Marketing automation is the automation of repetitive tasks across channels and is used by many organizations today. Whether non-profit or commercial, marketing automation can be effective regardless of size. For nonprofits, email marketing automation can provide deep customization and personalization while saving crucial staff time.
However, there’s one small catch. You don’t want to ‘set and forget’ as easy as it would be. Like any email campaign, these require close monitoring. Without keeping an eye on the progress of your email marketing efforts, you risk losing opportunity and/or investment. The best place to start is knowing the right metrics to track.
Measuring marketing automation metrics is an issue for most. Studies show that about 50% of people using marketing automation find measuring its effectiveness a challenge.
In this post, we’ll explore the marketing automation metrics that can make your life easier. Deciding how and when to tweak that email marketing campaign is about to get more comfortable. But first, let’s start with a look at why an effective marketing automation system is critical.
The Benefits of Email Marketing Automation
Imagine designing an email campaign, planning it out, coding and scheduling all the emails. You’re probably already doing that. Now, imagine that same campaign, but for each response (or lack thereof) to an email, a different email is triggered automatically. With email marketing automation, you can build anything from a basic welcome series to an intricate journey, compelling supporters to take action on an array of issues and based on behavioral data.
Email marketing automation can offer many benefits, including:
Time Savings
For those looking to channel valuable time into other projects, marketing automation can be an enormous time savings. With it, you can schedule your email marketing efforts ahead of time and to different target audiences. This leaves time open to perform other tasks.
Enhanced Productivity
Organizational time savings can boost productivity levels. More time means your marketing or fundraising team suddenly has the time to brainstorm other ideas. They can apply their creativity to varying key areas while still retaining efficiency.
Personalization
Creating a custom experience for every supporter is key to a good ROI (Return On Investment). Marketing automation allows you to do this.
For instance, with email marketing automation, it is possible to send out emails based on user engagement levels. This way, you can increase engagement and boost conversion.
In Engaging Networks’ marketing automation tools, you can build custom profiles for your automation journeys that allow you to target specific interest groups, donors and many other segments. The sky’s the limit.
The One Voice Effect
Marketing automation offers the coveted omnichannel experience to your customers. This means that whether you are marketing to them via email, SMS or social media, the tone and voice remains the same.
Metrics to Track Email Marketing Automation
Like any email campaign, tracking activity metrics like send numbers, opens and unsubscribes are the foundation. You’ll want to establish a plan to monitor these in your email marketing automation tools – which can be much more complicated. Workflows in marketing automation can range from 3 to upwards of 150 messages, so focus on the plan. In addition to quantitative data you’ll want to monitor qualitative data as well (ideally your eCRM will help in this type of reporting). Here are some basics to monitor.
Number of Emails Sent
For nonprofit email marketing, this is a vital metric. Effective email marketing automation is more comprehensive than sending out emails the old way. This simple metric shows that marketing automation is working. Match your deliveries to your estimated send lists and make sure the numbers are what you expect. If they’re not, evaluate your program for errors or possible email deliverability problems.
What’s email deliverability? Check out our Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability to learn more.OPEN THE GUIDE
Monitor Behavioral Triggers
Supporter behavior is a crucial metric to track as it’s what drives your email marketing automation campaign. Ideally your eCRM will provide good metrics and reporting to help with this, but the analysis can be largely observation as well. Are people responding the way you expected? Or, are they all choosing the ‘other’ option or not interacting with your email? Supporter behavior can be very telling and may mean you need to tweak copy or asks to change your outcomes.
The Response Metrics
Okay, your activity metrics point to the practical use of marketing automation. The logical next step is to find out if it’s working. This is where you need to consider the response metrics.
These metrics will show you whether your nonprofit email marketing efforts are resonating with the audience and answer the question of audience engagement levels.
The following measurements show automation effectiveness in terms of audience response:
Click-Through and Open Rates
These metrics are indicators of whether crucial parts of your emails are performing. If people are not opening the emails, perhaps you need to make adjustments to your subject lines.
If they’re not clicking, maybe it’s the email copy that needs an upgrade. The open rates and click-through rates (CTR) will show you!
Site Traffic
With email conversions come an upgrade in web traffic. This stat is vital if you’re trying to direct recipients to a particular web page. Analyzing your site traffic to know what percentage comes from email can help you measure effectiveness. Is your eCRM integrated with your Google Analytics?
Conversions
Depending on the goal of your campaign, conversions may be significant. A conversion is when someone successfully completes a desired action like making a donation or updating their recurring gift. So the question is, are people converting? Are they taking the desired actions? If not, again, you may need to make some changes.
Unsubscribes
Any email marketing comes with the risk of unsubscribes. But… email marketing automation often tends to deliver more messages. While those messages may carry unique content to specific segments who are interested, this is still an important metric to monitor. If you see unsubscribes spike, pause and consider why. Is it your message? Is it the quantity of emails? Is it your segmentation? If you haven’t done it already, configure an email preference center and make some changes to your unsubscribe page to reduce attrition.
Revenue Generated
It’s tempting to make this the end-all of measuring effectiveness, but don’t. For every dollar raised, you could have another if someone else also opened your email, clicked and completed a donation.
This is also your best metric for proving the ROI on your email marketing automation. Consider how you can calculate that figure after your campaign has run awhile. This can help you make the case for additional budget and future enhancements.
Wrapping it up
Because the nature of marketing automation feels set and forget (you put a LOT of work into setting it up and then it just runs) it’s easy not to monitor. Always remember that each optimization can create more revenue for your organization. Unlike traditional email marketing, you have ongoing opportunities to monitor and adjust these campaigns to provide the best outcome. If you’re curious about getting started with marketing automation for your organization, take our marketing automation healthcheck quiz.
An eCRM that provides top notch marketing automation tools that make all of this easy for you is essential. Engaging Networks give you the ability to create workflows and monitor each emails performance to help you reach your goals. Watch this quick video to learn more and let us know if you’d like to speak to a team member about our tools.
