How do you present the success of the email strategies to the stakeholders?

Email marketing continues to be a staple in marketing programs. It is critical to best understand how to present success to your stakeholders in meaningful ways. To present success, I recommend addressing the following:

• Define what success looks like. What metrics will you report on to best showcase success? Some standard metrics include click-through rates, unsubscribe rates and revenue.

• Establish reporting and dashboards. You can think of reporting as the infrastructure that is needed to report on what is working and what isn’t. Your stakeholders will expect a regular cadence of reporting and progress.

• Identify the appropriate reporting cadence. Be sure to establish the appropriate reporting cadence with your stakeholders. It’s also important to establish what the next steps are as the program evolves (e.g., A/B testing, segmentation and personalization).

It’s important to gain buy-in from your stakeholders early so that your efforts are focused on continuous improvement and not alignment.

You present the success of the email strategies you are managing by focusing on metrics that matter. Tie your efforts back to revenue when you can. Open rates are interesting, but this metric does not truly speak to the success of your email strategy.

With the progression of privacy and lack of cookie tracking, we have to rethink how we gauge success for email. I recommend thinking about addressing these types of questions for your stakeholders:

• What messaging is resonating with our audience?
• What assets are users engaging with?
• What impact or outcomes is your email strategy resulting in?

Here is another resource that may be helpful and I too agree with its perspective.

Before getting to results, there should be an expectation set with the demand generation team that everything must have a hypothesis crafted before going to market. Then you report on that.

I have found many marketers do not do this foundational step which can result in just doing work for works sake, not really knowing if something really performed to expectation and data dumps are the norm rather than clearly articulated expectations vs. results.

Having a hypothesis crafted allows this tactic to have a purpose, allows you to triage the health quickly and zero in on learnings. If you thought it was going to do X, but it did Y - is that good or bad? What do you do next?

Basic email platform engagement. But most importantly, Are emails qualifying leads for outreach. Do emails speed up the qualification process. Do leads that engage with emails perform better in the sales cycle