What is Email Analytics?

Why is email analytics important?

The data in email exchanges is extremely valuable for any organization, as it gives insights into user behavior and interactions. Email analytics can help you set a baseline for improvements in several areas, such as engagement level, brand loyalty, and common behavior patterns. Here are two of the most common uses for email analytics: 

1. Track the effectiveness of email campaigns

One of the most common uses of email analytics is to better understand the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. More than three billion people use email globally, and email marketing offers a way to direct personalized messages to their inboxes. 

Marketers track users’ reactions to the emails they send. For instance, marketers often track deliverability (the percentage of users that actually receive the email), how many of them open it, and how many click or take an action.  

2. Make data-driven decisions

Email analytics — for example, in an email performance report — provides visibility into what is and isn’t working. If your application has email capabilities, email analytics can help you understand how to improve these capabilities and performance. Therefore, you can make decisions affecting the organization’s bottom line by considering hard data, not intuition. 

Types of email analytics

Email analytics measures engagement, such as how users react to your communications, as well as technical performance, like the deliverability rate of your emails. Typically, email analytics can be divided into two broad categories: message tracking and metadata. 

1. Message tracking

This category includes all email performance metrics from your audience’s end. These metrics measure the reaction and interaction of the receiver. 

• Message opens – This metric shows how many emails were opened relative to the number of emails delivered. Knowing this rate can give insights into user engagement with your emails. 
• Thread replies – If you are building an application with email threading capabilities, measuring how many replies the threads get can be useful in understanding how effective it is. An email thread is the grouping of related emails in a conversation. Email threading identifies the link—for example, people or relationships, between different emails and groups them. Tracking these relationships helps you map out which emails are gaining momentum.  
• Bounce rate – This metric indicates how many emails didn’t reach the recipient’s inbox. There are two types of bounce: hard and soft. A soft bounce happens when there are temporary issues with the email inbox. For example, the inbox is full, or the email server is under maintenance. A hard bounce occurs when a definitive failure to deliver, such as an invalid email address or server. It’s essential to identify why the emails bounce. If spam flagging is the reason, you may have authentication issues. Check your  Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records. 
• Link clicks – The click-through rate (CTR) can also be applied to emails, indicating how many people clicked the inside links. This metric reveals how often the email link catches the user’s attention. 
• Email deliverability – The term “deliverability” refers to the number of emails that reach the recipient’s inbox as a proportion of the total number of emails sent. This metric will depend on the organization’s sender reputation and the authority of the email service provider. For instance, if many emails are flagged as spam, the sender’s reputation will suffer. 

2. Message metadata

Every email has metadata containing detailed information, including simple details like the email’s sender, the recipient, and the timestamp. Product teams use this data to track and understand users’ behavior toward emails.

• Email sending frequency – This metric allows product developers to identify busy times when users receive the most emails or the frequency with which they are sending messages. This helps detect times of high demand when the servers may be at risk of overloading. 
• Unsubscribe and opt-out information – This link is included in the email headers. As a metric, it measures how many recipients unsubscribed or opted out of future communications. It may consist of details about the recipients. 
• Email status – In the email metadata, there is also information about the current status of the email, such as whether it was delivered successfully, marked as spam, or bounced due to a delivery issue.
• Timestamp, sender, and recipient information – This metadata includes details about when the email was sent (the time stamp) and about the sender and recipient (their email addresses and names). It also includes the return path or the email address to which the system responds. This information helps track the communication flow between individuals and organizations.

Why use an email API for email analytics?

An email API lets developers directly integrate their applications with email service providers like Google, Microsoft, and more. An API simplifies application development, allowing developers to build email capabilities faster. 

Email APIs empower businesses to: 

• Create efficient campaigns 
• Personalize and automate messages to engage with a broader audience
• Evaluate the success of their email campaigns via key metric insights. These valuable insights help businesses improve future campaigns and repeat successes. 

Email analytics with an email API can enhance a business’s overall online marketing strategy by improving the most direct outreach method possible: email. Here are three main benefits of using an email API with analytics: 

1. Simplified email capabilities 

Email analytics capabilities give businesses the visibility they need over how their email campaigns are performing. But, implementing email analytics in your business application using major service provider APIs like Google, Apple, or Microsoft is a long, complex, and costly process. 

Using an API like Nylas offers developers a ready-to-use email capabilities solution without needing to build one. 

2. Seamless integration

The right email API seamlessly integrates with email providers, allowing you to incorporate email, calendar, and scheduling capabilities with a single API. 

3. Real-time data

The analytics allow developers and businesses to receive real-time data about how the email function is performing. Accessing this timely information allows businesses to optimize email capabilities and improve the user experience. 

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How to enable email analytics in my app?

Email analytics can provide valuable insights into how business app campaigns reach users, enabling businesses to optimize them. Adding email capabilities to an app is time- and resource-consuming for developers. Using an API can simplify enabling email analytics in three simple steps: 

Step 1: Choose an email API service provider

Choose the email API provider with the strongest and most reliable analytics, such as Nylas API. Sign up and activate the email analytics function. 

Step 2: Set up email analytics in your application

Use Nylas’s support documentation to enable email analytics in your application. If questions remain, you can always contact our support team or check out our tutorials on using the email API. 

Step 3: Test

Using filters and views, test whether the application’s email analytics functionality is working properly. 

Leverage email analytics with Nylas API

The Nylas Email API is an all-in-one solution for including powerful email capabilities in an application. It provides a single point connecting the application to the users’ inboxes. The API is universal, connecting to all email service providers in minutes. 

Implementing the Nylas Email API saves developers thousands of hours, reducing the cost of building the product and allowing for a faster time to market. Because Nylas allows you to send directly from users’ inboxes, it results in 99.6% deliverability. 

Nylas delivers comprehensive email analytics that allows you to evaluate and scale your email outreach. Request a demo today or get a free API key to find out the best way to add communications to your application.