
Tracking Email and Social Media: Everything You Need to Know
Email and social media are very effective marketing tools for any business – in any industry – to utilize. However, they must also be used the right way in order to garner the greatest results possible. While awesome email campaigns and memorable hashtags can do wonders for a business’s marketing strategy, these elements can only do so much on their own.
To perfect your strategy, you have to do more than just create incredible content; you’ve also got to analyze how things like your emails and social media posts perform. With this information, you’ll be able to make smarter and more impactful marketing choices moving forward.
Monitoring Email Campaign Analytics
Measuring email effectiveness is essential to understanding your audience. Which words truly speak to you users? What day of the week is best for open rates? What time do your users check their mail? Measuring audience click-through-rates (CTR) will create a window into all of these metrics. We determine email click-through-rates with this equation:
Open Rate = # of messages opened / # of messages delivered
This is basically the measurement of how interesting your email subject line is, what time you’re sending an email, what day you’re sending, your “from” email address and how often you send emails. Check out your current stats as a benchmark for numbers to improve upon.
Here’s how to look at email performance in HubSpot:
- Check an individual email’s analytics by going to “Content > Email.” Find the name of the particular email you want to check out and click it to open the performance window.
- Your email open rate, CTR, delivery and contacts lost percentages are calculated for you. You can select which time frame you’d like to view these stats in, which are: first day, first week and first month.
At the bottom of the email performance window, you’ll see more facts about your email’s performance. You can view how many recipients opened your email from their desktop vs. their cellphone. You can also see how many users clicked through the email by device type.
This allows you to get a good monthly overview of what your email analytics are. For weekly purposes, we recommend you take a deep-dive by visiting each individual email itself.
Pro Tips: Here are some pointers on improving your email click-through rates:
- Getting a lot of hard bounces? Your contact list may need some updating. It’s typical for people to change their email address(es) pretty frequently – as often as every couple of months! Make sure you stay engaged with your audience and keep up with their correct email addresses.
- A surge of spam reports? Email recipients may be reporting you as spam if they don’t recognize your email address. Make sure your company’s name is in the email to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Tracking Social Media with HubSpot
Social Reach: the potential social media users that a message will reach based on your total follower count.
Social media is an extraordinarily powerful catalyst for your business. Why produce awesome content if there’s no one there to read it? Social media serves a number of purposes, such as engagement, brand awareness, content promotion, buyer insight, customer service and more! This is why tracking your social media reach is so important: it lets you know how many people are viewing your content on a regular basis.
You can easily track social media reach in HubSpot. If you don’t have HubSpot, you can find these numbers in each social media channel – they all provide free analytics tools for business.
Here’s how it’s done in HubSpot:
- Go to “Reports” under the Social tab. Here, you can take a look at all your social reach analytics for all of your accounts.
- Click on the “Reach” tab to the far right.
- On the “Reach” tab, you’ll see your total reach across all channels and how many monthly followers (or “fans”) you’ve amassed. On the right, you’ll see the percentage you’ve increased your reach.
You can quickly grow your social media followers at an exponential rate if you measure what’s resonating with your audience and what’s not. Looking at these numbers and tweaking your posts based on your findings is how you gain greater insight into your buyer personas – you can learn about the issues that matter most to them, including their pain points and language.
Pro Tip: Aim for a 10% social media growth every week. Even if you don’t hit it, expanding your network by just 5% every week and having a 20% monthly increase is still going to make an impact.
Source: Bluleadz