What is an email marketing dashboard?
An email marketing dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Mailchimp, HubSpot, Salesforce) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates), enabling teams and agencies to monitor email campaign performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Email marketing dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in an email marketing dashboard?
An actionable email marketing dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive email marketing dashboards
Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show email marketing's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Email ROI analysis: by campaign, using attribution for large budgets.
- Subscriber growth analysis: new subscribers, churn rate, and net growth.
- Cohort analysis: engagement and conversion by subscriber cohort (sign-up period, acquisition source).
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Email marketing manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have campaign views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, and email type. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Campaign performance reporting: overall email campaign performance across different segments.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues.
- Competitive analysis for email strategies and tactics.
- Content and audience research.
Operational Email Marketing Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and email managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Email: delivery, open, click-through, and conversion rates.
- Subscriber metrics: list growth, unsubscribe rates, bounce rates.
Operational email marketing dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build an email marketing dashboard?
To build an email marketing dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are Mailchimp and HubSpot for email performance, CRM for subscriber data, and Google Analytics for web engagement.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of email marketing dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like campaign monitoring, subscriber growth, and engagement analysis.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your email marketing reporting use cases, such as campaign monitoring, subscriber growth, and engagement analysis.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Opens, Clicks, Conversions, Revenue, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, campaign name, email type, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your email marketing dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your email marketing dashboards:
Share
Share your email marketing dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in an email marketing dashboard?
Email marketing dashboards should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of email campaigns towards business goals. They include:
Email funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the marketer perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: email deliveries, open rates
- Engagement metrics: clicks, forwards, shares, average time on email
- Conversion metrics: custom conversions, leads, purchases, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your email marketing outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: Cost per Thousand Emails Sent (CPM)
- Engagement: Cost per Click (CPC)
- Conversion: Cost per Acquisition (CPA), Cost per Lead (CPL)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Visibility: Open rate
- Engagement: Click-through rate (CTR), engagement rate
- Conversion: Conversion rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your email marketing performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: email marketing spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: Average Order Value (AOV), Average Customer Value (ACV)
To analyze these email marketing KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: email type, source
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: funnel stage, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: subject lines, format, topic, keyword
