Every ending—like a project or a year—is a time for reflection. However, reviewing something as significant as your marketing program can be daunting. What should you include, how do you present it, and what do you want to say?
To make it easier for you, we’ve created an email reporting template that you can use to collect your thoughts and impress your stakeholders.
What is an email reporting template?
An email reporting template provides an outline and place to share your email marketing status, recent wins, and lessons. It’s common to use an email report at the end of your fiscal or calendar year to give a status report to stakeholders and leadership. Of course, you can also create a report after a big email campaign, before a budgeting or investment pitch, or when you aren’t sure why you aren’t hitting your email marketing goals.
An email report template gives you space to share:
- Email marketing volume and performance
- Recent projects
- Lessons learned
- Challenges
- What you’ll continue using
- What you’d like to try next
What is the importance of an email marketing performance report?
After you’ve spent countless hours in the weeds of an email marketing initiative, you might want to forget it and move on. However, taking time to reflect benefits you, your team, and your organization.
Decide what’s worth your time
You’re probably working with time, budget, tech, or team constraints and need to spend your resources wisely. Filling out an email marketing report, even if you never share it with anyone, gives you a structured way to check in with yourself.
Are you spending time on the most impactful strategies? What are your highest priorities for improvement? Regularly reviewing your input and its impact lets you adjust your focus accordingly.
For example, if one of your goals this year was to increase read rates, but your old email design has stagnated engagement, you should prioritize a new responsive email template next year.
Champion for more resources for your team
You know how hard your team works and how vital everyone’s efforts are, but the rest of your organization might not. A polished and impactful email report is a bargaining chip the next time you want to advocate for investment or grow your team.
Align your email efforts with your company
A car with each wheel spinning in a different direction will go nowhere fast. Similarly, work progress is slow if each team goes its own way. Sharing your email goals, priorities, and insights with your is a great way to get everyone on the same page. You can also use your email marketing report to open discussions across departments and learn from other teams. Ultimately, you have to use these discussions to align your work with company-wide goals.
For example, suppose your company wants to increase customer retention. In that case, your report would have email marketing analytics that signal an engaged audience, like subscriber lifetime value and revenue per subscriber.
What is covered in Litmus’ email reporting template?
Litmus’ email report has more than 30 Google template slides ready to fill out. After entering your email team’s information, you’ll have a beautiful presentation ready to send and share with others.
Here’s what you’ll find in the template.
Email team overview
If you present to a non-email audience, they might need to learn the ins and outs of your daily work. The first step in your email reporting presentation is introducing your team members and giving an overview of how you help your brand achieve a goal, like increasing sales or creating an engaged community.
Email campaign’s reach
Your stakeholders don’t watch your subscriber count like you do, so share your audience size, emails sent this year, number of campaigns, and clicks generated. Revealing how many people you have a direct communication line with begins to show the impact of email.
Email program’s health and data
Once you establish the foundation of your email reach, take a moment to review the health of your program through metrics. Sharing your performance against industry averages and your past results proves you have subscriber quality, not just quantity.
An overview of key metrics is all you’ll need for an email health summary for a general audience. If you’re presenting to a team or client with a particular focus, you could include screenshots of your email analytics dashboard or Google Analytics report for extra detail.
Our email reporting template has space to share critical email analytics like:
Be sure to add any company-specific email reporting benchmarks, too. For example, tracking how often subscribers printed your emails is as useful of an engagement indicator as website visits if you regularly send in-store coupons, booking confirmations, or event tickets.
Business impact of email marketing campaigns
Only some stakeholders inherently understand the value of an active email list. Everyone understands dollar signs, however. Including your conversion rate, revenue generated, and return on investment translates your work to benchmarks that stakeholders value.
Recap key email goals
After describing the high-level results of email marketing this year, it’s time to share how you drove results. Start by listing your top goals and priorities for the past year. Leading with your goals gives context to your decision-making process and sets up your presentation to compare expectations vs. results.
Highlight considerable program successes
Go ahead—share your highlight reel. Pull out specific designs, email campaigns, messaging, or ideas that really worked this year. Explain what went well, what you learned, and how you can apply those lessons in the future. You can also share non-email-specific success, like an organized workflow or team morale.
Share important developments
A lot can change in a year (or, let’s be honest, in a week). Take a moment to share staffing updates, new tools or vendors, regulation updates, and other macro trends that affected your industry or customers. These insights influence your limitations and priorities.
Identify the biggest email opportunities for improvement
There are always new goals on the horizon, but you can impress your stakeholders with a plan. Be upfront about your team’s challenges and present your ideas for addressing them.
The opportunities section of the email reporting template is also your chance to pitch email marketing’s impact on your organization and ideas for cross-team collaboration.
For example, you can propose sharing successful emails with the social media team to repurpose for other channels. Your engaged community of subscribers is an ideal place to learn about your target audience and share what you’ve learned across the organization.
Set goals for next year and uncover opportunities
After recapping the past year, it’s time to look ahead. The final segment of your email report should address next year’s goals and what support you need to hit the mark. You could also add an overview of your current and projected budget.
Recap the success of your email marketing efforts today!
Nobody knows your email team’s efforts quite like you, but that doesn’t mean they can’t learn. Articulating your work helps you advocate for your team, show leadership the power of email, and prepare for the year ahead. Plus, looking back on successes you may have forgotten about feels good. Who doesn’t want a little year-end boost?
Claim your free year-end email reporting template now for a beautiful deck that’s easy to customize, along with helpful notes and tips to help you brainstorm content and guide your presentation.
The post Evaluate Your Email Performance with an Email Reporting Template appeared first on Litmus.
