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MessageGears’ Analytics Suite Powers Email Deliverability Excellence

Sep 13, 2018
Albert Liu

The primary goal of all email marketers is to drive customer engagement and retention, while constantly improving ROI. From content to IP/domain management and analytics, there are countless factors that go into implementing a successful email marketing campaign. However, when getting to the core of optimizing email campaigns and deliverability, it comes down to how you’re using data. Having access to all your data in an organized manner is one the most valuable resources email marketers can have.

Within the MessageGears cross-channel ESP platform, we offer one of the most powerful data analytics tools available in the ESP industry. It provides in-depth aggregate data on the entire lifespan of a specific campaign or job, down to the domain level (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.). Our analytics features not only help marketers easily digest and understand their email metrics, but also how they can improve their email efforts.

The MessageGears analytics toolset is composed of three levels of data — the account level, the campaign level, and the job level with performance by domain. Each level provides valuable data and trends to help identify potential issues and patterns with your sends.

Account-Level Analytics

MessageGears’ account analytics allows you to filter by day and month for a high-level view of volume, bounces, content errors, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints (total counts and rates with a 30-day and eight-month lookback). This allows marketers to easily see where, when, and why there were potential deliverability issues. It could be a spike in complaints, unsubscribes, or bounces. Knowing what caused it is essential for fixing the problem. (Click the below examples to view a larger version)

Marketing Campaign-Level Analytics

When diving a bit deeper, we also have MessageGears’ campaign-level analytics, which break down campaign performance over time. In the example below, it includes the full list jobs sent with specific metrics, in sortable fashion.

With this, marketers can easily identify which jobs were problematic and caused the dip in engagement rate. Perhaps a specific job had a much higher spike in complaints due to the content or time it was sent. Whatever the cause, this helps marketers quickly identify the root cause of an issue.

In recent years, we’ve seen increases in bot attacks, where malicious actors target a company’s opt-in form. This can generate thousands of fake email addresses. This causes huge spikes in hard bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes, leading to substantial deliverability issues. Just this year, we had two clients’ signup pages compromised by bot attacks. But with our real-time analytics, we caught this and resolved it immediately, greatly minimizing impact. Implementing CAPTCHA and/or double opt-in is a great way to combat these attacks and maintain an engaged subscriber list.

Job-Level Analytics with Performance By Domain

MessageGears’ job analytics provides the most valuable and granular data. Using it, you can see how a job and its top 10 domains perform over time. Most ESPs have a set retry window for temporary/transient failures, but with MessageGears, we can customize it based on the client’s needs. That’s why a specific job may have a lifespan of more than 24 hours.

Being able to see the performance of a job by domain in real time allows marketers to quickly pinpoint and diagnose issues, whether it’s a specific domain being sent to spam or causing a delay in delivery. Yahoo domains, now under Oath, commonly issue temporary failures when senders are warming a new IP/domain(s). With our top domain report, you can clearly see how fast your emails are getting through. This report also tells you if your ISP is throttling you. In the example below, we can clearly see QQ.com and Naver.com have significantly lower open and click rates compared to other ISPs, indicating spam issues.

Having the capability to filter by any email metric (deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, or complaints) provides marketers an opportunity to further optimize their campaigns. For example, if a client begins to see a trend that a majority of their customers is engaging with their emails from 6-9 a.m. rather than 3-5 p.m., they now have a simple way to improve engagement and ROI.

Our last section in Job Analytics is the top device report. What device did customers use when viewing your email? Was it the traditional computer, growingly popular tablet, or most commonly used mobile device? We continue to see an upward trend in users reading emails on mobile over any other device. This highlights the importance of ensuring your email templates render properly on all mobile devices to keep customers engaged. We partner with Litmus and allow marketers to see how their content renders across various email clients, including mobile platforms.

We send all our real-time data and event triggers back to our clients via API. But our analytics suite within the MessageGears platform helps gather the most important email metrics and presents them in a digestible format for any marketer. And of course, everything is exportable to .CSV if you want to manipulate the data further.

If you’d like an in-depth walkthrough of our platform and tools, please feel free to sign up for one of our monthly demo sessions, or reach out to our team directly for a one-on-one meeting.

About the Author

Albert Liu

Albert was the Head of Deliverability at MessageGears and responsible for helping clients optimize their email marketing efforts. He was the primary contact involved in on-boarding and consulting with clients, as well as managing ISP escalations/relationships. He knows all the ins and outs of deliverability and wants to help businesses understand how to enhance their email marketing campaigns.