Email Marketing Dashboards Allow You to See the Hump on Your Back

by | Oct 24, 2013

Email Marketing Dashboards – Every day is a rush.  There is so much to be done and the day-to-day tasks tend to absorb all our focus.  If we don’t have well-designed email marketing dashboards to watch our back, we can easily miss important information about our recipients.

Measuring Email Campaigns

Massive increases in email technology have come together in recent years to bring instant gratification to sales teams that want to know the results of email marketing efforts.  Companies that have not gotten on the bandwagon of marketing accountability are being beaten by the nimble, informed actions taken by those that have already adopted this way of doing business.

 According to the Marketing Profs blog, the AMA (American Marketing Association) defines accountability this way, “the responsibility for the systematic management of marketing resources and processes to achieve measurable gains in return on marketing investment and increased marketing efficiency, while maintaining quality and increasing the value of the corporation.”

A simpler way of saying this could be…you need a system of feedback to help you manage your marketing resources and experience an increase in sales.

How Dashboards Help

 Accountability is simply not possible if you don’t have a system for feeding back the information you need to discover when you are on track with your goals.  With astoundingly responsive data available, no company should be in the dark about the effectiveness of their email marketing. 

The email marketing dashboard supports your decisions or lets you know when you are off track.  With the data on your dashboard, you are able to make a course correction when you aren’t getting the actions you laid out in your strategy.

Dashboard Strategy Steps

Too often, a company will set up dashboards to monitor things that don’t align with their desired core business outcomes.  It gets back to the overused phrase that Stephen Covey made popular. “Begin with the end in mind.”

First decide what business goals you want to accomplish.  It can be as simple as determining your revenue projections.  From there, determine what needs to be measured, tweaked and improved to achieve that goal.  Some benchmarks may be the number of new sales leads, source of sales leads, appointments set, proposals presented, closed sales, average sale per closing.

With these outcomes quantified, you have the data to take your email marketing to the next level.

 Plant the Seeds Now – Harvest Sales Later 

If you do not currently use email marketing dashboards, setting them up may feel like a lot of work.  You would be right.  It does take a considerable amount of time to choose what needs to be measured and set up the metrics in your online CRM (Customer Relationship Manager software).

A healthy business is kind of like a healthy body.  You have a choice whether to eat the right foods, get the proper balance of rest and activity, and monitor your health condition over time.  The other option would be to rush through life thinking that you don’t have time for habits that promote good health.  When we don’t monitor the health of our bodies, emergency health crises are often the wake-up call.

Don’t allow your business to have “humps” you are not monitoring.  Use a good email marketing program that gives you the information you need to maintain good communication with your customers and the data you need to keep you on track for increased revenue.