Recently, we discussed a few of the ways an email marketing plan can help you communicate with and advertise to your customers. But, that’s only the beginning. Identifying your audience, developing a communication strategy, and determining your message will help you start moving in the right direction, for sure. But once subscribers have joined your list and start engaging with your email, there’s more to learn and consider.
Tracking your customers
From the moment they join your list, your subscribers start providing you with a wealth of useful information. Mailchimp signup forms can be customized to include fields that collect everything from a customer’s address and age to their interests and subscription preferences. But it can also be easy to overlook one of the most valuable pieces of data they can provide—signup method and location. If you’re an e-commerce business, the route your subscribers take to join your list can help you understand how to better communicate with them in the future, not to mention give you an idea of where you might want to focus your advertising efforts going forward.
For example, if you find that the majority of your signups are being generated from a Facebook form, you might want to focus on connecting with customers—and potential customers through social media. Or, if you’ve connected your store to Mailchimp, you’ll be able to identify subscribers who were added to your list after completing a purchase, then target them with a slightly different message than the subscribers who haven’t yet become paying customers.
Signup source can be found in each subscriber’s profile, and you can easily segment your list to target people who joined your list through a specific method, whether it’s a integration like Facebook and WordPress, an app like Mailchimp Subscribe, an e-commerce integration, or a regular hosted form. If you embed your form on multiple pages, you can even add a hidden field to your forms to help you determine signup location and then use it when creating segments later on.
Try placing your signup forms in several different locations to see where your subscribers are coming from—you might be surprised by what you find. And, if you want to take things even further, you can connect your site to Mailchimp to get a better understanding of the path your customers are taking from signup to email to website. We'll help you track where customers are going and what’s drawing their attention. Then, set up abandoned cart messaging to help encourage lapsed patrons to visit your store and complete additional purchases.
Learning from your reports
One of the most valuable benefits of using an ESP like Mailchimp is the ability to measure results after sending a campaign. Mailchimp reports contain a lot of data—data that can provide a lot of helpful insight. Opens and clicks are your most essential metrics. After all, if customers aren’t engaging with your campaign, your email marketing efforts are probably not going to be as successful—or as profitable—as you’d like. Be sure to keep in mind, however, that the engagement data for each campaign doesn’t exist in a vacuum. With each campaign you send, you’re able to gather more information about what’s actually driving that engagement, and you’ll begin to discover trends that can help shape your future marketing plans, too.
For example, if you check your reports regularly, you’ll start to notice even the most subtle improvement (or decline) of your engagement rates over time. If engagement is trending upwards, it can serve as validation of your current marketing strategy. Maybe you’ll even be able to identify trends within the trends, so you can double-down on send times, content, or calls to action that seem to boost customer engagement. If rates start dropping, it might be a sign that you need to make a few adjustments. Consider testing different template designs, adding incentives to your campaign, or sending on different days of the week.
Digging a little deeper
Engagement data often takes top billing, but there’s plenty of other useful data present inside your campaign reports, too. You’ll find a full list in our Knowledge Base, but we’ve highlighted a few of our favorites below:
The E-Commerce tab in your reports is your go-to location for all things—you guessed it—e-commerce. Once you connect your store with Mailchimp, you’ll find everything you need to know about the products you’ve sold, the revenue each product has generated, and a full breakdown of each subscriber’s purchases. This can be especially helpful for tracking which products are driving revenue—and which aren’t—so you can make changes for future campaigns.
The Links tab will help you get a better idea of how well each tracked URL in your campaign has performed. Do links near the top of your campaign result in more clicks than links towards the bottom? Does your audience respond well to links with a distinct call to action like Click Here or Buy Now? This is where you’ll find those answers.
Facebook has become an integral tool for marketers who want to connect with customers and expand their audience, and the Social tab in your reports reflects how well your campaign is performing across the platform. Once you’ve connected your account to Facebook, this tab will display a list of folks who liked your campaign and a map that shows your social clicks from across the globe. This tab also includes a list of the top influencers and referrers for the campaign, so if any outside sources happen to generate engagement for you by linking back to your campaign (in a write-up about your company or in a press release, perhaps), you’ll find that here as well.
No matter your line of work, your Mailchimp account can provide you with a lot of great information about your customers, your products, and the effectiveness of your overall marketing efforts. All of the information you’ll uncover is actionable, too—as you continue to learn more about your customers, you’ll start to think of new ways to engage and delight them. And as it turns out, engaged and delighted customers like to buy things.