Week 4
Collect and analyze email campaign data
You will learn about the key metrics in email marketing, such as open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and more. Youâll examine how to measure, track, and analyze email campaign results. Then, youâll learn how to effectively present email campaign results to stakeholders by creating an email marketing campaign report.
Dedication to study
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Videos: 28 min
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Leitura: 1 h 30 min
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Teste: 1 Teste com avaliação
Learning Objectives
- Identify common email marketing metrics.
- Measure and analyze email campaign results.
- Create an email marketing report that communicates results to stakeholders.
Content
- Introduction to metrics
- Most common email marketing metrics
- Email marketing results
- Review: Collect and analyze email campaign data
1. Introduction to metrics
Welcome to week 4
- Video Duration: 1 minute
In this section, weâll explore all facets of collecting and analyzing your email marketing campaign data. Data is important because sending the emails out is only half of the challenge. Measuring whether your campaign was successful or not is a big part of your campaign too. So when it comes to email marketing campaigns, how can you tell if yours was successful or not? First you have to understand how data, metrics, KPIs, and reports all fit together. Youâll learn that all of these concepts help ensure youâre confident in your decision making, allow for a more productive strategy, help organize and define target audiences, and open your organization up to new opportunities. Then Iâll talk to you about the common email marketing metrics most digital marketers used to determine a projectâs success rate. Those are open rate, click to open rate, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate, conversion rate, forward rate, list growth rate, bounce rate, and your campaignâs ROI. Then youâll discover best practices for presenting those campaign results to stakeholders. Stakeholders are going to be the people usually within your organization, that are affected by the campaign in some way. This might mean your boss, your team members or colleagues and other departments at your company. So letâs begin. Meet me back here in a bit.
Useful concepts in email marketing results
- Video Duration: 4 minutes
When it comes to email marketing campaign results, there are lots of concepts that are important to know. Terms like data, metrics, key performance indicators or KPIs, and reports are all likely to be a part of your daily vocabulary as a digital marketer. It can be confusing to try to distinguish between them. In this video, weâll work to understand the relationship between all of these concepts. Youâll come to learn that tracking and evaluating your campaignâs performance will help you understand how to serve your audience, which will lead to audience growth. When you know what works, you know what you want to stop doing and what you want to do more of. Knowing how to collect data, track metrics and KPIs, and review reports will help you analyze results and turn them into insights. These results help ensure youâre confident in your decision-making. They enforce productivity, so you donât waste time focused on tactics that arenât working. They help you define and target your audience and they open your organization up to new opportunities. Think of it this way. Lots of data makes up metrics, metrics make up KPIs, and KPIs make up reports. Letâs start with data. Data refers to a collection of facts or information. These facts, numbers, or information are used to inform or plan something. When you think about how many people visit your website, how many purchases were made after you sent out a promotional email, or even something like the age breakdown of your audience, thatâs all raw data. How do you turn data into metrics? As youâve learned in this program, metrics are data with additional context. If data is a number, think of metrics as a quantitative measurement of those numbers or data. Metrics help you make sense of raw data. Metrics refer to the quantifiable measurements that are used to track and assess a business objective. For example, if youâre looking at an email marketing automation tool dashboard and you see 40 website visits from an email campaign, thatâs an example of data. Itâs only until you view it as a metric that it becomes a piece of useful information. If you look a little closer and see that the 40 percent is your open rate, thatâs a metric. Youâll learn more about open rates later, but the open rate is the percentage of users that open your email. When it comes to email marketing, you canât choose and personalize data based on your organization, but you can choose and personalize which metrics to prioritize based on your organizationâs goals. Some important email marketing metrics are, open to click rate, open rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, and share rate. Recall that key performance indicators or KPIs, are measurements used to gauge how successful a business is in its effort to reach a business or marketing goal. KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs. This is because KPIs are the metrics you decide are important to determine your email marketing campaign success. You may decide that return on investment and conversion rate are the two metrics your company needs to prioritize for success. Whereas open rate isnât a metric youâll pay attention to. Sometimes itâs helpful to think about how youâre metrics fit together. Maybe you have secondary KPIs that when prioritized will help you reach your goals. For example, if your sales are a little low, but your conversion rate seems to be on target, you might want to focus on open rate, so that youâre getting subscribers to open the email. If they open the email, they are one step closer to buying and your sales may increase as a result. An email marketing report is a collection of KPIs. It usually includes the use of effective visuals like graphs, tables, and figures. Once you have your email marketing campaign report, you can use it to pull insights from. What did you learn? What did the figures tell you? Your reports are oftentimes included in presentations to inform stakeholders. The importance of data, metrics, KPIs, and reports in email marketing really canât be overstated, because they help inform your path as an organization. They help answer questions like, are you where you want to be? Are you headed in the right direction or should you pivot and adjust your tactics based on audience behaviors? Being able to answer those questions for your organization is invaluable.
Ivana - Leverage data and insights in email marketing
- Video Duration: 3 minutes
Hi. My name is Ivana, and Iâm a Performance Specialist at Google. A performance specialist helps advertisers use Google solutions for advertising, so that they can build campaigns that maximize their results for their businesses. The start of my career as a digital marketer was really not something I expected at all, because I actually have professional training as a photographer and a Bachelorâs degree in Fine Arts. But I realized that once I started working in that field, that it wasnât really what I love doing. I, of course, needed to find a job. I applied to various different jobs, and I didnât know what exactly I was going to do or what exactly I was going to like. But I was lucky, because I entered in a junior entrepreneur role in a digital startup. It was amazing to me how creative marketing was, because you have to think about your target audience, you have to think about the right messaging, you have to work with the targeting capabilities depending on the platform that youâre using. How do you leverage each channel to really find the people that you want to target with your message? All of those things are just very creative. Itâs very important to leverage data and insights when youâre doing email marketing campaigns, because you want to take into consideration as much as possible the information that you have gathered from your subscribers, as well as the information that you have based on, for example, seasonality. If you know, for instance, the date of birth of your subscribers, I could potentially in my past experience send an email to them during the month of their birthday or before the month of their birthdays, proposing party planning services that they could use to organize a birthday party. Itâs very important when running any type of campaign to make data-driven decisions. In email marketing specifically, sometimes an email doesnât work because maybe you sent it at the wrong time of the day or at the wrong day of the week, or perhaps the subject line, it wasnât personalized to the subscriber, so they didnât find that appealing and they didnât open it. You want to be able to test out those hypotheses. The best way to do that is to set up split tests. Perhaps I believe that people did not open my email because the subject line was not personalized, and my hypothesis is that if it had been personalized, a lot of people would have wanted to open it more. What I can do is I can split my subscriber list for the next email campaign that I send out. Then one variant can have dynamically inserted the name of the subscriber, and then the other one can be just static, but nothing else changes. The same content of the email, the same rest of the subject line, so everything remains the same except for that. If I notice that there is a significant difference between those two open rates, then I can determine with some confidence that inserting, for example, the name of the subscriber into the subject line helps or not helps the performance of my email campaign. A very important part of doing digital marketing and email marketing is spending the right time in understanding your results. It requires a lot of creativity to think about which hypothesis youâre going to test out next, but itâs very fun to look at those results and integrate those learnings into your future optimizations.
Use metrics in email marketing
- Reading Duration: 20 minutes
Metrics are an integral part of every email marketing campaign. In this reading, you will explore examples of how companies use metrics to learn about their audienceâs behaviors and preferences which help them adjust their strategies as needed.
Open rates are down
To Your Health is a brand that creates custom vitamins for its customers. Customers take a survey that includes their health and wellness goals and needs, and To Your Health develops and sends them custom vitamins.
To Your Health sends a weekly newsletter to anyone who has subscribed to their email list. After a few months of sending the newsletter, they realized open rates decreased week by week. In their analytics dashboard, they can see that open rates have decreased from an acceptable open rateâ25%âto a much lower numberâ18%. They discuss it as a team and determine there are a few things they can do to fix this issue.
First, the company decides to spend more time researching and writing effective subject lines. They choose to use punchier, more clever phrasing to get customers excited and enthusiastic about their emails. Next, the company decides to send out two different newsletters: one to current customers and another to new customers. That way, the content fits each subscriberâs specific needs, and they wonât feel like their time is being wasted.
The first solution of changing the subject lines entices subscribers to click to open the email, and the second solution of sending more targeted emails will ensure they continue opening the emails and enjoy the content week after week.
High click-to-open rates
A food delivery service, FoodNow, allows customers to fill a customized online grocery box, which is delivered to their door later that week. After customers fill their boxes, they get a confirmation email. In that confirmation email, FoodNow encourages customers to click a link back to their website. This link automatically takes them to their box, where they can add the same items for next week, so they donât have to edit the box later. Recently, theyâve noticed their click-to-open rate surge from 3% to 6% in the last 6 weeks. They decide to capitalize on this and include some additional suggestions in their emails.
Because FoodNow realized their customers like engaging with their emails and clicking through to their landing page, they figured they could get more sales if they add more clickable links.
FoodNow adds a âsuggested items for youâ link in these confirmation emails, so users can add not only items theyâve purchased frequently but also items they may want to try in the future.
Increase in unsubscribes
Blakeâs Beans is a large coffee company with several locations. As part of their email marketing campaign, Blakeâs Beans sends out all kinds of marketing emails to subscribers. When analyzing metrics from the last month, they notice an increase in unsubscribers and a decrease in list growth. This is a problem because it means their readers arenât engaging and/or enjoying their emails. They notice that each time they send emails out, around 3% of people unsubscribe, and their list has only grown by 1% over the past month.
To find out why subscribers are unsubscribing, and potential customers are not subscribing, they add a very brief survey to their unsubscribe page, asking for feedback about how they can better serve their base. This wonât get their old subscribers back, but it will answer questions about why they left in the first place. Next, they decide to start a referral program, encouraging current customers to invite friends to sign up for marketing emails. If someone refers a friend to sign up, they both get a coupon for 10% off. This way, theyâll see list growth.
Key takeaways
Now you know what it looks like when companies adjust their campaigns because of metrics. As mentioned, analyzing metrics is an effective way to understand how your audience wants to engage with you. Sometimes, like in the low open rate and increase in unsubscribers examples, youâll have to pivot your strategy to fix an issue. In other situations you might have, such as what was demonstrated in the high click-to-open rate example, youâll notice that your audience enjoys engaging with you and you can capitalize on that.
Regardless of what the metrics tell you, itâs important to add a personal touch to your strategy. Knowing you want your open rates to increase by 5% is great, but you have to plan how that will happen.
2. Most common email marketing metrics
Common email marketing metrics
- Video Duration: 3 minutes
Recall that metrics are quantifiable measurements used to track and assess progress towards a business objective. This is important to remember as we explore the most commonly used metrics in email marketing. Whether youâre the one tasked with setting KPIs at your company, or theyâre already set for you, youâll need to know the importance of each metric in email marketing. In this video, weâll explore open rate, click to open rate and unsubscribe rate. Letâs get into it. An open rate is the percentage of users that open your email. Most likely you wonât have to do any kind of calculating yourself because youâll be using a tool that automates those for you. However, itâs good to know that it can be calculated by dividing the number of people who open the email by the number of people who received the email. Your open rate is important, because it indicates how engaged your subscribers are. A high open rate might mean youâre writing effective subject lines while the low open rate might mean your subject lines needs some work. If your organization doesnât put much emphasis on achieving high open rates though, you arenât the only ones. Some companies care more about how the subscribers engaged with the email once theyâve opened it rather than the fact that theyâve opened it. Thatâs where your click to open rate comes in. A click to open rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links in an email out of the total number of unique opens. If you ever need to calculate your click to open rate, divide total clicks by the number of unique opens. This metric is often used in AB testing, where two versions of an email are sent out at the same time to see which version an audience responds more positively to. Lots of marketers pay very close attention to their click to open rate.
Letâs say you are trying to generate interest in your new cleaning business through email marketing. You decide to send two versions of the same email with different images attached to hyperlinks. Whichever has a higher click to open rate or whichever version your subscribers clicked on more, will determine future decisions around which images you may add.
The more your audience engages with your content, the more your email marketing campaign will thrive. And if they arenât engaging, you may find that theyâll eventually unsubscribe. Thatâs where unsubscribe rate comes in, and unsubscribe rate is just what it sounds like. Itâs the percentage of email recipients who unsubscribe from your send list after opening an email.
This metric is useful because it indicates whether you are delivering content that your audience enjoys. However, in some cases, users just opt out of opening your emails altogether rather than unsubscribing. So if they arenât opening your emails, thatâs a different issue than them unsubscribing. To calculate the unsubscribe rate, divide the number of unsubscribes by the number of emails delivered. Open rate, click to open rate, and unsubscribe rate are all great indicators of how things might be going for your campaign.
Whether or not they are the right metrics to prioritize as KPIs, thatâs up to you and your team.
Common email marketing metrics: Part 2
- Video Duration: 3 minutes
In this portion of the course, youâre learning all about the metrics companies track to see whether their campaign is successful or not. Weâre covering everything from open rate, click to open rate, and unsubscribe rate to conversion rate, email bounce rate, complaint rate and more. In this video, weâll focus on the last three I just mentioned conversion rate, email bounce rate and complaint rate. The conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link in your email and took a desired action, like making a purchase. Basically, conversion rate answers the question, did your audience do the thing you wanted them to do? Achieving a high conversion rate is very important to many companies because it means youâre selling more products or services without having to increase your budget. You can calculate conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of clicks. Typically, youâll rely on analytics tools to give you this number. Google Analytics, which you may have already heard about and youâll learn more about in later videos, provides marketing statistics and analytical insights. Itâs a great tool for understanding your customers by tracking various metrics like conversion rates. Going back to a prior example, if you want to know the conversion rate for your new house cleaning companyâs email campaigns. Youâll want to check how many people ended up booking your services from your emails. A subscriber is more likely to take your desired actions if they receive your emails thatâs where email bounce rate comes in. Email bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipientâs inbox. This metric can be calculated by taking the total number of bounced emails and dividing by the number of emails sent multiplied by 100. Typically, bounce rates can vary and are subject to change. So to see how you are doing, check your industry standards online. If you find your bounce rate is higher than the industry average, you may need to do some investigating. A bounced email is caused by incorrect or inactive email addresses or an import error with your email list. To avoid a high bounce rate make sure to verify your domain, double check your automation tool is up to date and working properly. Purge your email list periodically so that inactive emails are no longer included and make sure you have your subscriberâs permission to send emails. Your complaint rate is the percentage of complaints recipients send to mailbox providers about receiving your email. You can calculate it by dividing the number of complaints you receive by the total number of emails delivered to subscribers. Most experts agree to an industry standard of about 0.01% or one complaint per 1,000 emails. So, since your new home cleaning business is relatively small, you may not track this metric for a while because odds are youâre not getting a lot of complaints. This metric can help you gauge how happy your subscribers are and since youâre serving them you want to be sure you arenât offending them or getting some something wrong. If you do, you may lose subscribers. Conversion rate, email bounce rate and complaint rate all provide important insights to the overall success of your campaign.
Common email marketing metrics: Part 3
- Video Duration: 3 minutes
When it comes to email marketing, growth can be measured in lots of ways. One organizationâs definition of growth may be different from another organization. One company may choose to track their list growth rate as a KPI, well another tracks forward rate. A third company may choose to track return on investment or ROI to find out if the work theyâre putting in is resulting in increased sales dollars. In order to know which metrics your company should track, youâll need to become familiar with the most common email marketing metrics. In this video, weâll talk about ROI, list growth rate and forward rate. Letâs start with ROI. Recall that ROI is the ratio of money made and money spent. You can calculate this number by dividing the total revenue by the total amount of money spent and multiplying by 100. Letâs say your house cleaning company made $800 from your first email campaign, and you figure you spent about $200 on it, your ROI will be 400%. This important metric tells you whether your email marketing strategy is productive. ROI and email marketing tends to be pretty high because the total spend is so low. This number is always helpful to know, but itâs especially useful when creating reports and presentations for stakeholders showing a dollar amount helps to show the effectiveness of your campaign to your organization. Itâs important to note that you may not review your ROIs frequently as the other metrics. You may check the others daily or weekly, but ROI is often calculated and reviewed monthly, quarterly, or annually. In the previous video, I mentioned that email marketing has an average ROI of 42-1. For every one dollar spent, $42 is made back, thatâs a pretty high return on investment. But donât get discouraged if your ROI isnât that high, every situation is different and maybe you are more focused on tracking other metrics. And return depends on multiple factors, such as volume of sales, average order value, website conversion rate, and more. Because of this, companies in different industries may have very different return margins on email marketing campaigns. List growth rate is the rate at which your list grows. The calculation for this one is a little more advanced. You take the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribers, divide that by the total number of email addresses on your list, and then multiply it by 100. This number is helpful to track because if your emails are quality, a high list growth rate may translate to a higher sales volume, which can mean a higher ROI. Another way to grow your brandâs audience is through subscriber forwards. A forward rate is the percentage of recipients who click on the share button to post to social media or who click the forward button to send to others. Forward rates can be calculated by dividing the number of forwards or shares by the total number of emails delivered. A forward rate is an incredibly valuable metric because when an email is forwarded, it means you are generating new leads. And what greater compliment to your brand is there than to know your subscribers want to share you with the world? I hope you feel ready to help your company or future company, strategize and prioritize growth using the metrics and KPIs youâve learned.
Learn more about common email marketing metrics
- Reading Duration: 20 minutes
There are all kinds of email marketing metrics that digital marketers may want to track, analyze, and present to stakeholders. The metrics that your team chooses to measure will depend on what your overall business goals are and what your campaign goals are. Once you know that information, you can decide which metrics make sense for your team to focus on. In previous videos, you were introduced to common email marketing metrics. In this reading, weâll revisit those metrics so that you have a resource to refer back to.
Common metrics
Digital marketers rely on tools to track metrics and create reports to help them gain insights from their campaigns. However, itâs possible to calculate these metrics yourself, if you ever need to. Below are some of the most common metrics you learned about in previous videos, along with their corresponding calculations.
Open rate
Is the percentage of users who open your email. Your open rate is important because it indicates how engaged your subscribers are. A high open rate might mean you are writing effective subject lines, while a low open rate may suggest that your subject lines need some work.
- Number of people who open the email / Number of emails delivered
Click-to-open rate
Is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links in an email. This metric is often used in A/B testing, where two versions of an email are sent out at the same time to determine which version performs better. Digital marketers typically pay very close attention to their click-to-open rate.
- Total clicks / Number of unique opens
Unsubscribe rate
Is the percentage of email recipients who unsubscribe from your send list after opening an email. This metric is useful because it indicates whether you are delivering content that your audience enjoys.
- Number of unsubscribes / Number of emails delivered
Complaint rate
Is the percentage of complaints recipients send to mailbox providers about your email. This metric can help you gauge how happy your subscribers are. Since youâre serving them, you want to be sure you arenât offending them or getting something wrong.
- Number of complaints / Total number of emails delivered to subscribers
Conversion rate
Is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link in your email and took a desired action, like making a purchase.
- Number of conversions / Number of emails delivered
Forward rate
Is the percentage of recipients who click on the âshareâ button to post to social media or who click the âforwardâ button to send to others. A forward rate is a valuable metric because when an email is forwarded, it means you are generating new leads.
- Number of forwards / Number of emails delivered
List growth rate
Is the rate at which your list grows. This number is helpful to track because a high list growth rate may translate to a higher volume of sales.
- [(Number of new subscribers â number of unsubscribes) / Total number of email addresses] x 100
Bounce rate
Is the percentage of emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipientâs inbox. If you find your bounce rate is higher than the industry average, you may need to do some investigating. A bounced email is caused by incorrect or inactive email addresses or an import error with your email list.
- (Total number of bounced emails / Emails sent) x 100
Campaign return on investment (ROI)
Is the ratio of money made and money spent. This important metric tells you whether your email marketing strategy is productive.
- (Total revenue / Total spent) x 100
Key takeaways
There are all kinds of metrics you can use in email marketing. Depending on the campaign, you might find that some provide you more relevant information than others. The important thing is that you understand that pulling insights from your metrics is how you will achieve your marketing goals.
Test your knowledge: Types of metrics
- Practice Quiz. 4 questions. Grade: 100%
3. Email marketing results
Create an email marketing report
- Video Duration: 3 minutes
After youâve spent time tracking your metrics and assessing your campaign success levels, youâll want to share that information with stakeholders and marketing team members. Your stakeholders will be interested to know how effective your email campaigns are, and if your time is being used wisely, and this is where youâll communicate that. To do this, youâll build an email marketing report. An email marketing report is essentially a collection of your KPIs that you present to your team and stakeholders to inform them of your campaignâs progress. In this video, youâre going to learn how to create an effective email marketing report. An email marketing report tells your stakeholders just what your campaigns are doing for the company. These reports answer questions like, how has our business positively benefited from email marketing? Is our email marketing strategy falling flat anywhere? How can we improve upon it? Can we put even more money behind certain aspects of our campaign now, and so many more. So when it comes to presenting these reports to stakeholders, be concise, visual, engaging, and show growth. Being concise is important because you want to show you value your stakeholdersâ time. Only include details that are absolutely necessary to tell your campaign story. Avoid jargon and technical language so that anyone can understand your report, even if they are not familiar with email marketing metrics. Using visuals in your report is an effective way to tell your story. Visuals show your audience something that words canât always accomplish, and they represent what youâre saying, visually, to help people understand it. For instance, showing your stakeholders a line graph with many spikes and dips in it, is much more effective than putting text on screen that attempts to explain the spikes and dips. Itâs okay to use your report straight from your automation software, but if you want to tailor the presentation to your liking, you should rely on programs like Google Slides, Microsoft PowerPoint, or Canva. Using images, diagrams, and charts also adds interest and allows you to be more engaging with your stakeholders. Being engaging is important because you want your stakeholders to be interested and entertained. Grab and keep your stakeholdersâ attention by varying the way that you present your data. Play videos of demos, testimonials, or case studies. Tell a story or anecdote related to the data in the report, and ask for audience participation through questions, surveys, or quizzes. Itâs not just about entertaining your stakeholders though, you want to show them that youâre adding value to the company thanks to your campaign. Include your key performance areas. This will help you demonstrate how you achieved successful results and outcomes. Describe the goals and objectives you set for the project and what you hope to have achieved by the end. If youâre presenting this report to your business partner and co-owner of your house cleaning service, and you know your general objective is to grow your subscriber list over the duration of the campaign, explain how you did that. Then, describe how you met those objectives against your KPIs. Review how you defined the success of your project at the beginning and highlight the outcomes you achieved that demonstrate this success. Letâs say your goal was to increase your list growth rate by 400 percent over four months. Your list growth rate is your KPI. Include whether or not you hit that goal. Include all of this as a bullet point list so that itâs organized, clear, and concise. Growth can also mean you learned some hard lessons. Discuss anything you learned during the course of the project and any areas youâve identified for improvement. You may or may not be a naturally gifted presenter, but use these tips and youâll be better equipped for that part of the job. Meet you back here later.
Karan - Tips for presenting to stakeholders
- Video Duration: 4 minutes
My name is Karan, and Iâm a Digital Strategy Lead on our Accelerated Growth team here at Google. I basically describe our Accelerated Growth program as Googleâs internal startup incubatorâstartup accelerator programâfor high-potential customers. So whenever we find someone that just got a new round of funding, is launching into busy season, expanding to new locations, hiring new sales reps, or something along the lines that they want to grow with Google, we get to hand select those customers, loop them into our program, and give them access to all sorts of betas, resources, consultants, to help the business profitably and successfully grow using Google products. Presenting to stakeholders can definitely be scary. I have definitely had experiences where I am sweating before I enter the room to chat with these people. But what gets me over that sometimes is getting in the room and actually just having a real conversation with them before we jump into all of our action items and all of the wonderful things that Iâve prepared to talk about today. Howâs life? Howâs your day going? Whatâs the most exciting thing that happened to you today? And just getting a little bit of that banter going, kind of just takes a little bit of the edge off when youâre talking to these stakeholders, because you remember, at the end of the day, they are also real people. Feeling prepared is one of the most important things when entering the room to present to stakeholders. It makes you feel comfortable, it makes you feel relaxed, and it makes you feel like things are going in the right direction because you know what youâre going to talk about, youâve thought about the objections that you might get to some of the ideas that youâre bringing to the table, and youâre able to kind of work with everybody in the room to make clear action items and next steps. I love to prepare an agenda so that I know these are the exact specific things that I know I want to cover in this meeting. And I like to know whoâs in the room to make sure that I can customize the content to the people that Iâm going to be talking to and make sure that itâs relevant for the specific people that are going to be in the room. It is so important to prepare stakeholders before you enter the room. One of my favorite tactics is actually before the presentation, where I present to a group of stakeholders, is to individually meet with each of those stakeholders beforehand to let them know, âThis is what Iâm going to talk about. Do you like this presentation? I kind of want to get your opinions before I present this to the large group.â This way, you can kind of vibe check each of the individual stakeholders, before entering in the room, make sure that they are aligned with my ideas and kind of know that theyâre going to support and back up what Iâm going to say before I enter the room. The follow-up after the presentation is just as important as the presentation itself. I typically like to send a detailed follow-up email with everything that we talked about and make sure that we clearly outline what the action items are from the presentation, who is owning the action item, what is the timeline that they need to be completed by, when are we following up next on these action items? And put everything in writing that you discuss so that everybody has a very clear report, essentially, to go back to to know what needs to be done following this presentation. Presenting poor or unexpected results to stakeholders can definitely be a tricky subject. My biggest piece of advice is to tackle the issue head on, come to them, and acknowledge the bad performance before they have a chance to say that back to you. And come with tangible action items and solutions in order to get out of the bad performance. This way, it doesnât feel like you are reactive, but youâre being proactive and saying, âI know that this is happening, this is why this is happening, and these are the three next steps that weâre going to be taking in order to achieve our goals.â But you are saying, âIâm a part of this team. I know that some things are not going as well, and this is what weâre going to do, to fix them.â The biggest piece of advice I would give to an entry level digital marketer when preparing their first presentation, is do not try to present too much. Less is truly more. Think about the key takeaways that you want someone to leave this presentation knowing. Whether itâs understanding a bit of information, whether thatâs wanting to assign people some homework, or whether itâs just kind of communicating how things are going right now. Know and work backwards from what do I want the end goal to be from this presentation, what do I want people to leave this presentation knowing, and work backwards and make sure that itâs very clear and explicit through what you present.
Tips on presenting
- Reading Duration: 20 minutes
If youâre intimidated by giving presentations, youâre not alone. Public speaking makes many people feel nervous. But as with most things, the more you do it, the more natural it will feel. With time and practice, youâll become more confident in your public speaking skills. In this reading, youâll learn some tips for leading great presentations that keep your audience engaged.
Tip 1: Speak clearly and slowly
If youâre nervous while presenting, you might speak too fast. Youâll want your audience to be able to clearly understand everything you say. So, it helps to pace yourself while you speak. You might even consider tapping your toe within your shoe to keep a rhythm while you speak.
Tip 2: Allow for pauses
Pauses display confidence and help set the pace for your presentation. Some ideal times to stop for pauses include when you pose a question to the audience, or when you transition to a new section of your presentation. Adding a meaningful pause is also a great way to make sure that you arenât speaking too quickly!
Tip 3: Make eye contact
As you present, try to make eye contact with different people in the audience. Make eye contact with one person for 3-5 seconds before moving on to the next person. This helps you connect with members of the audience and keeps everyone engaged in your presentation.
If looking someone in the eye makes you uncomfortable, hereâs another tip you can try: look at a personâs forehead instead of directly in their eyes. Or, try to look at each person at eye level, but look directly past at the wall behind them as you scan the audience. This will make it seem like youâre making eye contact with the audience without actually doing it.
When presenting virtually, make sure to look directly at your webcam. This will help the audience feel as if youâre looking at them, even though youâre not in the same room. Try posting your notes to the side of your computer screen so youâre not glancing down during the presentation.
Tip 4: Tell a story
If you are using digital tools to create a presentation, like Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint, think of your presentation as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Each slide should push the story youâre telling forward, and the story should flow from slide to slide. Part of telling an effective and engaging story is including examples of actual users, such as quotes, photos, or short video clips from interactions with users. Storytelling is more powerful than sharing a list of research insights because your audience can observe the emotions, pain points, and delights of your product from a real userâs point of view.
Tip 5: Be concise
While itâs great to use stories and data to keep your audience engaged, be sure that everything you share adds value to your presentation. Keep the information you present concise and to the point. A study found that the average human attention span is eight seconds. This means you have a very short amount of time to hook your audience and keep them engaged!
Tip 6: Know your audience
Your tone and the content of your presentation should be appropriate for the audience that you are connecting with. For example, your presentation will be more informal and might use different terminology when youâre with a group of colleagues versus external clients. Similarly, let your audience know you. Be yourself and let your personality shine. This will help you appear more authentic and can strengthen trust between you and the audience.
Activity: Present email marketing data to stakeholders
- Practice Quiz. 1 question. Grade: 100%
- Access Quiz:
To use the template for this course item, click the link below and select âUse Template.â
Link to template: Email marketing presentation
Activity Exemplar: Present email marketing data to stakeholders
- Reading Duration: 10 minutes
Here is a completed exemplar along with an explanation of how the exemplar fulfills the expectations for the activity.
Completed Exemplar
To review the exemplar for this course item, click the link below and select âUse Template.â
Link to exemplar: Email marketing presentation
Assessment of Exemplar
Compare the exemplar to your completed presentation. Review your work using each of the criteria in the exemplar. What did you do well? Where can you improve? Use your answers to these questions to guide you as you continue to progress through the course.
Note: The exemplar represents one possible version of the presentation. Yours will likely differ in certain ways. Whatâs important is that your presentation explains the data clearly and interprets it in a way thatâs relevant to the audience.
Letâs review Slides 5â8 one at a time:
Slide 5: Open rates by email category
Summary: The speaker notes summarize the chart data and explain why itâs relevant: Among three email categories (newsletters, new show announcements, and promotions), promotional emails perform best with all three segments. Examining promotional email data in greater depth could provide a more specific answer to the question of what type of content performs best with each segment.
Slide 6: Open rates by promotion type
Summary: The speaker notes explain what the promotional email data means for each subscriber segment: Recent attendees show a slight preference for pre-order discounts, past attendees are split between last-minute and BOGO promotions, and people who have never attended a performance engage most with BOGO emails. This information gives a partial answer to the question of what type of email content performs best with each segment.
Slide 7: Click-to-open rates by promotion type
Summary: The speaker notes explain why click-to-open rate data is important: It indicates the percentage of subscribers who open emails are clicking the links inside. They also consider how the data on Slide 7 compares to the data on Slide 6.
Among subscribers who have never attended a performance, the click-to-open rates are highest for BOGO promotions. This result is consistent with the open rate data. Similarly, recent attendees are most likely to open and engage with pre-order discounts. While recent attendees open last-minute discount and BOGO emails at about the same rate, theyâre slightly more likely to engage with last-minute promotions.
Slide 8: Conclusion and recommendations
Summary: The conclusion slide draws on the analysis from Slides 5â7 to recommend email content to prioritize for each group.
Test your knowledge: Present to stakeholders
- Practice Quiz. 4 questions. Grade: 100%
4. Review: Collect and analyze email campaign data
Wrap-up
- Video Duration: 1 minute
Excellent work. Youâre another step closer to becoming a confident digital marketer. First, we dove into the relationship between data, metrics, key performance indicators or KPIs, and reports. You learned that data, metrics, KPIs, and reports are all building blocks of one another, and work together to make up a more organized email campaign. You learned that metrics are quantifiable measurements that are used to track and assess a business objective. Then you learned the most common types of email marketing metrics. I introduced you to metrics such as open rate, click to open rate, unsubscribe rate, conversion rate, email bounce rate, complaint rate, ROI, list growth rate, and forward rate. Based on greater goals and objectives, each company prioritizes and tracks certain metrics which theyâll use as their key performance indicators. Finally, you learned how to present your reports to stakeholders and team members. You know that the key to a good presentation is being concise, visual, engaging, and show growth. These concepts will be important to your success as a digital marketer because understanding, tracking, analyzing, and presenting metrics is the best way to gain new insights for future campaigns. Keep working your way through the program. Youâre doing great.
Glossary terms from module 4
- Reading Duration: 20 minutes Access Glossary
Module 4 challenge
- Quiz. 10 questions. Grade: 90%