Beyond the Inbox: Tracking Email Marketing KPIs Across Multiple Channels for CPG Food & Beverage Brands

Are you a food and beverage brand looking to expand your marketing efforts with email marketing KPIs? Look no further! In this article, we’ll explore the importance of tracking email marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) beyond the inbox and provide valuable insights on how CPG food and beverage brands can optimize their email campaigns for success.

First, we need to define just what email marketing is!

What is Email Marketing?

In today’s digital age, email marketing is a powerful tool for food and beverage brands to engage with their target audience. It allows for personalized and targeted communication, enabling brands to build relationships and drive sales.

However, tracking the success of email marketing campaigns goes beyond simply monitoring open rates and click-through rates (CTRs). While the email inbox is a critical starting point, it’s essential to understand the broader impact of your email campaigns on customer behavior and engagement across various channels.

Why Track Email Marketing KPIs Beyond the Inbox?

Tracking email marketing KPIs beyond the inbox is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness and impact of your campaigns. Let’s look at some important factors before diving in.

1. Understand the Customer Journey

Understanding the customer journey is vital to tracking email marketing KPIs. It involves analyzing how recipients of your emails interact with your brand across multiple channels.

For food and beverage brands, tracking email marketing KPIs across multiple channels is essential to understand customer interactions better, tailor messaging and content, drive higher engagement and conversions, and analyze how email campaigns contribute to the overall customer journey. Speaking of journeys… Let’s find a map, or we may get lost!

Navigating a customer journey map

• The customer journey starts with awareness. At this stage, customers have a problem or need. They are looking for answers. How can your brand solve its needs?
• Secondly, the customer performs their evaluation. They will look at different competitors before making a decision. Evaluate their needs and the competition to fill any gaps in your industry. What are other brands doing well? What are they missing?
• Once a customer makes a purchase, determine how to keep them returning. Define their usage patterns and their need for a re-purchase in the future.
• Lastly, ensure your customers are advocating for your brand. Creating a loyal customer who advocates for your company and its products or services is invaluable. This can be achieved through great customer service, ongoing offers, rewards, recognition, and valuable content.

Several beverage brands have crafted a customer journey that resonates with their target audience. Starbucks is a great example.

Starbucks has built a strong customer journey through personalized experiences and loyalty programs. From their mobile app that allows customers to order ahead and earn rewards to their in-store ambiance and friendly baristas, Starbucks focuses on delivering a seamless and enjoyable customer experience at every touchpoint.

The knowledge a customer journey map can provide empowers you to optimize your email marketing strategies, personalize your messaging, and then deliver a cohesive and compelling customer experience across all touchpoints.

2. Measure Cross-Channel Impact

Indeed, email marketing is rarely a standalone channel for food and beverage brands. It often works with other digital marketing channels, such as social media, content marketing, and paid advertising.

How you can measure cross-channel impact successfully

• Utilize tracking mechanisms to track website visits directly attributed to email campaigns
• Analyze data to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns in driving traffic to the website
• Allocate the marketing budget more effectively based on the analyzed data
• Optimize strategies for maximum ROI

Tracking mechanisms… What are those? To track email marketing KPIs across multiple channels, you can use tools like UTM parameters or even dedicated landing pages to measure website visits directly attributed to email campaigns. Analyzing this data can help optimize marketing strategies and also allocate budgets effectively for maximum ROI.

Further, tracking and analyzing email marketing KPIs is crucial for brands to understand the customer journey, measure cross-channel impact, and optimize campaign performance.

3. Optimize Campaign Performance for Email Marketing KPIs

By analyzing the data and insights gathered from the various metrics you are tracking, you can make data-driven decisions to improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns. These metrics can include conversions, bounce rates, and post-click engagement metrics to uncover trends and patterns that indicate what is working and what needs adjustment.

Some strategies you can utilize to optimize your food and beverage brand’s campaign performance

• Segmentation and personalization for your audience(s)
• A/B testing to experiment with different elements of your email marketing campaigns
• Optimize email designs for mobile devices, different email clients and dark vs light mode
• Engage with compelling content
• Monitor your campaign and act accordingly based on customer engagement

Later in this article, we will dive deep into how you can effectively optimize and measure your campaign performance for a successful approach to email marketing KPIs. This data-driven approach allows you to make informed decisions, refine your targeting, and create more compelling content for your email campaigns. Now that you have a background on why, let’s look at the essential email marketing KPIs to track.

Essential Email Marketing KPIs to Track

To effectively track the performance of your email marketing campaigns across multiple channels, it’s crucial to monitor the following vital KPIs. You may want to add additional KPIs specific to your business.

1. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate measures the percentage of email recipients who take the desired action, such as purchasing or downloading a coupon. Identifying your conversion rate from email compared to other channels can help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.

2. Website Traffic

Monitoring website traffic generated by your email campaigns is crucial to understanding the impact of your emails on driving visitors to your site. For example, tools like Google Analytics can help you track the number of visitors, their behavior, and the pages they interact with. By comparing the website traffic from different email campaigns and other channels, you can gain insights into which campaigns are most effective in driving organic traffic.

3. Social Media Engagement

Tracking social media engagement KPIs for email marketing is crucial in understanding the impact of your email campaigns and their connection to social media platforms. You can expand your reach and encourage audience engagement by driving traffic from your emails to specific social media posts.

Monitoring metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and click-throughs on those social media posts is important. This data allows you to measure the cross-channel influence of your email marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize both your email and social media strategies.

Integrating social media engagement tracking into your email campaigns can enhance your overall marketing performance and foster a stronger connection with your audience across your owned channels.

4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value is a metric that estimates the total revenue a customer generates for your brand over their lifetime. You can assess your campaigns’ long-term impact and then profitability by tracking the CLV of customers acquired through email marketing. This information helps you make data-driven decisions regarding customer acquisition costs, retention strategies, and overall marketing budget allocation.

5. Email Forwarding and Sharing

Email forwarding and sharing are potent indicators of audience engagement and brand advocacy, for example. By tracking the number of times your emails are forwarded or shared, you can gauge how much your content resonates with your subscribers. Additionally, tracking the channels through which your emails are shared, (such as social media or direct messaging) provides insights into the preferred communication channels of your audience.

6. Email Deliverability and Bounce Rate

Monitoring email deliverability and bounce rates ensures your emails reach the intended recipients. Generally, high bounce rates can indicate issues with your email list quality or deliverability practices. By regularly monitoring and addressing bounce rate issues, you can maintain a clean and engaged email list, improve deliverability, and maximize the reach of your campaigns.

7. Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of subscribers who opt out of receiving further emails from your brand. Tracking this metric helps you understand the level of engagement and satisfaction of your subscribers. High unsubscribe rates may indicate email content, frequency, or targeting issues. Analyzing and addressing these issues can help improve subscriber retention and the overall effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

Actionable Tips for Optimizing Email Marketing Campaigns

Now that we understand the importance of tracking email marketing KPIs beyond the inbox, let’s explore some actionable tips for optimizing your email campaigns

1. Implement UTM Tracking

Utilize UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to track the performance of your email campaigns in Google Analytics. Furthermore, you can track website visits, conversions, and other desired actions directly attributed to your email campaigns by appending unique UTM parameters to your email links.

Setting up UTM codes in your email campaigns enables you to understand which email campaigns, sources, and mediums drive the most engagement and, lastly conversions, allowing you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your future campaigns.

2. Integrate Social Sharing Buttons

Include social sharing buttons in your email templates to encourage subscribers to share your content on their preferred social media platforms. This also extends the reach of your email campaigns and enables you to track the social media engagement and impact generated by your emails.

How to integrate social sharing buttons in your email template

1. Choose Relevant Social Media Platforms: First, pick the social media platforms that align with your brand and marketing goals. These can include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
2. Design Your Buttons: Create visually-appealing custom buttons that match your brand colors and style, or use pre-made icons.
3. Generate Sharing URLs: For each platform, create a sharing URL that will be triggered when recipients click the sharing buttons. Most social media platforms provide APIs or URLs to share content directly.
4. Add Button HTML Code: Insert the social sharing button HTML code in your email template HTML. Place the buttons in a prominent location, such as at the top or bottom of the email or alongside relevant content sections.
5. Customize Button Styling and Messaging: Apply appropriate styling to your social sharing buttons to match your email template. Customize the buttons’ size, color, spacing, and alignment to ensure they blend seamlessly with your email design.
6. Test the Buttons: Before sending out your email campaign, test the social sharing buttons to ensure they work correctly. Click on each button and verify that it opens the respective social media sharing window or dialog box with the intended URL pre-populated.
7. Track Social Shares: To measure the impact of social sharing, use URL shorteners or UTM parameters specifically for social shares. This allows you to track the number of shares and the traffic generated from those shares in your analytics platform.

By integrating social sharing buttons in your email template, you make it easy for recipients to share your content with their social networks, increasing the visibility and potential reach of your email campaigns. Also, it encourages engagement, expands your brand’s social presence, and drives additional traffic to your website or landing pages.

3. Use Unique Landing Pages

Create unique landing pages for each email campaign to track website traffic and conversions specifically from your emails. By directing recipients to a dedicated landing page with a clear call-to-action, you can easily measure the success of your campaigns and then optimize them based on the data collected.

Unique landing pages specific to your brand and related to the story you share keep followers engaged and intrigued. This keeps them coming back to you for more of your product or service, of course!

Here are some landing page examples specific to the Food and Beverage industry

1. Meal Kit Subscription Landing Page: A landing page promoting a meal kit subscription service could showcase enticing food images, highlight the convenience and variety of meal options, and emphasize the benefits of saving time and effort in meal preparation.
2. Restaurant Reservation Landing Page: A landing page for a restaurant reservation system might feature mouth-watering images of the restaurant’s signature dishes, provide an easy-to-use reservation form, and highlight positive reviews or testimonials from satisfied customers.
3. Healthy Snack Product Landing Page: A landing page for a healthy snack product could highlight the product’s nutritional benefits, use vibrant visuals of the snacks, and include customer testimonials or success stories showcasing how the snacks have improved their well-being.

Remember to consistently monitor and analyze the performance of your landing pages to make data-driven decisions and improve your overall email campaign performance.

4. Conduct A/B Testing for Email Marketing KPIs

Continuously test different elements of your email campaigns, such as subject lines, content, CTAs, send times, send days, and visuals, to identify the most effective variations. A/B testing helps you understand the preferences and behaviors of your audience, refine your messaging, and ultimately increase engagement, conversions, and overall campaign performance

First, Plan And Prepare A/B Testing for Email Marketing KPIs

1. Define a clear objective: Start by defining a clear objective for your A/B test.
2. Identify the variable to test: Choose the one you want to test in your email. This will be the element that you vary between the different versions of your email. For example, if you want to test the subject line, the subject line would be the variable.
3. Create variations: Create two or more variations of your email, each with a different version of the variable you identified. Ensure only one variable is changed between the versions to isolate its impact. For example, if you’re testing subject lines, create two different subject lines for each variation while keeping the rest of the email content consistent.
4. Split the audience: Divide your email list into random, mutually exclusive segments. Allocate a portion of your list to each email variation. The size of each segment will depend on the size of your overall list and the significance you want to achieve in your test. A typical split is 50% for each variation, but you can adjust it based on your needs.

Second Take Action, Evaluate, and Refine

1. Send the emails: Send each variation of your email to the respective segments of your email list. Ensure that the timing of the sends is the same for accurate comparison.
2. Measure and compare results: Monitor and measure the performance of each email variation based on the predefined metrics you want to track. These could include open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, or other relevant KPIs.
3. Determine the winner and implement the winning variation: After gathering enough data and reaching statistical significance, determine the winning variation based on the predefined objective and the metrics you measured. The winning variation is the one that demonstrates the highest performance or desired outcome. Implement the winning variation into your future email campaigns. This could mean using the subject line, copy, design, or any other element that showed superior performance.
4. Iterate and repeat to optimize performance continuously: Continuously test and refine different elements of your email campaigns to optimize their performance. Keep experimenting and learning from the results to drive improvements and achieve better results with your email marketing efforts.

A/B testing allows you to make data-driven decisions, optimize campaigns, and improve overall performance.

5. Personalize and Segment Your Emails

Segment your email list based on demographics, preferences, or past purchase behavior, and personalize your email content accordingly. Personalization and segmentation have been shown to significantly improve email engagement and conversion rates. This is essential for optimizing your email marketing campaigns.

Utilize marketing automation tools to streamline this process and then deliver targeted content to the right audience segments. By tailoring your emails to specific segments of your subscriber base, you can increase open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

There are many ways to segment your email campaign; here are a few examples

1. Geography: Where are your contacts based? How do they purchase your brand’s service or product?
2. Gender: Do men and women require different messages from your company? Who is primarily purchasing or spending time on your website?
3. Language: What language do the majority of your purchasers/followers speak? Is it many? Is it just a couple? Pro tip—don’t presume a contact’s preferred language based on their location. The world is full of well-traveled folks, so that is not enough. Instead, pay attention to the language of the pages on which your contacts convert.
4. Website activity: Use page-level targeting to understand how a visitor interacts with your website. You can use that data to send relevant nurturing emails.

Personalizing and segmenting your emails can create more targeted and compelling communications that resonate with your audience. This approach enhances engagement, increases conversions, and fosters stronger customer relationships. Ultimately, it leads to more effective email campaigns and better overall marketing results.

6. Monitor Email Deliverability

Regularly monitor your email deliverability metrics to ensure your emails reach the intended recipients’ inboxes. Maintain a clean email list by regularly removing inactive or disengaged subscribers and following email best practices to avoid spam filters and deliverability issues.

Ways You Can Effectively Monitor and Improve Email Deliverability

1. Use a reputable email service provider
2. Monitor email bounce rates
3. Maintain a clean email list
4. Implement double opt-in
5. Authenticate your emails
6. Monitor sender reputation
7. Check spam placement and feedback loops
8. Analyze email engagement metrics
9. Monitor blacklists
10. Use email delivery reports and analytics to identify trends and areas for improvement.

In short, by actively monitoring email deliverability, you can proactively maintain a good sender reputation, improve engagement, and ensure your emails reach your intended recipients’ inboxes. This, in turn, maximizes the effectiveness of your email campaigns and fosters stronger relationships with your audience.

7. Analyze and Iterate your Email Marketing KPIs

Regularly analyze your email marketing KPI data and iterate on your strategies accordingly. Use email marketing analytics tools to gain insights into your campaigns’ performance and identify improvement areas.

To track email marketing KPIs for your food and beverage brand, define key metrics, gather and organize data, visualize it, compare and benchmark, identify successes and opportunities, draw insights and actionable takeaways, iterate, and test, track and measure progress, and document and share findings with relevant stakeholders.

Then, test new approaches, measure the impact, and refine your tactics based on the results.

Key Takeaways

By following the steps in this article, your food and beverage brands can refine your email marketing KPIs strategies, enhance engagement, and drive better results.

1. The customer journey map is a crucial component when tracking email KPIs
   • Discovery: Someone discovers the beverage brand.
   • Evaluation: They look at a few different beverage websites to compare.
   • Purchase: They decide to purchase on promotion.
   • Loyalty: They sign up for a monthly loyalty program or incentive based on their research on other beverage brands.
2. Monitor critical metrics: Keep track of conversion rate, website traffic, social media engagement, customer lifetime value, email forwarding and sharing, deliverability and bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate to gain insights into email campaign effectiveness.
3. Implement actionable tips: Implement UTM tracking, integrate social sharing buttons, use unique landing pages, conduct A/B testing, personalize and segment emails, monitor email deliverability, and analyze data to optimize email marketing efforts.

Lastly, for more actionable tips, check out this resource on growing your email list.

Conclusion

Tracking email marketing KPIs is crucial for food and beverage brands to understand the customer journey, measure cross-channel impact, and optimize campaign performance. Start tracking those KPIs, make data-driven decisions, and watch your email campaigns flourish like a fresh vegetable garden.

Reach out to our team at ChuckJoe today to learn more about how to grow your email list, organize your contacts, and guide you through email campaigns!