Email Reporting Best Practices

[Anonymous]

Hello all!

I'm overhauling our entire marketing reporting process and was hoping to get some feedback/best practices on how some of you are reporting on email and digital campaigns, specifically around the following question:

• How long do you wait after deployment to being pulling reports?
  • I've been asked for reports less than an hour after initial deployment, which is a bit premature for any real evaluation in my estimation, so I'd like to set a best practice here for how soon a valuable report "will be available" to my stakeholders

Thanks to all!

[Anonymous]

Hi Jessica! Good question. While I'm not sure if this is "Best Practice" per se, I know 48-72 hours after email send is the majority of all engagement that will occur. We actually have a centralized reporting folder, so all stakeholders (campaign managers) receive a single email performance report and link performance report every week. That weekly report includes all the emails for all the campaigns they care about. So, as a builder, when I build a campaign, I go to that requested folder, go into their email and link performance reports, and add the email i just built to that weekly (monday morning) report. We do the same thing for Landing Pages as well, so it keeps requestors off our backs for reporting since they know they're getting it every Monday.

Hope that helps!

[Chris_Willis1]

I would concur - in our market generally 48 to 72 hours is the best timeframe by which to evaluate an email.

In our org, I have workspaces set up for our distinct marketing regions, so the single Email Performance & Link Performance would not be optimal.  Is anyone using RCE to deliver these reports?  The challenge there is that not all emails are RCE reportable if they are operational. 

[Julz_James]

Hi Jessica,

An hour after a send is very premature in my eyes.  I tend to do reporting on a weekly basis (every Friday) for our Field Marketing Managers so that they can look at the sends for the week (as we don't send anything on a Friday), so I know there is at least 24hrs between the last send and the report being created.

Engagement takes a couple of days to filter as if someone is out of the office/annual leave/sick etc then they won't be looking at the email for at least a day.

Hope this helps?

Juli

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Jesica,

Frankly, 1 hour does not make any sense. The emails are not yet finished to deliver at that time!

I would wait at least 2 days to give the reports a chance to be accurate.

-Greg

[Aslihan_Ayan_Ha]

I agree with 24hrs and 48 hrs. Most of the engagement does happen within 24 hours before it gets buried within the users' inbox.

[Chris_Willis1 · Accepted solution]

Indeed.  It's one reason why the email open/click heat map report in RCE is really useful. 

[Robert_Mullown2]

As most here have noted, one hour is nowhere near long enough after launch.  Depending on the size of the list, there are most likely quite a few still in "Pending" status.  48 hours at least is my standard.