Subscribers say they hate it.

Businesses love it.

The Direct Marketing Associations (DMA) says it’s still the top digital marketing channel in terms of ROI.

Email Marketing is probably the most consistent channel in terms of both return and frustration.

How can something that’s so successful create such disparity between its participants?

Here’s my take: when it comes to executing an email marketing campaign, people fall into two buckets:

1. The ‘set it and forget it’ crowd: Once the campaign/workflow is live, this is how it’s staying. They track results at the bottom and pay no attention to anything else.
2. The tinkerers: Make changes on a per-email basis in an effort to improve engagement metrics, like open or click rates. Too in the weeds to know if the changes they’re making are having a material impact on the subscriber experience, and therefore, results.

In both cases, the marketer has little insight into subscriber signals and therefore lacks the ability to improve the subscriber experience.

The set-it-and-forget-it crowd is simply looking at the output at the bottom.

“Email was our top channel in terms of leads last month!”

The tinkerers make small, inconsequential changes on a per-email basis that have little impact overall success.

“We improved the click-through-rate of our welcome email by 3%!”

The former isn’t paying attention, and the latter is too in the weeds.

In this episode of Data Snacks, I talk about the importance of rolling up your campaigns to track aggregate performance. While it’s important to track the individual performance of the emails within your campaigns, unless you have an easy way to see the big picture, such as this email marketing dashboard, you’ll have little insight into whether or not those changes accomplish anything.

Want the template featured in this episode? You can download it for free right here.

Here’s how we track email campaign performance