Also it helps to look at performance between campaigns based upon different attributes. For example, you might want to compare emails by what day of the week they were sent, by what type of campaign (Welcome vs. Newsletter vs. Alert etc), by what type of promotion it was (special offer vs, competition), or by any chosen way of categorising the email send.

The new tagging facility in Maxemail allows you to do just that.

How can it be used?

As well as reporting by tags, they can also be used in other areas of Maxemail:

Behavioural Segmentation

Rather than selecting specific emails within your segmentation criteria you can now also select tags. So you could now select to send to all the people that have clicked on one of your ‘special offer’ emails, rather than selecting these emails individually.

If you are selecting multiple tags then someone could match any of these, they do not have to match all of these. This is the same on every use of tags in other areas of Maxemail.

Data Export

Select additional filters of what emails you are interested in based upon tags selected.

Comparison & Segment Reports

Perhaps when looking at each segments performance, it might be interesting to see how they perform across different types of emails. For example, do certain segements respond better to event information than general news?

Tag Performance Report

This special report in the ‘Insight Reporting’ section of Maxemail allows you to break down where your overall performance is coming from. by tag. For example, what percentage of revenue from email marketing is generated from your re-activation programme versus Welcome emails and Newsletters? You might also want to compare performance between tagged emails this way – for example, you may have tagged emails by what day of the week the email was sent and this allows you to easily see which day of the week performed best.

Insight Reports

In any of these Dashboard and CRM-style reports, you can filter the email selection on which you are basing the report by selecting tags. This is useful in areas such as filtering out special types of emails on your dashboard reports, as these could distort statistics and volumes sent at certain times of year, and cloud any trend analysis.

Creating & Managing Tags

To create and edit tags, simply go to the tools menu and select ‘Manage Tags’.

Here you will see a number of example tags and tag categories to help you get started. Rather than allowing you to freely type tags against each email like on many blogging and CMS packages we have a more controlled approach to creating these. This is to ensure typos, duplicates and mistakes are kept to a minimum as they will cause mistakes in your analysis. Also, throughout an organisation it is good to maintain consistency in tagging to maximise the benefit which tags provide. Therefore you may wish to restrict which users can create and edit tags.

Tips for tagging

We recommend tagging an email with only one tag per category. For example, if your main focus of the message is ‘special offers’ only tag the email with this, even if it contains secondary content items.

Also don’t get too detailed – there is no point in just having one email matching a tag as this will not be very useful when it comes to future analysis.

Adding tags to emails

Simply select these on the email properties screen. It is a good idea to set-up tags in any templates you use, including a ‘Default’ template which allows you to define a whole host of settings, even if the email was not created from a template.

Also for tackling the issue of going through past campaigns and quickly adding tags to all of these we have created a ‘Mass tagging’ function. This will be available shortly by right clicking on the main emails section within Maxemail and selecting ‘Apply tags’. Here you can select your tag, and then tick which emails or folders you wish to retrospectively apply this to. This means in the future you may choose to change your tagging methodology yet still be able to apply this on past campaigns for instant insight.

Getting more help and advice

If you want to tap into our expertise in this area at Emailcenter then feel free to call your Account Manager to arrange a time for our Analysts to provide recommendations on how you go about tagging your email marketing campaigns.

One of our existing reports – Segment and Cross-tab Reporting does this by providing the ability to drill down into segments to identify which segments are performing best, and which ones require further targeting.

We have two new reports though that take this even further.

Lifecycle Report
You will often see a downward trend in open and click rates over time. This is because when people receive your newsletter they might decide it is not for them, as there is perhaps no relevant content or you send it too often, so they make the decision to stop opening when they see it amongst so many other emails. Yes, some people will unsubscribe or hit spam, but generally that involves a lot more effort than people are willing – it is just easier to ignore.

The Lifecycle Report is designed to show how long your database stays engaged after subscribing. You can choose over how many emails you want it to measure – say the first 12 which people receive, and the report will show you an open rate for each of the first 12 emails someone receives.

Like other reports in Insight Reporting, you can filter the emails over which the report is run by ticking them, by selecting tags and a date range. A date range is mandatory, and Maxemail will only select subscribers added after the start of this range. This ensures your report is statistically reliable as only new subscribers are shown, not older subscribers from before you started to use Maxemail.

You can also apply segments to filter on which customers to report on.

What you are hoping to see is a very gradual decline in performance over time. If you have a sharp drop – or say halve the number of opens in several sends – this suggests you will suffer from list fatigue.

If you are seeing a drop, you can identify where you need to correct it. This might mean reducing frequency to new subscribers, improving the relevance by segmenting sends or adding tailored content, or perhaps introducing a welcome programme or other targeted messages at appropriate points in the lifecycle.

The report is also useful when you introduce more advanced elements into your email marketing. New subscribers don’t have any pre-conceived ideas about what is in your messages, whereas older subscribers do. Therefore, even if you do introduce content items, these older subscribers won’t realise you have changed. Looking at just the trends of new subscribers clearly highlights any impact.

Engagement Report
While the Lifecycle Report looks at open rates for each email new subscribers receive, the engagement report gives you an overall health-check on your email database. Against the emails you select, it will group recipients into one of five groups based upon how many emails they have opened.

Therefore you can quickly establish how many of your database have not opened a single email in say the last 12 months.

The report allows you to specify a minimum number of emails that someone must have been sent in the emails you have selected – this just ensures those which only received a handful of messages do not add bias in the report.

You can also select segments to apply, which allows you to look at different audiences – perhaps by the source of the data – and see the true value of each.

Our general rule of thumb is to expect 40-60% of your database to have not opened an email in the last year – anything outside of that is unusual, although you should see this in your most engaged and dis-engaged segments. Our clients who achieve better than this, and also have a higher percentage of ‘Advocates’ on their list, are the ones who run highly relevant email programmes.

The report is really aimed at raising awareness of how many never open the email. This creates the arguments behind the business case for moving to a relevant, automated and optimised email marketing programme. Management are used to seeing 15% open rates and are not inclined to change anything as a result – but show them that the majority of their database have ignored all of their emails in the last year and it shifts their perception. No longer do they over-value their customer database, and the opportunity is there to shift away from ‘batch and blast’ to a more tailored email marketing approach.

To access a list of how many emails each recipient has opened, the existing ‘Engagement Report’ in Data Export allows you to export this.

If you want help in setting up or analysing any of these reports, please do not hesitate to contact Support or your Account Manager.

Here at Emailcenter we take the issue of data security very seriously. Our clients are hosting their valuable customer databases with us and they expect our security to be of the highest standard.

In a recent blog post “Data security check-list” we highlighted a number of safeguards we have implemented. Another major tool in the fight against hackers is our new Maxemail Security Key. The Maxemail Security key is a USB key with a button on it, which users are prompted to press when logging in. This sends a unique, secure code and completes the login. A new code is generated each time the button is pressed for extra security.

Download our data security whitepaper here: 3 Threats to the Security of Your Email Marketing Database

The first thing you need to do is create a new Insight Report.

Now we can start adding the ‘report items’ we need. First of all we need to add a graph that shows performance over the last year, for which the ‘Performance Over Time’ report is ideal. This, along with other reports can be added from the ‘Insert Report’ option.

This adds the report, but now we have to click the settings button to tell it what data to look at.

On the first tab we can choose whether we want to look at actual numbers (total sent, total opens, etc.) or percentages (open rate, click rate, etc.), what grouping we want to use for the time periods (every week, month or year), the statistics we want to show, and an optional time range for the report.

The next tab allows us to select which emails and folders to include, and the final tab allows you to filter the emails by selecting tags that must be assigned. This allows you to drill down and produce a graph which contains just the data you want to see, without any clutter of ad-hoc campaigns or automated emails. Like other reports in Maxemail you can click on the graph and drag to zoom into an area.

It might also be helpful to have a list of emails underneath this graph that allows you to find an email that caused a particular spike – this can be done by adding ‘Comparison Data’ from the ‘Insert Report’ menu, or automatically by clicking on a time period on the graph.

Another report useful in taking a snapshot of your email marketing is the ‘Breakdown’ report. This allows you to select 2 different selections of emails and compare them with one another using either a funnel, data table or pie chart. By choosing rolling date ranges this can also be used to compare the same set of campaigns for two different time ranges. For example how do our email statistics compare in the last 30 days to the 90 days prior to that? This immediately highlights if what you are performing better or worse than your previous benchmark.

The final report to look at for a Dashboard report is the Tag report. Tagging was introduced earlier this year in order for users to assign other attributes to an email and then group by these attributes in reports. For example you might tag by campaign type – newsletter, welcome, winback, abandonment, etc. or indeed by the main topic in the email.

With the Tag report you can set-up two types of report:

1) Compare the performance of each tag selected (e.g. open rates of newsletters versus winback) by selecting ‘Percentages’ in the ‘Display values’ dropdown.

2) Compare specific numbers generated by each tag (e.g. display total revenue generated by newsletters versus winback) by selecting ‘Actual’ in the ‘Display values’ dropdown.

Immediately, management can now see how each type of email performs against one another, or what the true value in revenue that email generates.

In addition, you can drag and drop reports to move them around, add text and headings and add any further reports at any time.

If you need help in setting up your dashboard, please do not hesitate to contact our Support team.

The above will no doubt be a familiar scenario for many who have commented on an acquaintances status or someone you know, without knowing most of their friends. The mass of irrelevant ‘comment’ emails that follow are pretty frustrating, causing many users to turn notifications off. Although turning off notifications would stop the flood of unwanted emails, it would also stop you being notified of comments you would be interested in.

Facebook have attempted to address this frequency and relevance issue and have announced the following:

Whilst the debate into the optimum frequency of send is normally applied to marketing emails, brands need to consider this issue even if they are ‘just sending notifications’ and ‘not trying to sell anything’.

Facebook is trying to sell its users something – a place to spend time whilst online. As such Facebook need to treat all emails as marketing emails and ensure they contain more relevant notifications at an appropriate frequency.

All users are different however and wish to be notified of activity to varying degrees.  It is good to see that Facebook is directing users to their preference centre, where users can decide the exact type and frequency of emails they receive – something all senders can learn from.

Facebook’s new found respect for its users is likely down to the emergence of its first main competitor in recent years: Google+.

For more information on the optimum frequency of sending emails, read Choosing the right email frequency by Sean Duffy.