User Guide - Email Dashboard

On any page, navigate to the right-hand filter and select your unit in the Primary Filter dropdown. The top half of the page will show you key rates for email marketing, including open rate, click-to-open rate and click rate. Hover over the latest fiscal year bar to get a quick percent change for any of the rates.

If you have a unit filter deployed, bear in mind that only emails utilizing the standard naming convention will be included. If you recently shifted your email names, then your year-over-year metrics may be skewed.

Use page 5 of the dashboard to do a quick check of which emails are included in the analyses based on your selected filters. If something looks awry, uncheck your unit and select “Unknown/Untagged” from the primary marketing unit.

Go to page 1 and select your unit. Hover over the FY 2021 bar to see a percentage breakdown of emails by type.

Navigate to page 3 and check out the table in the lower half: Data by Unit/Department. Use the filter on the right to select the current fiscal year only.

You can see how KPIs compare to other units. Use the vertical gray line to understand the overall rate. Use the filters on the right to limit the data to your primary audience and consider the same comparison – do you have room for improvement? Can you identify units with strong performance and touch base to learn more about their approach?

Use the filters on the right to limit the data to your primary type of send – do you have room for improvement? Can you identify units with strong performance and touch base to learn more about their approach?

Did a specific type of email under/over perform that skewed your overall performance?

Navigate to page four and consider the following:

1. Use the table in the lower half of the dashboard to view performance differences in your audiences. Were donors less likely to open than current students? If yes, did you send more emails to donors? Or current students? Are there ways to optimize your audience mix or leverage strategies from one audience to another?
2. Use the drop-down menu for the table in the lower half of the dashboard to flip over to email type. Similar questions here – were solicitations more likely to have poor performance than your newsletters or vice versa? Consider your mix – if your manager is asking for more of an email product that is performing at a lower rate then your overall rates may go down.
3. If you find differences by audience or email type, take the next step to see if that is the trend over time by the chart on the lower half of page 2. Use your filters on the right to identify the audience and/or type and then view the rates for that selection over time. Is it consistent and therefore expected? Or do you have an unanticipated drop during the current period? Perform this analysis one audience or one email type at a time. If you are feeling adventurous, combine audiences and types to narrow things down. Follow that up by removing your unit filter. Does the overall institution trend the same way and therefore we may have a larger audience or ask issue?

Is your email performance heavily impacted by seasonality?

Higher education is a notoriously seasonal industry. If your email performance rates are lower than last quarter, you may just be in a seasonal slump.

Go to page 2. In the lower half of page 2, use the menu to change the view to “All Email Rates.” Double-check your date filters and expand so you can see more quarters or months over time. You can use the small +/- at the lower rate of the table to change the view from quarters to months.

We recommend starting with quarters to identify any large portion of time where you may see decreased performance. Expand the view to months to learn about changes by months and examine seasonal trends over time.

Are you sending more emails than normal?

Sometimes increasing the volume of email can detract from your open and click-to-open rates. To quickly check year-over-year volume, use page 1. Apply your unit filters and hover over the fiscal year to quickly see the volume and percentage breakdown by type. Keep in mind you can break the fiscal years into quarters and months using the “+/-“ button at the bottom right of the chart.

Go to page 5. Do not apply any filters. Type “covid” into the text box below, “Search for Campaign” in the lower half of the dashboard.

The answer? 1.7M emails were delivered that had “covid” in their name.

If you search for “coronavirus,” you’ll see that another half a million emails were delivered.

On any page, you can utilize the “Download” feature to grab elements of the dashboard and export them in a variety of ways: as an image, a cross tab data file, a PDF or a PPT.

• Image downloads: This will download the full tab that you are on into a PNG file.
• Cross tab data file: If you want the charts as is, don’t use this option. What will occur is that you will be able to select a page element and export the raw data as a .CSV or Excel file.
• PDF downloads: You can download a single tab, certain data charts only from the dashboard, multiple pages or the full workbook to a PDF. If you are downloading full pages, we recommend portrait mode.
• PowerPoint downloads work the same as PDFs relative to choices. Whichever pages you choose, each will be a single slide in your export.

1. Navigate to page 4 and apply a few filters to grab what you need.
2. After applying all those selections, the table will show you all emails the unit sent in BBIS or Acoustic.
3. Click download and select Data.
4. When you view your download, use the “Full Data tab” and select “Download all rows as a text file.

If you fear you do not have enough emails named with the analysis parameters or you want to look at data before you transitioned, you can use the search bar on page 5 to narrow the view by old naming standards or information regarding email names that you are aware of.

1. Go to page 5. Enter a term into the text box below, “Search for Campaign” in the lower half of the dashboard.
2. After pressing enter, the table will show you all emails the unit sent in BBIS or Acoustic.
3. Click download and select Data.
4. When you view your download, use the “Full Data tab” and select “Download all rows as a text file.”