How to Effectively Analyze Drip Marketing Campaigns

If done properly, drip marketing has the power to build trust among brands and potential customers, and create a basis for converting prospects into customers.

It is one of the most quantifiable marketing methods, and you can track everything, from who opened your email messages, to who clicked on your links and where do the subscribers come from. But, all that data and analytics can be a bit overwhelming and it can be difficult to gauge the results of your campaign.

For that reason, in this article, we’ll talk about how to effectively analyze your drip marketing campaigns, the metrics that you need to measure, and how to take the necessary action to improve your campaigns.

Recommended: What Is Drip Marketing? The Basics of Drip Marketing Campaigns

Why Analytics Are Vital for Drip Marketing Success?

Every analysis and campaign tracking is a challenge. Analyzing the results of your drip marketing is essential due to the following reasons:

• Effectiveness Comparison: By measuring the success of your drip campaigns, you can compare it with the effectiveness of other channels like social media and assess where you need to spend more time for better results.
• Improving Campaigns: If you only send campaign after campaign and not measure its success, you’ll miss out on valuable insights and you won’t understand how and where you can improve.

In essence, it is crucial to see the bigger picture of your drip campaigns and make better decisions by looking at which strategies are best for your business. When you measure the effectiveness, you need to go beyond metrics like open rates and clicks and focus more on your email list value, the subscribers’ activity, and the engagement rate.

Audience’s POV

When email marketing began, businesses were focused on building the largest possible email list without thinking about personalization. But, those tactics don’t work today. You can’t send out an email blast to a large subscriber’s list and expect a positive ROI.

Today, your audience expects your email messages to be personalized, relevant and packed with valuable content. If that is delivered to them regularly, you can build a relationship with your most devoted subscribers who interact with your campaigns.

Relationship building can only be achieved by delivering valuable content to the customer’s inboxes. So in essence, if you want to have a successful drip marketing campaign, you need to have an approach that will be focused on engagement at every touch-point of the campaign.

By having insight into your campaign’s engagement rate you’ll get an overview of how campaigns perform and unravel how the audience interacts with your messages.

The Insights You Need to Track and Analyze

When you analyze your drip marketing campaigns, you need to understand them both, from a business´s point of view and from the subscriber’s too. You want to know how your email messages perform but also, you need to have insights into the behavior of your subscribers.

Related: [Infographic] 24 Fundamental Email Marketing Stats

Open Rate

You need to know how many of your subscribers open your email messages. The open rate will mostly depend on your list size, and depending on your industry, it can vary from 15.22% to 28.46%.

Open Rate = Emails Opened / Emails Sent – Emails Bounced

Ideally, you need to aim for an open rate of 20% minimum. If your open rate is above 20%, then you have a healthy-optimized campaign and if it’s below that, you need to think about improvements in the time of sending, subject lines and other elements that might put subscribers off.

In most cases, your open rate will be an indicator of how your email subject lines are performing. Do A/B test variations and see what works best for your open rate.

Click Rate

Your click rate is the percentage of subscribers that clicked on the link of your email message content. It is an indicator of the effectiveness of your email copy and the responsiveness of your subscribers. It is one of the keys to your drip campaign success.

Click Rate = Number of Clicks/Total Emails Sent – Email Bounces

A high click rate means that things are going well for your drip campaign, and also, that your content is engaging and relevant, so people are clicking. Again, the rate can depend on the size of your email list, your content, and other factors. A healthy click rate for your campaign should not be under 15%.

Reply Rate

Do you receive replies on your email messages? If that’s the case, it means that your email copy or CTA is on point and the subscriber is ready to move on to the next stage of the drip sequence.

Reply Rate = People Who Replied / Emails Sent – Emails Bounced

High open rates combined with low reply rates can signal that you promise a lot in your subject line but under deliver in the copy. It can also indicate that your copy is too long or you haven’t personalized your message enough to be valuable enough to reply to.

Bounce Rate

Sometimes, your subscribers don’t even receive the message – the message bounces. This can happen if they’ve subscribed with a fake email address or you’ve misspelled their username.

Bounce Rate = Bounced Emails / Total Recipients X 100

A high bounce rate means it is time to review your list and see which contacts are real on your target list.

Unsubscribe Rate

It’s never a good thing when someone unsubscribes from your email list, and it is even more painful to measure it. But, you have to improve if you did something wrong.

(Number of Email Addresses who Unsubscribed / (Number of Email Addresses Sent – Number of Email Addresses Bounced)) * 100%

Unsubscribe rates are excellent if you want to assess if your content is bad or not. Also, it is crucial to see at what stage of your campaign people unsubscribes. Maybe it’s on the 2nd email, or the 4th etc. You need to ensure that you provide some great content, especially at moments when users are more likely to unsubscribe from your list.

How Insights Can Improve Your Drip Campaigns

Insights are not just numbers, they’re indicators, and pointers of how your campaign is going and what direction should you take to improve.

Improving Open Rate

Your open rate is the principal indicator of your drip campaign effectiveness. If you’ve measured an open rate of below 15%, it could be due to the following reasons:

• Untargeted Email List: As we said, it’s in the quality, not the quantity. Sometimes, 10 subscribers are more valuable than 10,000. To avoid this, you need to ensure a targeted approach from the beginning and stay out of buying email lists.
• Unsegmented List: Every subscriber and every lead is not the same and shouldn’t be treated the same. If you send the same message to every subscriber, you’ll increase your open/engagement rate.
• Generic Subject Lines: We can’t emphasize this enough. If you want an increased open rate, stay away from generic subject lines and be a little more creative.

Like we said above, the subject line is the main factor that determines your open rate. To write better subject lines, you need to be simple, but you need to write something that develops an interest in your message.

For example, you can be direct and write a line such as:

Or, you can include a dose of curiosity:

Both types of headlines are not generic and make things interesting for the users.

When you optimize your campaign subject lines, don’t forget that most users today are on mobile devices. This means that before you start your campaign, you should test how the subject line will appear on your mobile screen. For this, your best bet is to keep them between 5-9 words.

Increasing Click Rate

Click rate is an important metric to track and improve because it provides you with a direct insight into your email copy performance. Only relevant copywriting will bring you more clicks in your email messages. Let’s consider the following examples:

Example 1

Example 2

Which email will lead more people to click on the link? Of course, the first one. Because the content is relevant and impactful and the next logical step for the user is to learn more about it. That’s why, to increase your click rate, your content must be relevant for the recipient.

The next way to increase your click rate is to personalize your email messages. Businesses that send personalized messages earn 39% higher click rates than ones that don’t. To personalize your campaign, never forget to include the recipient’s name in the subject line and in the email copy. That is the first step in tailoring your email messages to your target audience.

Another way to increase your click rate is to send more, but still, relevant email messages. A HubSpot study found that the click-through rate can be increased if you send from 15 to 30 email messages per month.

Also, don’t forget to make your email newsletter mobile-responsive. If users open a non-responsive email message, they’ll close it immediately on their devices or unsubscribe because of the bad experience.

Better Email List Quality

It’s not just in the number of subscribers, but in their quality as readers and potential customers. It doesn’t matter if you create a drip campaign for 10,000 or 100 customers, the effect will be positive only if they’re the right customers for your business.

However, if your number of subscribers doesn’t grow, you need to do something about it. You can always start by offering irresistible lead magnets to new subscribers, such as e-books or a mini-course. But, don’t forget to be GDPR compliant and get permission to send both the lead magnet and marketing emails.

You can also consider adding an exit intent popup on your website to encourage people to leave their email addresses.

You don’t need to be an expert web designer to add an exit intent popup on your site. In fact, if your CMS is WordPress, you can use the following plugins that will help you set the pop-up.

• Exit-Intent Popups by OptiMonk
• Ninja Popups for WordPress
• OptinMonster
• Popup Maker
• WP Optin Wheel
• MailOptin

When you create popups, don’t forget to experiment and see what kind of popup brings you the most subscribers. You can play with colors, text, and A/B test the CTA. Just make sure that you’re focused on your target audience and tell them exactly what will get if they subscribe to your list.

Improving Campaign Segmentation

A non-effective drip campaign can be a result of bad email segmentation. You can even create multiple campaigns, but you must segment them and tailor them by addressing the segment’s concerns, needs, and wants.

With segmentation, you can group together subscribers that have similar or the same traits. For example, you might want to create a segment of subscribers with the same traits or who are all currently subscribed to the same campaign.

Segmentation will also help you tailor more powerful email messages. A study by MailChimp of 11,000 segmented campaigns sent by roughly 2,000 users found that compared to non-segmented emails, segmented emails saw:

• 14.31% more opens
• 10.64% more unique opens
• 100.95% more clicks
• 4.65% fewer bounces
• 3.9% fewer abuse reports
• 9.73% fewer unsubscribes

You too can deliver a sophisticated and segmented email experience to subscribers. This is not more than a secret tactic that is reserved for big and lucrative corporations.

Here are 3 criteria that you can use to successfully segment your drip marketing campaigns:

• Warm Leads: The leads that show an increased interest and engagement with your campaigns. These people regularly open your emails, click on your landing pages, and spend a huge amount of time browsing your website. This segmented email list should be the main priority for your drip marketing campaign.
• Regular Leads: You can’t eliminate the rest of your email subscribers. You need to develop a special drip campaign that will continuously nurture them with tips and offers that can push them to the next stage of their customer’s journey.
• Inactive Subscribers: These people subscribed to your list for a reason, but perhaps you couldn’t tailor the right approach so they stopped engaging with your email campaign. To bring them back into the funnel, you need to create a segmented campaign just for them. This campaign will keep reminding them that they still matter to you and invite them to read your content and follow your offers. When you segment, make sure that you create different subscription boxes (popups, landing pages) for each segment to make the job easier for you before you start the campaign.

Wrapping up

As you can see, measuring and improving drip marketing is not only about the numbers. Each of the metrics above may seem simple, but they’re powerful enough to help you determine what needs to be altered and refined in your messages. The metrics also reveal valuable lessons that you can apply to future campaigns.

Refining your drip campaigns is a long-term process, and only by having an effective, analytical, and flexible approach can you unravel the path that will lead to more subscribers and sales for your business.