Analytics done well can lead to better customer service and bigger bottom lines (for example, my client used analytics insights to increase sales 250%) — done poorly it can be a complete waste of time. This article provides a quick and easy analytics roadmap specifically for email marketers. My aim is to help you understand how analytics fits in the big-picture and overcome the analytics fears I often see holding organizations back. This roadmap provides you with a solid foundation and prepares you to take advantage of the hidden insights within your ESP account data! Yay!
This short roadmap has two parts
Part 1: Analytics defined, and
Part 2: Two questions to ask before you start your next analytics project.
Part 1: Analytics Defined
I define analytics as the practice of using data to help you make decisions. My analytics process has three steps:
My Analytics Process:
Identify your objective, intention or a question that needs to be answered
Collect and organize the data
Analyze the data and translate the analysis into action items
This process only has three steps, but it is powerful — following the three steps are the key difference between useful, actionable insights and data overwhelm/confusion.
In every analytics project, steps 1 and 2 above are the same. However, the types of analysis techniques used in step 3 depends on the question that you want to answer. In general, there are three types of analytics (Descriptive, Predictive and Prescriptive).
The table below compares the three types of analytics. In addition, the table includes email marketing examples for each type of analytics.
