Optimizing Email Campaigns with Marketo Reports

What do you do after sending an email in Marketo? The answer should be to check email reports and metrics.

Email reporting in Marketo is a foundational feature that is critical for marketing teams to get right. There are many different reports available in Marketo, many of which touch on email marketing efforts. In this post, we're going to provide a deep dive on email reporting techniques to help you report on and optimize your emails.

Marketo Email Metrics

You might already be familiar with common email marketing metrics like open rate, click-rate, and deliverability. Let's make sure we've got a good understanding of what each metric means in Marketo and how they are calculated.

Marketo Email Reports

Marketo offers different types of reports to track your performance across different channels and activities. Here are the most relevant reports for email marketing:

• Email Link Performance Report
• Email Performance Report
• Engagement Stream Performance Report
• Campaign Email Performance Report

In Marketo, you can create these reports at the program level to automatically filter a single program or access global reports through the analytics section.

Email Performance Report

The Email Performance Report is your classic email marketing report. It covers all the essential email metrics like send, delivered, open rate, click rate, and so on. In the global analytics folder, you can view any email sent in your Marketo instance based on the timeframe and other filters. If you create the report at the program level, your report will only analyze emails in that program.

Email Link Performance Report

The Email Link Performance Report is used to help you report on which links receive the most clicks in your email and a count of leads that click those links. This report could be impacted by link tracking protections for Apple iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma users.

Engagement Stream Performance Report

The Engagement Stream Performance Report is used to report on emails within an engagement stream in your Marketo nurture programs. It's a valuable report for evaluating your nurture programs and how emails are performing. With this report, you can filter by a specific engagement stream.

Campaign Email Performance Report

The Campaign Email Performance Report allows you to run an email report on emails within a single smart campaign. This will let you set up a precise view of how emails are performing within a single workflow, which may be valuable for campaigns that have multiple steps like webinar campaigns or autoresponders for form submissions.

Setting up Marketo Email Reports

Marketo email reports can be customized to fit your reporting needs. Here are a few options to explore to get more out of your reports:

• Applying Smart Lists
• Setup and Configuration Options
• Automating reports through subscriptions

Applying Smart Lists to Marketo Email Reports

Marketo's Smart List functionality can be applied to a number of different reports, including the four reports we specified above. Smart List filters can help you put together a simple segmentation for more fine-grain reporting. You can use these reports to answer specific questions about your email performance. For example,

• How did leads from the United States with a lead score greater than 50 perform?
• Did leads in the "New" lifecycle stage perform better than MQLs?
• How much does acquisition program matter for your engagement stream performance in your nurture programs?

Setup and Configuration Options for Marketo Email Reports

Each type of Marketo Email Report will have its own options in the Setup tab for you to review. These settings can help you dig deeper into your email performance. For example, for the Email Performance Report you can Group by Segmentations to compare how different segments perform.

Automating Marketo email reports through subscriptions

You can use the Subscriptions feature to set up automated reports for anyone in your organization (they don't need to be a Marketo user). The automation will send an email at a frequency of your choosing and can optionally attach an Excel report. A word of caution: it's easy to accumulate email reports in your inbox, so use this feature sparingly.

How to optimize your emails with reporting and metrics

Reporting on your email performance is only step 1–the next step is to interpret those results and make adjustments. The ideal content process starts with creation but ends with optimization so you can make your next piece of content better. Continuous optimization is an iterative process and by making this step part of your process, you'll begin to accumulate significant improvements over time.

Let's look at some examples of various email metrics and how those data points can help us with an optimization strategy. We'll look at three metrics:

• Open Rate
• Click Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate

Open Rate

As an example, let's say your email campaign has an open rate of 8% – far below the industry benchmark of 15% (depending on the industry).

Optimization Strategies

• Subject line testing: Start experimenting with different subject lines to see what works and what doesn't. Marketo's A/ B testing functionality is perfect for this.
• Sender name: Test out different sender names and avoid using impersonal names like "noreply" or "marketing."
• Send time: Review what time you schedule emails and try different times of the day to see if you can improve open rates

Click Rate

What if your email has a high open rate, like 20%, but the click rate is only 2%? You're doing a good job of getting your audience's attention yet you're likely failing to transform that into action.

Optimization Strategies

• Content relevancy: Make sure the content of your email matches the expectations set by the subject line. If you're promising something, make sure you deliver on that promise.
• Clear call-to-action: Are your CTAs prominent and formatted in a way that grabs attention? CTA buttons are effective as well as actionable language.
• Link placement: Experiment with where you place links within the email, and place important links higher up in the email to see if that improves click rates.

Unsubscribe Rate

An email with a high unsubscribe rate, typically greater than 1%, is a cause for concern and could indicate a number of challenges.

Optimization Strategies

• Email frequency: Review how often you send marketing emails to your audience. Too many emails can lead to subscriber fatigue and cause contacts to unsubscribe.
• List health: Periodically review the health of your email lists. List hygiene activities like removing stagnant, unengaged contacts can help prevent unsubscribe rates from spiking.
• Preference Center: Instead of only offering unsubscribing as an option, you could use a preference center to give contacts the opportunity to manage communication preferences. You could reduce unsubscribe rates by offering the ability to reduce the number of emails sent per week.

Marketo content creation and the power of continuous optimization

The classic idiom, 'what you measure, you improve,' holds true for Marketo emails. Reporting on the success of your email campaigns and email performance is a necessary step in the content creation process. Feeding those reporting insights into your content development stage is critical – getting results requires continuous optimization.

One aspect we didn't touch on in great detail, but is relevant – your Marketo email templates. The templates you create in Marketo are the foundation of all emails sent by the system. Well-designed email templates can provide a significant performance boost. Iterating and optimizing those templates over time mimics the astounding power of compound interest. At first, the incremental results are nearly imperceptible, yet over time, the value accumulates to result in significant improvements.

Knak is a no-code campaign creation tool built for Marketo users. You can design, develop, and sync all your email templates to Marketo, while continuously iterating on the template. Knak's collaboration tools ensure everyone can access the emails and use a simple UI to make changes. Check out our no-obligation video demo here.