Definition
💡 Analytics for email refers to the collection and interpretation of email-related data.
Commonly analyzed data includes:
- Open Rates: How many recipients open an email.
- Click-Through Rates (CTR): The percentage of recipients who click on links within an email.
- Conversion Rates: The number of recipients who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service.
- Unsubscribe Rates: The share of recipients who opt out of receiving future emails.
- Device and Client Usage: Information on the types of devices and email clients used by recipients.
Purpose of Collecting Email Analytics
Perhaps the most common reason why analytics for email are collected is to improve the performance of marketing campaigns. Even today, with social media dominating the public discourse, the humble mail can be the most effective marketing channel, but it requires careful analysis to reach its full potential.
Besides marketing, analytics for email can also be used to determine whether messages are reaching their target recipients and to gain valuable insights into the target audience.
Example
Here are three examples of how email analytics can be used in practice:
- A small online bookstore sends out a monthly newsletter featuring book recommendations and special offers. Using email analytics, they track the open and click-through rates. They notice that messages sent on Tuesday mornings perform better than those sent during other days of the week, so they adjust the delivery of the newsletter accordingly.
- An IT department at a large corporation is responsible for an in-house mail system. To monitor how well it works, they keep an eye on delivery rates and bounce rates. Whenever a spike in these metrics occurs, they promptly investigate and fix the issue.
- A wildlife conservation non-profit uses email analytics to better understand and engage its donor base by collecting information about device preferences, geographic locations, and best-performing content types.
Does Gmail Have Analytics for Emails?
Gmail, as a free email service for individual users, does not provide comprehensive built-in analytics tools like those used in email marketing platforms, such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
The best you can do is use the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder to add parameters to your URLs so you can measure things like how many people come from an email to your website in Google Analytics.
There are, however, some third-party Gmail plugins that you can use to analyze additional mail-related metrics. Examples include Email Analytics and Email Meter.
Can I Use Google Analytics With Outlook Email?
Google Analytics and Microsoft Outlook are not directly compatible out of the box. Outlook is created by Microsoft, so it can't be tracked using Google Analytics without an additional integration program.
For example, n8n is a workflow automation platform that allows you to integrate Google Analytics with Microsoft Outlook. With a tool like this, you can design automations that extract, transform, and load data between different apps and services.
