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.

Listen to a podcast of the Interview for some useful insights into email marketing topics ranging from customer relationship strategies and design tips all the way through to email analytics, the recent data breaches effecting the industry and the what the future may hold for email marketing.

You can view this and other digital marketing podcasts at www.targetinternet.com

If you would like to discuss any of the topics covered in this podcast please get in touch.

To celebrate the start of the new football season, we have created a league of the marketing emails sent by football clubs from the Barclays Premier League.

Read on to see if your team are going to make it into Europe, settle for mid table mediocrity or get relegated.

Click on the thumbnail images to view the emails in full.

1) Everton

Everton find themselves on top of the league with their well designed, content rich newsletter. The striking hero shot and lead story will keep fans coming back for more. Calls-to-action are impactful without being too crass and content blocks are well organised, making it easy for readers to consume the various different messages.

2) Sunderland

Close runners up – Sunderland, produce a tidy newsletter with many of the plus points of the Everton email and a few more besides. Text to image ratio is good, including free text article headers, meaning that fans will be able to read email content before downloading images (always nice to see that). It also contains a “match pack” providing fans with useful information on the upcoming fixtures, including a travel guide and how the “Black Cats” faired on previous meetings between the two teams.

3) Arsenal

The Arsenal newsletter is very simple and uncluttered. The one column structure makes for easy reading and the absence of any garish adverts makes you feel the Arsenal marketing team care more about building good relationships with it’s fans as opposed to simply monetising the email. There is however a well placed call-to-action for the clubs online video player.

4) Tottenham

The Tottenham newsletters are very long, but contains a good mix of news, game highlights, products from the club shop and eye-catching social links. Although there is a lot of information contained in this email, it is still quite easy to read through, using a simple grid layout to good effect.

5) Chelsea

Although I am not a huge fan of the Chelsea emails, there are a lot worse examples in the league, so they make 5th spot by default. Their placement of imagery makes it difficult to know where to start reading first. Their content is too reliant on “match reports” and lacks any articles fans would actually be interested in reading.

6) Fulham

The Fulham newsletter looks like a badly formatted Word document, more than a promotional email from a club playing in the richest football league in the World. With a bit more attention to detail it has the makings of an email the Fulham fans would really enjoy receiving. Their hero shots on the other hand are of a good standard.

7) Aston Villa

Aston Villa send shorter emails than any other team in the league. These emails should prove successful in achieving click-thrus on desired links, as they often only contain two calls-to-action and not much else. These emails are 100% image, but if fans download the images they are presented with a pleasant looking email.

8) Man Utd

The Man Utd emails contain too much information and I doubt fans would read even half of it. It does contain some nice features however, such as a Q&A session with a different Man Utd player each issue. The Man Utd marketing team should do a bit more testing, as half the images fail to show in Gmail and this has been the case for a number of months now.

9) Liverpool

Liverpool used to send out a newsletter with the standard links to highlights, match reports and so on, but the only time fans seem to receive emails now, is when the club want to get some money out of them. This is short sighted, more needs to be done to nurture relationships with subscribers.

10-18) Stoke et al…

Nine of the twenty teams in the league (Stoke, Blackburn, Bolton, West Brom, Wigan, Wolves, Swansea, QPR and Norwich) send out the same generic emails, generated from the back end of their almost identical websites. It obviously does not matter if Stoke’s emails are almost identical to Swansea’s, but the lack of effort is evident and this will likely be reflected in the responsiveness of their respective subscriber databases.

19) Man City

No email sign up form can be found (by me anyway) on the Man City website, so it does not look like they are utilising email any more. This is a real shame because if their emails were anything like their website, they would be great.

20) Newcastle

Although Man City do not send emails, they are saved from bottom spot because sending no emails is better than sending the sort of emails that Newcastle send. Newcastle fans must feel rather used and unvalued, when they receive emails from their club, only to find it contains no information at all about Newcastle United, but is simply trying to sell them cheap electricity. Shocking!

The season has only just started, so there is plenty of time for teams at the foot of the table to turn things around.

Emailcenter won the Silver standard award at the Travel Marketing Awards last night. We received this award for the innovative work we have done for environmentally friendly adventure holiday company – ResponsibleTravel.com.

This award is the latest in a long list of reasons why companies are turning to Emailcenter to deliver highly innovative and targeted email marketing campaigns to their customers.

By using behavioural data captured from their website, ResponsibleTravel.com were able to target their customers with highly relevant holiday emails, resulting in a 254% increase in conversions of prospects.

Read the ResponsibleTravel.com case study.

To discuss how behavioural targeting can help your email marketing get in touch >

No value is  added to the email by mentioning the World Cup, it just seems marketers think that this  cuts through the clutter and empathises with their customer base. It doesn’t – it just adds to the clutter of all those other brands and their tenuous World Cup links. It all just reminds me of a politician claiming to like the coolest band of the moment in case it improves their street cred.

Just like I don’t want our politicians spouting on about their hip music collection I don’t want my favourite clothing retailers talking to me about football – that’s why the BBC Sport website and talkSPORT radio exist.

Another reason perhaps for this constant tirade of World Cup themed messages is the impact the event has on various businesses sales levels. Talking about the World Cup is not going to help here, particularly as you will be more reliant on your non-Football watching audience during this time. And don’t forget that less than 1/3 of the UK population watched the most popular England match so not everyone is footy mad right now).

What email marketers should be doing is the same as normal – cutting through the everyday inbox clutter by being relevant, timely and offering value to the receiving customer. So rather than keeping the World Cup in your subject line tell your customers what fabulous relevant products are in the email for them this time.

And now that England are out, please don’t just move onto Andy Murray as your next topic.