Despite being the most widely used way to communicate, there’s very little offered in terms of native email analytics.

With a billion people relying on it to get work done every single day, it keeps the world turning, but do we really understand how we use email?

There’s so much potential to learn and understand how you work and communicate with both your team and the outside world.

Let’s take a look at what’s possible with email analytics.

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What are email analytics?

Do you know how many emails you sent or received last month?

Who you speak to the most?

Or how long you take to reply?

Without using another tool to help you it can be impossible to know any of this!

Email Analytics work by pulling the raw data from your inbox and visualizing them in a way that helps you get useful insights.

We turn this...

Into this!

Having an understanding of your inbox and how you use it allows you to see any areas where you can improve, as well as where you are already doing well. You can then set yourself targets to work towards and use email analytics to track your progress.

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What are the benefits of tracking email analytics?

What you can get out of email analytics depends on what you want to achieve or improve with your inbox.

There’s no blanket solution here. There's many different uses of email and therefore many different ways to analyse and understand how it’s used.

For example, if you’re looking to improve your response time for your whole team, it’s important to first know what your current average response time is. You’d then want to set a clear, realistic target to aim for, and take some steps to cut response time.

Some of the most important benefits of email analytics are:

Closing more sales

‍78% of sales go to the company who answers first, so you’ll want to keep your sales team responding quickly! As we’ve written about before, this can quickly lead to a huge increase in your revenue.

Improving customer satisfaction

‍61% of customers stop buying from a company due to poor customer service, meaning your Customer Service team has a similar commitment to response time. Happy customers are returning customers, and the word can spread quickly!

Visibility for managers

Work can easily go unnoticed if it lives in each employee's inbox. Having better visibility can help managers balance workload and see who's going the extra mile. Understanding how their team is communicating both amongst themselves and with the outside world is a huge advantage when it comes to deciding how to manage and incentivize.

Understanding remote team’s performance

Managers continue to worry about the productivity of their unexpectedly-remote teams. Without face-to-face interaction it can be hard to know when and how they’re working, but email analytics can give managers a lot of information to better understand this..

Knowing nothing slips through the cracks

If a team is closely looking at their email analytics, they can make sure every received email will be taken care of quickly — making sure no important emails (and potential leads) are missed.

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8 essential email analytics to track

There’s a wide range of different email analytics you can use for different purposes, depending on what you need for your team. Here’s 8 of the most commonly used.

Email Response Time

Email response time allows you to see how long people wait on average for a response from you. This is calculated by measuring the time between receiving an email and the response being sent.

Email response time is likely the first answer you’ll get when you ask a Sales or Customer Support Manager what metrics they track. It gives you a clear insight into how long your customers are waiting once they contact you, and it’s directly tied to closed deals and customer satisfaction.

Do you know what your average email response time is? To see your email response time you can connect third-party analytics tools like Email Meter to your email. Once you know that, you can set goals to improve and track how it changes over time.

You can also choose to track median response time to avoid your data being skewed by outliers.

Time Before First Response

This is great for measuring how long a customer needs to wait for a response after first reaching out. Once that first response is received they’ll know that they’re being listened to, so this is often one of the most important metrics for keeping customers happy.

Response Rate

For teams who need to reply to all (or a large proportion of) received emails, this metric is perfect to see if everyone is being responded to. It can also be used in the other direction to see how many sent emails are being replied to, which can be useful for sales teams who are doing cold sales emails.

Email Volume

Important for seeing how much work your team is doing, this is measured by looking at both received and sent email numbers. If there’s a large number of emails coming in this could mean your team’s workload is increasing and their response time could drop. If lots of emails are being sent, this could mean their productivity is increasing!

Busiest Hours

It can help you to see when the busiest times are for your team for incoming emails, or when they are their most productive with sending outbound emails. You can see a breakdown of sent/received emails throughout the week hour-by-hour. If there’s a lot of incoming emails during a certain time of the day, you can ensure there’s enough agents working to deal with this influx. If there’s a time when lots of emails are being sent and your team is being super productive, you can understand better how your team works and what motivates them!

Top Senders and Recipients

Using our Top Interactions table, it’s possible to find out who you interact with the most and understand where most of your time is spent. Find out who your most demanding clients are and who on your team is interacting the most with them. This can be great for deciding which clients to assign specific agents to (who may be better at dealing with more emails) or to see who on your team is the most communicative.

Internal/External Breakdown

Find out how much communication is going outside of your domain and how much is kept within. This can help to see how well your team is communicating amongst themselves, or how much they are reaching out to external clients.

Thread Length

Understand how long threads are, which is useful for understanding if your team is communicating efficiently. For example customer service teams will want to keep thread lengths as short as possible to ensure enquiries are being dealt with as efficiently as possible.

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The best way to track email analytics with Email Meter

As we’ve seen, email analytics are a treasure trove of insights just waiting to be discovered. We’ve got the perfect platform to help you fully understand your inbox.

In order to optimize workflows and improve productivity, we need metrics and insights that help us make smarter decisions. This means using a third-party analytics tool like Email Meter to help you identify bottlenecks in your team’s email performance which you could have missed otherwise due to the lack of analytics in core email. More efficient workflows mean more time saved, and more productivity, more revenue!

Whether you’re a freelancer working alone or have a team of 100, we’ve got a number of solutions to offer you every insight we’ve talked about and more, which you can view from a centralized, easy-to-understand dashboard.

We’re able to work with most setups and workflows, including shared mailboxes, so no matter how your team is organized, there’s insights we can give you!

We’re already helping other leading companies around the world including Netflix, Uber and Roche, so why not sign up for our Free version and check out what we can offer you? If you can’t find what you’re looking for you can reach out to us anytime here: hello@emailmeter.com