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

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.

The reason is that email marketing is not about a single message – its success is based upon your entire relationship with your customers via email. Think CRM, not Campaigns.

As an example the biggest impact upon whether someone will open an email is not the subject line, the from name or the time of day you sent it; It is all the other emails you have sent previously. So if the recipient has found the last few emails they opened were dull and had nothing relevant to them, this will drive their desire to open it or otherwise, more than whatever you state in the subject line.

Therefore if this is how email works then we need a new way of measuring these long-term factors to go alongside our basic metrics, heatmaps and other campaign-specific reporting. This is the driving force behind our new ‘Insight Reporting’ toolset within Maxemail.

Insight Reporting allows you to build your own dashboards and reporting pages that provide the trend and in-depth analysis you need to make informed decisions about your email marketing. Within the report you can add your own text and headings, and produce a presentation-ready PDF for download.

The reports available to include currently are:

Performance Over Time

View trends on a selected range of emails, or actual numbers on emails delivered, click traffic and revenue generated.

Breakdown Report

Allows you to see two types of emails side-by-side (Let’s say your newsletters versus promotions), or one set of emails in two different ways of reporting

Engagement

Shows how many emails people open, including how many people never open the emails. You can apply segmentation criteria to compare engagement of segments within your database

Lifecycle

This shows average open rates after someone has subscribed, for each email they receive. For example, the very first email subscribers receive might average 40% open rate, but by the time they receive their 5th email you might only average 15% open rates. This enables you to see how quickly members in your list start to disengage from your communications, and highlight the need to introduce measures such as increased segmentation and tailored content, reduced frequency and multi-stage Welcome programmes to overcome this.

Tag Performance

If you use our tagging system to tag your emails you can compare different types of emails performance, or see how much traffic or revenue each type of email brings to your database.

The video below shows how to setup your first Insight Report. Over the coming days  and weeks we will be adding further posts on each of these reports to show you what you could learn about your email marketing.

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.

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.