Key Aspects of a Successful Pardot Email Marketing Strategy – Part 3 (Post-Email)

In the earlier posts in this series, we have talked about pre-email preparations and the email itself. Let’s move on to the work after an email is sent to guarantee success. Some of the steps can be taken before you send an email but as a whole this post will deal with reporting, optimisation and tracking. 

Email reporting 

You should set the reports according to the goals and KPIs set before you send a single email. Analysing your reports on the campaign/list level and even individual email level, whether you sent a list email or a nurture program email, offers insight into the strength and weaknesses and where emails can be immediately improved. 

In general, if you have a low email open rate, then either your subject line or headline is weak, or your audience is wrong. A high email open rate and low clickthrough rate means the email content, design, layout or CTAs are not appealing. A high clickthrough rate but low conversion rate on the landing page can mean the problems with landing page content, conversion options, CTAs, disparity between the email message and the landing page offering etc. This is why carefully setting your benchmarks is important, you can determine just how much more is required by comparing your KPIs with benchmarks. 

Optimisation and tracking go hand in hand

Email optimisation might include A/B testing of every single aspect of your email but one at a time. A different email copy, different subject lines and headlines, different CTAs, tweaks in design, changed CTA placement. For your Pardot landing pages, you can – in addition to Pardot’s internal analytics – add scroll tracking and in-depth event tracking with Google analytics and Google tag manager and really get into the detail of what landing page elements are making people convert or bounce and optimise accordingly.