Getting Started with Insights Reporting

Miles: Hey, everybody. Welcome to an Emma webinar. We’re excited to roll out a brand new set of features for all Emma accounts called Insights. We hope everybody’s had a chance to log into their account and take a look at it. But, if not, totally cool, we’re gonna do a deep dive of the new features today. And also, very excited to get a sneak peek at some brand new features. But, before that, let’s do a little bit of webinar housekeeping. Everybody is on mute, but we’ve saved some time at the end for Q&A. So, you can use the questions feature and go to webinar to submit your questions and we’ll take those at the very end. So go ahead and submit those any time you want, totally cool, let’s see. On top of that, we’re also recording this webinar. So, in the next couple of days, keep an eye out on your inbox, we’ll be sending the recording and the deck around. So, even if folks who aren’t able to make it, this webinar will still go to their inbox. So, share that with your colleagues as well.

So, let’s go ahead and get started. We’ll do some quick introductions. My name is Miles Price, I’m on the product marketing team here at Emma. And I’m very excited to have Cale Mooth with me.

Cale: Hey, everyone. I’m senior product manager here at Emma. My team was largely responsible for the Insights product, so we’re really glad that we’re able to start showing this off, and we really hope you all will find some use out of it.

Miles: Yeah. Cale’s team has done some really, really incredible work with Insights, so, we’re excited to have him here to answer some of the questions and give us a walk-through. So, let’s do a quick agenda, real quick, on the webinar. Before we do a product deep dive and run through Insights, we kind of wanted to highlight some of the challenges that we as marketers face, and also just, from hearing from our customers, you know, the things that led us to build Insights. You know, understanding how data is a minefield of options, and, you know, it can be time-consuming gathering all that data and making it visually appealing for other teams. So, we’ll highlight that, do a walk-through of the new features, and then Cale’s gonna walk us through a demo. And we’re super excited to be able to show you guys a sneak peek at some brand new features that aren’t available yet, but we wanted to kind of tease these new features a little bit. So, we’ll show those off, and then have time at the very end for a quick Q&A. So, without further ado, let’s go ahead and get started.

So, everybody that’s here, you’re most likely an Emma customer, if not, welcome. But, one thing that we all have in common is that we’re email marketers. We use email as a channel to connect with our customers and our subscribers. And, on top of that, we’re also data-driven marketers. So, on top of being creative and analytical, we’re also really dedicated to growth. We have benchmarks that we set for ourselves, and we really need to be tech savvy, good with numbers, comfortable with change, and on top of that, just be able to connect well with others. And it takes a really well-rounded individual to get that type of marketing right.

So, for data-driven marketers. We have seen kind of a set of new challenges that make taking all of this data that you’re collecting on your subscribers and your customers, kind of, make that a little bit more difficult. So, before we get into those challenges, kind of wanted to run through what it means to be a data-driven marketer. Data-driven marketers, they track everything. You know, you’re not making gut decisions with your marketing, you’re carefully tracking all of your activities and campaigns, you’re looking at things like data analytics, and UTM codes, those are your best friends. You leverage different types of technology. So, you don’t just stop at spreadsheets or Excel files, you use the latest tech and marketing tools to efficiently analyze data to improve your strategy over time. You’re also creating content that’s based on evidence. So, you’re taking that data that you’re collecting, all those analytics, and tests, and using that to be the key to creating great content.

You understand what your audience and your subscribers respond to, that’s essential to producing content that resonates with your subscribers. And you collect and use feedback, this behavior drives your marketing decisions. You know how to collect customer feedback and implement data to create really, really great experiences that best suit your customers. But most of all, you are driven by analytics and insights. So, you know exactly how to measure, and manage, and analyze what makes a campaign successful. You’re tracking KPIs, looking at marketing trends, and using the customer data that you’ve collected to maximize your email programs. But, for a lot of marketers, it’s really difficult to see the big picture when you’re collecting data from all these different places. So, a lot of marketers, just having the tools to quickly act on that data and adjust their email strategy is a huge challenge. It’s also time-consuming to take all that data manually and put it into a way to see weekly, or monthly, or quarterly, how your emails are performing. We talk to many customers who are just exporting mailing data, just to paint a bigger picture. And then, it’s also difficult to take that raw data, once you get it exported, and make it look good for your teams, and be able to have a meaningful visual representation of what that looks like.

So, with Emma, we already have some really powerful and impactful response tools built into your account. If you’ve ever sent a mailing and you click the response page, you’re able to see individual mailings that you’ve sent over time. So you can see a high-level overview of that mailing’s response data, open rates, click rates, even deliverability stats. There’s the heat map included. And we’ve included a lot of this data that’s super helpful, but this is granular, this is on a per mailing basis. So, when you think about improving your email strategy over time, you kind of have to use the compare mailings feature text for a lot of this data, and it can be time-consuming. On top of that, we’ve also got an iPhone app that lets you see your email stats on the go in your pocket. It’s available for free on the App Store, if anybody hasn’t used it yet, it’s called Metric. But, again, this is an at-a-glance per mailing response solution.

So, what we wanted to do is, we wanted to, we talked to our customers, and every single one that we talked to told us a similar story. It takes a lot of time to export multiple mailings and get all that data put into a spreadsheet so that they can track more aggregate levels of email performance. And maybe this sounds familiar to you, maybe you’ve got an intern on the job, or you’ve got a student worker that’s compiling all this data for you. So, it takes a lot of time. And even in some cases our customers are coming to us and saying, “We don’t have time to do it, let us pay you.” So, we set out to make a solution to this, and we wanted to build a high-level aggregate email data tool that makes it easier to visualize, and to save you time. So, that’s what Insights is. We’re excited to roll this out. It actually went live for all accounts a few weeks ago, you should’ve gotten an email about it and also some in-app messaging. But, Insights is our new reporting tool that gives you that high-level, date-based aggregate view, into exactly how your emails are performing, how your audience is growing and changing over time, and a way to quickly act on those changes and engagement. So, yeah. It’s available for all accounts, Pro, Plus, and HQ.

And let’s just walk through some of the high-level features. The one thing that was really important for Insights was being able to easily benchmark that performance over time. So, Insights automatically calculates email engagement and performance for you, you don’t have to do anything manually. So that you can quickly see the key performance metrics like opens, clicks, you can see how they’re trending, higher or lower. Here in the screenshot you can kind of see that we’ve added green and red to denote increases and decreases in those trends. Insights also lets you track exactly how your audience changes over time. So, whether that’s positive growth over time, or you can see how many subscribers you’ve lost in that period of time. And we’ve also included the trends on this page as well. So you can pick that date range, whether it be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or a custom range, and you can see those growth metrics for your subscribers. And most importantly, to us, being able to quickly make those actionable changes to your strategy. We wanted to release Insights so that not only do you have the data, but you’re able to do something with it. So, when you open up Insights, you can see the data, and you can see all of the great visualizations, but now you also have a save-as-segment feature that lets you take those chunks of really important data, like the most engaged customers that have opened in that period, or the subscribers that have clicked in that period, and be able to save them out as a separate segment so that you can deliver more targeted campaigns to them.

And, for Emma HQ customers, we understand that you’ve got an organization that has several different subaccounts with different sending strategies and different types of customers, so, we wanted to be able to bubble up all of that data up to that HQ level, so that you can track that engagement across the whole organization. At the highest level, you can see the entire performance, and then you can use the Select Subaccounts drop down menu right here, and drill down into individual subaccounts, or maybe select the ones that are in a certain region. So, this is really good for being able to see exactly how your organization is performing.

So, with that, I’m going to hand it over to Cale, and he’s gonna walk us through a product demo.

Cale: All right. Great. While we switch screens here, we’ll just set this up a little bit. So this is a Plus account that we’re going to look at. The first thing I really wanna highlight is just how important and how powerful the date component is for this particular feature. So you can choose any time span you want, from, you know, a handful of days to a number of weeks. This really becomes handy when you start thinking about that aggregate level of data. So, I can choose, for example, the couple of weeks leading up to Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and begin to see a performance summary of all of those campaigns that were sent within that time period. Same thing for the week after. Maybe I’m doing a Giving Tuesday campaign that week, same thing. I can select that week and begin to see that roll up data across all of those campaigns.

And so, at the very top here, you’ll see the summary section. It’s just pretty straightforward, you’re gonna see your open rate and click rates. But, again, what becomes powerful is this trending feature that you’re seeing here. So, I know instantly, for the month of March I’ve got a little bit of a bump in terms of my open rate. Over on the click rate side, I’m seeing a little bit of a decrease for the month. And again, this is comparing this current 31 days to the previous 31 days. So those may prompt me to go back and look at my content and say, “Hey, what may have contributed to that bump or to that slight decline in terms of click rate?”

A little bit further down we have, again, in the summary section, just a few more stats around deliverability rate, your unsubscribe rate, the total emails sent as a result of those five campaigns. And, again, you can begin to see the trends as a result compared to the previous time period. And then going down a little bit further. So this is essentially the same data, but you wanna visualize that. So, this particular account, you can see right away that they are pretty regular senders, they’re sending, essentially, Saturday morning each week. But it’s really interesting. So, obviously, you’d expect that spike on Sunday, but they’re actually seeing quite a bit of engagement, you know, two to three days out. So, very interesting to look at that stuff visually.

And then, finally, down here at the bottom is just a more detailed list of all the mailings that were sent within that time period. So, this is very similar to what you might see in the compare mailings section, where you have some of those high-level stats, per mailing, you can click into the response view from here, you can sort the columns to see which ones were performing best depending on the metric. And speaking of compare mailings, this is, I do wanna point out the export option here. So, when you hit Export to CSV, you’re gonna get that raw data in spreadsheet form, and that will export every bit of mailing data within the time period. So, very similar to the compare mailings tool if you’re using that today.

Miles: This is such a great visualization of data. A lot of our customers are actually taking this information, you know, grabbing screenshots and adding that into, like, team update decks. I know my boss here loves to see visualization of data like this, so, being able to screenshot how our mailings have performed over time, and just have a quick visualization update is super helpful. So, no more spreadsheets, no more plugging and editing and trying to make it look good, it just looks good right off the bat here.

Cale: That’s right. We’ve heard that a number of times talking with you all, whether it’s a PDF or a PowerPoint, it always helps to have something visual when you’re showing off these numbers.

All right. Let’s hop over to the Growth tab. So, this is all about your audience. I’m gonna change this up to the month of May for this example, because I know there’s some interesting data within this time period. So, this account has roughly about 1,100 subscribers, which you can see here. So, high-level, first number you’re seeing is that growth number. So, within this time period, this account had 14 new subscribers. And then we break that down a little bit further, 15 total. Last period, again, you can see that important trend for this account, that was down a pretty good percentage point compared to the previous period. Lost subscribers, so that’s, essentially, your opt outs, and then we do a calculation to, essentially, subtract opt outs from new subscribers and you kind of get that net subscriber count for the period.

Miles: And don’t forget, there’s the save new subscribers as a segment button right underneath the new subscribers. This would be really handy if you wanted to target brand new subscribers that month with, you know, a welcome series, or be able to send them relevant content. Maybe you had an event that month and you wanted to follow up, and send them some, “It was nice to meet you at the event, here’s some related content.” Things like that.

Cale: Absolutely. And when you click that link, it’s gonna jump you straight to the segment builder. You’re gonna see those counts as to what portion of your audience that’s taking up, just like you would expect normally.

Okay. As we scroll down, again, we have a visualization, essentially, of the same data. If you’ve ever looked at an audience growth trend, whether it’s in previous versions of Emma or any other ESB, typically that graph is gonna look like this. Audience growth is, for the most part, a fairly slow trend upwards. So, you know, if you have thousands of subscribers, it’s difficult to visualize that slower increase when you’re dealing with such large numbers. So, by default, we’re keeping that existing subscriber count turned off, and as a result you can see very clearly what’s happening day-to-day. So, for this particular account with the smaller audience, I can quickly see which days are adding new subscribers. And then, in particular, on May 11th I have this very obvious loss of members here. So, this account lost six members on that particular day. Looking back on the engagement tab, I know that there was an email sent on that day, on the 11th. So, something happened with that content, where it caused them to lose those subscribers. So, very quickly I can pick out these spikes and then go back to my content and see what may be driving that.

Miles: Cool. Thank you, Cale. Awesome demo. So, yeah, Cale walked us through the engagement tab and the growth tab, to show, you know, that engagement over time, just drilling down more into showing that data in a bar graph form, and also being able to save those data points as a segment. But, on top of that, we also kind of wanted to show everybody a sneak peek at some brand new features. I’m gonna slide back over here to the deck really quick, just to highlight some of these points. Okay. So, Insights tab right now has the engagement tool and the audience growth tool, but, we wanted to build some features that took it a little bit further. So, not only are we showing you how your emails are performing, but we wanted to deep dive into that and actually drill into what are the best send times for you. What are the top performing pieces of content. Meaning, which parts of emails have been clicked on the most during that time period. Even the best performing subject lines that got the greatest open rates, and a look at a brand new heat map, because we’re marketers and we love heat maps. And a heat map that’s gonna show you, day-by-day and hour-by-hour, which times are the most effective for engagement. So, I’m gonna hand it back over to Cale for that one. And. All right.

Cale: Okay. So, we’ve done all this work to compile all this data, and we really wanna leverage that aggregation and begin to pick out more useful information for you. So, to eliminate the process of you having to go through and find these particular interesting data points yourself. And we can do all this, it’s catered very directly to your audience and to your content based on the data. So, we have three things that we wanna show here on this new trends tab within Insights. The very first one here is this top trending send times graph. So, we’re showing you the top three send times that have garnered the most engagement from your audience within the specified time period. And again, this is completely flexible, you can change the time period, you’ll get different results depending on the time frame and what was sent in that time frame.

Another important feature here, like we’ve seen elsewhere, we’re showing you not just the fact that these are the best times, we’re showing you, essentially, why, and how much better that engagement level is over your average for that time period. This is a very fluid type of data set. So we really wanna encourage you to test the ascend time. So we want you to, you know, take a little bit of extra effort and just send at random times to make sure you’re getting the most out of your content and your audience. The more you can test, the better this data is going to be.

Miles: And, as marketers, I feel like we all look for patterns, but we also look for kind of best practices, like, taking this data and understanding that these are not gonna be hard and fast rules. Like, 10 to 11 a.m. on Tuesdays is not always going to be the best time to send, but, now you have a window. You have some examples of when you can, you know, change things up, you can try some new things out and get some more interesting data around it.

Cale: Exactly. All right. So, for the next section, this is where we’re highlighting, essentially, the top content. So, the highest, or the most engaged content that was sent within the selected time period. Talking with a number of you all, we know that you’re doing that export from compare mailings, compiling all those spreadsheets, and trying to find this data yourselves, so we know that this is very helpful. Once you know which content is performing the best, obviously, there’s opportunity there to replicate that effort, and hopefully see those engagement numbers continue to climb. So, we’re highlighting the top three mailings sent by click-to-open rate, in this particular section.

And again, you’re getting all that same insights. You’re seeing, in particular, this first one had a 19% higher than average open rate, 12% higher average click rate. So you can really begin to see just how much better certain pieces are performing compared to others. Oh, I do wanna point out one more thing. So we have this slider which lets you set the minimum email volume size, or essentially the minimum audience size for these results. So, we know that smaller sends with more targeted content generally generates higher engagement levels, so you may wanna filter some of that out if you really wanna see more of the results around your larger broadcast sends. So it’s just an additional tool to begin to play with the data and see small sends versus large sends and see what that data is looking like.

Okay. So, that’s top content. And then finally we have the top trending subject line section, I think this is pretty straightforward. So, these are your top performing subject lines based on open rate. And again, you get the same flexibility here with the audience scale where you can choose to see, or choose to include those smaller more engaged mailings versus the more broadcast sends. And again, you’re getting those same trends in terms of just how much higher, or lower, above average. So, this is really important to see, you know, what’s performing really well. We think it’s gonna be equally important to show you, you can see this top and bottom toggle here. So the intent is to show, essentially the bottom of the list as well. So, just as valuable to be able to see what’s not working, see, potentially, how bad those numbers are, and obviously adjust as a result.

Miles: I think it’s good to see, you know, not only, like those really high-performing concept pieces or subject lines, but also to see, you know, what didn’t really resonate, because that’s an opportunity to improve. It gives you a chance to see, “All right. Maybe I thought this subject line was gonna be a clear winner, and it totally didn’t work. So, let’s revisit that subject lines,” or that’s a strategy that marketers are always wanting to improve. So, you know, sometimes top trending content, seeing not only the higher performers, but also where you’ve got room for improvement, I think that’s really valuable.

Cale: Cool. Well, we have one more little tidbit to show you here in terms of what’s coming next. So, in addition to servicing all these additional data points, we’re also thinking about how we can further visualize the information. And as Miles alluded to earlier…

Miles: Heat map.

Cale: Yes, the heat map. So, this is a heat map that shows essentially your send times, different hours throughout the week. And the darker the square, that will indicate the higher the engagement level. So, just very visually, you can begin to kind of look at that grid and connect the dots as to when your best send times may be happening.

Miles: Yeah. I mean, heat maps are great. So we have the heat map that’s on the individual mailings response page, hopefully everybody’s had a chance to look at that. So, that shows you exactly where people are clicking inside your email. This takes it to a bigger picture, and shows you, on a day-by-day and hour-by-hour range, you know, when people are gonna be engaging with that email. So, we’re really excited to be able to kind of transcend that feature that a lot of our customers love and use all the time into this bigger picture heat map.

Cale: And that’s largely what we have to show now in terms of what’s coming next. You can expect to see these features coming into your account in the next few weeks. We’re polishing up the final little bits and we’re just about ready to turn this on for everybody.

Miles: Cool. Thank you, Cale. All right. So, as far as the presentation, that’s…Let me get this back into present mode. Pretty much wraps it up, but we do have some time for Q&A. So, Cale and I are gonna tackle some of your submitted questions. Yeah, so, we’ll just go back and forth. First question is from Travis. And Travis asks, “On the audience tab, does lost subscribers only mean opt outs?”

Cale: That’s a great question. The answer is, no. It’s actually a much more comprehensive tally of numbers. So, we’re including opt outs, we’re including deliverability errors, and also any deletes that you’ve done in your account. So, you know, everybody manages their account differently, many people rely just on those opt outs, but for others there’s a lot of manual import and export action going on as well, so, we’re actually tallying up all of those potential opt outs.

Miles: Cool. All right. Next question is from Leah. Leah asks, “Just seen Insights for the first time in my account, how can I use this information moving forward?” That’s an awesome question. There’s a lot of information inside of Insights. And there’s a lot of ways to drill down and kind of customize your view. But, I would say, most importantly, the biggest takeaway, definitely from this webinar, is the save-as-segment feature that gives you the ability to take this information that you’ve been given, how your emails are performing, and move it to a more actionable way. Being able to take opens, being able to take a list of people who have clicked in that time frame and save them as a segment so that you can change your email strategy and send them more targeted campaigns is huge. And also, being able to see that audience growth, new subscribers over time, save that as a separate segment, that’s great. So, awesome question.

Next is from Sarah, “How large of a time frame will Insights cover?” Cale, you wanna take that?

Cale: Absolutely. So, eventually, Insights will cover a full 24 months of data. As you continue to use your account and continue to send month-over-month, it will eventually contain 24 months of data. And the purpose of that is to get to that year-over-year comparison. So, you can easily compare, you know, the month of May this year compared to last year and see how things are going over time.

Miles: Cool. And Jake asks, “What’s the difference between Insights and Compare Mailings?” If you’re familiar with the Compare Mailings feature, that lets you select individual mailings and compile all of the response data into a CSV. Insights lets you see an entire date range, that kind of opens the door for more possibilities and way more information. So, you get a much more large picture of the data that you’re getting and how your emails have been performing.

Okay. Another question is from Caroline, which I think, actually, you just addressed, “Why can I only see mailings back to January and not further?” That kind of goes back to the other question about the…

Cale: Yes. Yeah. And just to clarify a little bit further. So, Insights is a completely new system, essentially, from the ground up. So, we begin collecting account data for this new experience towards the end of the year, beginning of January. So, as we’ve turned this on for your accounts, you can currently go as far back as January. But eventually, going forward, again, as you continue to use the product and run with Emma, we will fill that in for a full 24 months.

Miles: Cool. Okay, we’ll keep going. Mark asks, “Is Insights available at the subaccount level or only for the overarching enterprise account?” Insights is available at the subaccount level. So, each subaccount can see how their account has performed over the date ranges. But, as an HQ admin, you have this kind of HQ admin version of Insights that lets you not only see the whole organization, but you can drill down into those subaccounts and see a selected range.

Okay. Just looking through, “Can we create a subaccount with an Emma Plus account?” A subaccount is actually just a part of our Emma HQ platform. So, if you would like more information on that, we will definitely send you some Emma HQ info.

I believe that is all of our time for questions. Let’s run through some takeaways real quick. So, today, we went over our new Insights feature which is available for Emma Pro, Plus, and HQ accounts. So, with Insights, you’re able to easily benchmark your email performance over time, you’re able to see exactly how your audience is growing over those time periods, and use the save-as-segment feature to quickly make actionable changes to your strategy, to be able to take that data and drill it down into a group of customers that you can further target. And, for HQ accounts, be able to track that engagement and those metrics across the whole organization, or drill down into specific lists of subaccounts.

And we got a sneak peek at some brand new stuff that Cale’s team has been building that will be available for everybody shortly, over the next couple of weeks. So, we’re excited to roll all those new features out. Everybody, keep an eye out on your inbox for communication about that. And also, for the recording for the webinar, we’ll be sending that out in the next day or so. And, one more thing. We have an incredible professional services team here that’s made up of not only Emma experts, but email marketing experts. This is a group of people that spend their time looking at email strategy for our customers, and learning how to better tweak and make changes to individual customers’ email programs. So, if you saw Insights, and you look at the data, and you want maybe some advice on how to make that even better, please contact our professional services team, they’re incredible. So, just head to myemma.com/services, and somebody will follow up with you shortly.

So, that’s it, everybody. Thank you so, so much for coming. We’re really excited about Insights, we think it’s gonna be a huge help for your data and for your email marketing programs going forward. And if you have any questions, hit up our support team. Just go to myemma.com/support. And we will see you next time.

Cale: So long.

Miles: Bye.