Poll: How far back do you need to go for your email reporting?

[Anonymous]

As part of improving the performance of Email Analysis reporting in Revenue Explorer, we’re planning to prune old email data.

How far back do you need to go for your email reporting?NOTE: If you report on emails that were sent more than 12 months ago, please post your use case to this discussion thread. Please note that we will not be pruning emails that are sent on a recurring basis (e.g. triggered or nurture emails).

[Anonymous]

How about three years, we collect leads from as early as grade 10 on who may become prospects in two or three years down the line. One of the main reasons is we have to influence class/course selection so that the prospect meet the eligible requirements for college or university especially the math

[Anonymous]

We go back much further to about 3-4 years. Because different emails are sent at different times of year to different audiences with different outcomes, we can't realistically set goals and benchmarks without doing analysis on all three of these factors. If an email is only sent once per year (say, for Father's Day), it's helpful to have that data on hand.

That being said: I wouldn't necessarily store that data in Revenue Explorer. Here, we have hard copies/digital copies of the emails themselves stored on a local srver, and have made historical Excel sheets (for high-level analysis) and queriable databases (for granular analysis) to go further back. Realistically, you probably only need a year's worth of data before looking to export that data to another platform.

[Anonymous]

I voted past 12 months, but ideally I would like 2 years of data reporting on this.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Agreed... if I went to the higher-ups and said that I could only report on the last 12 months of emails (we've only been implemented for 8 months), I think they'd be pretty annoyed. Our reports come out at a certain time of the year, and we will want to compare our email results year over year.

[Kim_Allen]

I would like more than 12 months. Sometimes I like looking at QTR over QTR by year - So if I were pulling Q2 2014 and Q2 2013 numbers right now, I wouldn't be able to if we only did 12 months history. So I'd say for what I normally pull, maybe 15 months? 2 years would def be a safer number though.

[Beth_Holine]

I agree with everyone above - the longer the better, with two years being the minimum.

[Anonymous]

I agree with the above - at a minimum we need to go back at least 2 years on email reporting

[Anonymous]

Thanks everyone for your feedback.  This is very useful input.
 
There seems to be a consistent theme around reporting month over month or quarter over quarter, for the last 2 years.  When you create this reports, do you look at 1) individual emails, 2) aggregate metrics for all emails sent in that time period, or 3) some other type of detail/grouping?

TJ

[Kim_Allen]

I tend to look at aggregates for the time periods and also different groupings. I like to group by channel or certain events.