When reporting on emails it can be useful to group several emails together to get an overall report for a type of email. For example your Christmas promotions might be made up of several weeks of sends, each with various segmented versions.

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.

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

When we all first started sending email marketing campaigns, I’m sure we will all agree that we were amazed at the amount of reporting data available to us. We could see in real-time who opened, what they clicked on, and later, what they bought and for how much.

Yet once you have got over the initial excitement and try and use these reports to improve your email marketing the buzz dies down as they don’t provide any insight into what to do next.

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Your Friend - “I have some big news. I am moving to Australia in a few months!!”
You - “Nice! I’m glad you got the Job. I’m not jealous… much!”
Non-mutual Friend - “Generic congratulations/shock!!!” = Irrelevant email notification from Facebook
Non-mutual Friend - “Generic congratulations/shock!!!” = Irrelevant email notification from Facebook
Non-mutual Friend - “Generic congratulations/shock!!!” = Irrelevant email notification from Facebook
Non-mutual Friend - “Generic congratulations/shock!!!” = Irrelevant email notification from Facebook

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Maxemail has had a powerful A/B Split Testing function for many years, that allows you to easily test anything about your email campaigns, to random samples of your lists. We have now enhanced this to make it even easier and quicker to use, allowing you to automate the picking of a winner for when you are not around to do so.

Here is a screenshot of the updated Split Testing screen:

Here you can see there are new icons along the top to open, copy, delete or create emails for this Split Test. The best way of adding different versions into the test, is to create one version you are happy with, copy it and change the one element you are testing in the other emails.

The other new icon in here is the “New Winner…” option. This opens the following dialogue box:

Simply select which metric Maxemail should decide the winning version upon. For example selecting “Total Unique Opens” will mean Maxemail chooses the winner that has the highest percentage of unique opens.

The next dropdown allows you to specify when the winner should be picked and sent to the remaining people on your list, which have not already received one of these emails:

When you do start using the updated feature, remember these key elements of best practice:

• Leave it long enough for results to become clear – even a subject line test might take 12 hours to be reliable

• Use a sample size of at least 2,500 people per test, ideally 5,000

• Change only one thing per test, otherwise you will have no idea what impact each element has had. This includes when you send the email, so make sure you send the tests at the same time

• Choose the right statistic to pick your winner from. While open rate might appear to be the best statistic for a subject line test, we often prefer to use click-thru rate. This is because if one subject line is directly related to the offer at the top of the email, this might generate more clicks, even if less people open it. After all these people are opening the email because of what is in the subject line.

The new ‘A/B Split Testing’ function will be available 9th May, 2011, as part of the V6 release.