looks like.

Our engagement tab shows you detailed customer data, including information like:

• Days since the last click
• Click frequency
• Days in the database
• Days between clicks

SEINō automatically tags subscribers as, e.g., “Promising”, "Loyal customers" or "At risk", based on their current and previous actions and engagement levels. The goal is to help you target specific audience groups with the right messaging type and frequency.

You'll find this makes it much easier to correct negative trends, prevent unsubscribe rate spikes and urge prospects with targeted offers that interest them. Because nobody likes those naggy "We want you back" emails, especially when they're not backed by value.

Customize data visualization

In most cases, ESPs only let you view results for individual campaigns. This separate view makes it difficult to compare campaigns. With SEINō, not only do you get plenty of trackable metrics, but you can also benchmark your email campaigns against each other in one reporting view. This comparison view lets you conduct an in-depth email marketing audit, pinpoint the strongest aspects of your different strategies, merge tactics or find campaigns that are visibly lagging behind others.

You can sort this information in any way you want with options like:

• Grouping
• Pivoting and filtering data
• Dashboarding
• Creating a BigQuery table or graphs
• Exporting data

Of course, you can select which information gets displayed in your email marketing report, so you don't get distracted by data irrelevant to what you want to look into. Here's another short video on how to set up the performance overview dashboard to your liking and navigate it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXjes7j4PcY&ab_channel=SEIN%C5%8D%7CEmailAnalytics

Ready to make the most of data-driven email marketing?

Knowing who your subscribers are and how they interact with your emails helps you create emails with personalized, relevant messaging and offers that speak to their interests and pain points and optimize email timing and tone. All this is necessary to get your audience to perform the desired action and make your campaign successful.

If you don't feel like spending hours manually downloading and copying numbers from your email marketing software into Excel sheets and even more time sorting through this data (understandable), an email analytics tool is your best friend.

SEINō gives you fast and accurate data, translating to more company time and email marketing value. We like to keep it visual and actionable. You don't have to be an expert analyst to give your email marketing strategy a data-based boost.

Book a free demo to see how it works, or learn more about SEINō.

Data-driven email marketing: FAQ

What is data in email marketing? Effective email marketing campaigns are based on solid subscriber data, like open, conversion and bounce rates, email sends and deliverability, list growth or revenue made per email and session. Collecting information that will help you drastically improve your future campaigns is easiest with an analytics tool like SEINō, which you can connect to your email marketing platform.

How do you analyze email marketing data? The easiest way to make sense of collected subscriber data is with an email analytics tool that clearly groups and visualizes this information. SEINō makes it simple to find areas for improvement and leverage data-driven metrics for effective email campaign management.

Why is data important in email marketing? When used wisely, collected data makes your email marketing strategies the most effective they can be. You learn what type of content, subject lines and message-sending frequency get your audience segments to act how you want them to. Without collecting and analyzing data, you're essentially wasting time and money on guesswork.