Shopify-ready body Understanding Marketing Insights

Digital marketing relies on data points, or metrics, to analyze the results of your efforts and help you make better decisions about future emails, campaigns, and other marketing activities. Dynamics 365 Marketing provides insights for two important marketing tools: marketing emails and customer journeys. These insights can help you understand how your audience interacts with your content and identify ways to improve future marketing efforts.

Marketing Email Insights

Once a marketing email has gone live and has been sent through a customer journey, you can use the built-in Insights tab to analyze its performance. Available insights include:

• Open rates
• Clickthrough rates
• Bounces
• Unsubscribes
• Email open times
• Link clicks and heat maps
• A/B testing results
• Other recipient interactions

If you are unsure what a particular metric means, hover over it to display its description.

Open Rate

Open rate measures the percentage of recipients who opened your email. A higher open rate generally indicates that more recipients are interested enough in your message to open it. Open rates can also provide feedback about your subject line and preheader text. These elements should make the purpose of the email clear and give recipients a reason to continue reading. For example, if you are advertising a sale, mentioning the sale or when it ends may help recipients immediately understand why the message is relevant to them. An unclear or uninteresting subject line may make the email easier to overlook in a crowded inbox.

Clickthrough Rate

Clickthrough rate measures the percentage of email recipients who clicked one or more links in your email. If your clickthrough rate is lower than expected, review the number and relevance of your links. Too many links can make an email feel disorganized, while irrelevant links are likely to be ignored. Keep links clear, concise, compelling, and directly related to the content of the email.

Use Heat Maps to Evaluate Calls to Action

Heat maps provide another way to evaluate your calls to action. In the Links area of Insights, you can see which links received the most clicks and where those links appeared within the email. This can help you determine whether an important call to action is receiving enough attention. If a key link near the bottom of the email is being overlooked, for example, you might move it higher or make it more noticeable with a button, color, or another visual element.

Understanding Email Bounces

Bounce rate measures the percentage of sent emails that could not be delivered to the intended email address. There are two primary types of bounces:

• Hard bounces: Often caused by an invalid domain or an email address that does not exist. Check for simple errors such as misspellings or an incorrect domain extension.
• Soft bounces: These can be more difficult to diagnose and may be related to your content or the quality of your subscription list.

Email providers and anti-spam systems evaluate the quality and reputation of your content. Erratic capitalization, poor spelling, and excessive punctuation are examples of characteristics that can raise spam concerns. A high bounce rate can also indicate problems with your subscription list. Ideally, recipients should have opted in to receive your marketing messages and should be able to revoke that permission when they choose. To investigate bounces, open the Insights for a sent email. In addition to the Overview, you can review Delivery and Results by domain to identify addresses that bounced and determine what may need to be corrected.

Use A/B Testing to Improve Emails

A/B testing lets you compare different versions of an email to determine which performs better. You might test:

• Button colors
• Font sizes
• Subject lines
• Images
• Email body messaging

For the clearest results, change only one element, or a small number of closely related elements, between versions. If you change too many things at once, it becomes difficult to know which change caused the difference in performance. A/B testing can help you compare metrics such as open rates, clickthrough rates, engagement, and return on investment.

Review Customer Journey Insights

Email metrics provide detailed information about individual messages, but you can also analyze activity at the customer journey level. For a live customer journey, the Designer view provides quick information about:

• Currently processing sends
• Successfully processed sends
• Stopped or expired sends
• Journey milestones

You can also select an email within the journey and navigate directly to that email's insights, making it easier to move between journey-level and email-level analysis.

Analyze Journey Performance

The Customer Journey Insights area includes Overview and Incomplete journeys information. The Overview can show email delivery information along with opens and clicks over time. This lets you see how audience engagement changes after a message is sent. If the journey includes embedded page elements, you can also review visits and submissions over time.

Investigate Incomplete Journeys

The Incomplete journeys area can help you investigate emails that were bounced or blocked. Reviewing blocked emails lets you identify contacts the journey could not reach. Problems such as inactive contacts, duplicate records, and invalid addresses can then inform future contact or subscription list cleanup. If an address is invalid, investigate whether it contains a simple typo or whether other contact information from the same organization can help you determine the correct address.

Turn Insights into Action

You do not need to track every available metric. Identify the measurements that matter most to your marketing goals and review them consistently. Use what you learn to improve:

• Email content
• Subject lines and preheaders
• Calls to action and links
• Subscription lists
• Contact data
• Future marketing processes

The value of marketing insights comes from turning the information into action. Track the metrics that matter, analyze the results regularly, and use what you learn to continually improve your marketing efforts.