MEASURING EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is showing no signs of slowing. Law firms are using it effectively to generate new leads, keep in contact with clients and provide added value. With continued remote working, our digital media platforms are more important than ever.
But measuring and managing email marketing can be tricky.
We have already explored connecting google analytics to power BI. Today we are going to look at doing the same thing with your email marketing.
How do firms use digital marketing and where are the challenges?
For the majority of firms, email lists are managed from the practice management system (PMS). Email marketing campaigns are managed with tools like Mailchimp, Vision 6 etc.
Using two systems can always lead to challenges:
When bounce backs and unsubscribes come through your campaign management tool, how do you effectively manage that back into your PMS?
When subscriptions to lists occur with the PMS or via the website how can I push that to my campaign management tool?
How do I keep those contact lists in sync?
How can I tell how effective a campaign is? Both in terms of click throughs on the email itself and new enquires into the firm?
What is the conversion of those new enquires into actual fees?
Can I see email trends that lead to people unsubscribing? How much value are those unsubscribing potentially worth?
How can I track what’s resonating as valuable and what isn’t?
What times seem to work best for email and my clients?
What kinds of clients and potential clients are clicking through? Is it happening in a certain industry, for instance.
I’m sure you can think of many more.
Some of these are issues around reporting and some are issues around integration and syncing data.
Where it’s not possible to integrate your campaign manager into PMS automatically, you may need to rely on exception reporting to keep the contact lists in sync.
Because Power BI can pull data from your campaign management tool, your webforms and your PMS, it can offer both kinds of reporting. An overview of how campaigns are going and tools to keep contact lists in sync.
Let’s look at how we connect to email marketing to Power BI.
The first hurdle with any Power BI project is “how do we get to the data”.
If your data is on premises you connect to power BI through a Power BI Gateway. Your PMS, for instance, might be on premises.
If your data is in the cloud – and your email campaign management tool is likely to be – then we need to connect another way. Sometimes out of the box connectors exist that allow you to directly connect to Power BI.
More often you need to access the information programmatically using the email application’s APIs. I chatted about APIs in the post explaining how to connect to your accounting system. You have the choice to try and program against the APIs yourself. Or check to see if someone has already made a connector that you can subscribe to.
If the above is too hard or you want a quick proof of concept, you can always use the reports available in your email marketing system and export those out to excel. You can then connect Power BI to those excel reports. However, this is not live and takes a fair bit of manual intervention.
Once the data is connected what can we do with it?
Referring back to our list of challenges, we could create the following reports. Using Power BI to draw data from your email management tool and your PMS:
An exception report that shows the email address associated with a contact in your PMS and in your campaign management tool. With an indication of bounce backs and unsubscribes. This report could be emailed to the primary relationship of the contact. They can then keep their data up to date and perhaps reach to someone who has unsubscribed if necessary.
An exception report that compares lists in your campaign management tool and your PMS. Or a list of recently added contacts to particular PMS lists. This can help the marketing team keep both lists in sync.
A report that shows click throughs on an email campaign, new enquiries from your PMS and converted enquiries from your PMS. This could be filtered by a time frame. Like our Google reporting sample, this is co-relation rather than causation but can still be effective in identifying trends.
A report that ties those have unsubscribed to their PMS data. For instance, a referrer that has recently unsubscribed and has also referred decreasing value might need some attention.
Where industry growth (value of fees, number of enquiries etc.) is within your PMS and how that is translating to the campaigns you are sending out. This can be useful to plan future marketing activities.
A report that compares those that are actively engaging with the email marketing and their client or referrer profile in your PMS. Are they a current client or referrer or should you reach out? If they are, are the marketing topics they are engaging with an area you presently do work for them or not?
In summary
Keeping email campaigns on target, useful and ensuring your lists are up to date can be tricky. Power BI can make it easier to manage. Measuring the success of your marketing campaigns and planning future campaigns can be even harder. Power BI allows you to compare different pieces of data and give you insight. You can use it to understand how your campaigns are working and what campaigns might be valuable in the future.
