Email marketing reports contain valuable information, but reviewing spreadsheets, comparing campaign results, and preparing leadership summaries can take hours.
Microsoft Copilot can help marketers analyze campaign data in Excel, identify performance patterns, and turn raw numbers into actionable recommendations.
In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to use Copilot to analyze an email campaign report, identify opportunities for improvement, and turn the findings into a marketing action plan.
Step 1: Prepare Your Email Marketing Data
Start by exporting a campaign report from your email marketing platform. Your report might include these columns:
- Campaign Name
- Send Date
- Emails Sent
- Delivered
- Unique Opens
- Unique Clicks
- Conversions
- Unsubscribes
- Revenue
For this example, imagine you’re analyzing three promotional email campaigns for an online shoe retailer.
| Metric | Campaign A | Campaign B | Campaign C |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emails sent | 10,000 | 10,000 | 10,000 |
| Delivered | 9,800 | 9,700 | 9,850 |
| Unique clicks | 294 | 388 | 492 |
| Conversions | 29 | 39 | 59 |
| Revenue | $1,450 | $1,950 | $2,950 |
These are illustrative figures, not actual campaign results.
Open your report in Excel and format the data as a table. Give the table a descriptive name, such as EmailCampaigns, so it’s easier to reference.
Marketing tip: If your email platform reports opens, remember that privacy features and automated activity can make open rates less reliable. Clicks, conversions, revenue, and traffic quality often provide more actionable signals.
Step 2: Ask Copilot to Analyze Campaign Performance
If Copilot is available in your Excel environment, select it and provide a clear prompt.
Try this:
Copilot prompt:
“Analyze the EmailCampaigns table. Compare the three campaigns using click-through rate, conversion rate, and revenue per delivered email. Identify the strongest-performing campaign for each metric, explain the differences, and summarize three findings for a marketing team. Use the data provided and do not invent missing information.”
This prompt works because it identifies the dataset, specifies the metrics, and tells Copilot exactly what kind of output you need.
If your version of Copilot doesn’t support the requested analysis directly, you can calculate the metrics in Excel and ask Copilot to interpret the resulting columns.
Step 3: Calculate the Metrics That Matter
Use consistent definitions so your comparisons are meaningful.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Unique clicks divided by delivered emails, multiplied by 100.
Conversion rate
Conversions divided by delivered emails, multiplied by 100. If your organization defines conversion rate using clicks as the denominator, use that definition consistently instead.
Revenue per delivered email
Revenue divided by delivered emails.
For Campaign C, using the illustrative data above:
- Click-through rate: approximately 4.99%
- Conversion rate: approximately 0.60%
- Revenue per delivered email: approximately $0.30
These figures help you compare campaigns beyond total revenue.
Step 4: Investigate Why One Campaign Performed Better
Suppose Campaign C generated the most clicks, conversions, and revenue.
Don’t immediately assume its subject line was responsible. The campaign may have featured a better offer, a different audience segment, or a more compelling product.
Ask Copilot:
“Based on the available campaign data, identify what we can confidently conclude about Campaign C. Separate findings supported by the data from possible explanations that would require additional information, such as subject lines, audience segments, creative, and offer details.”
This is an important distinction. AI can summarize what the data shows, but it shouldn’t invent reasons for the results.
Step 5: Turn the Findings Into an Action Plan
Now ask Copilot to translate the analysis into specific next steps.
Copilot prompt:
“Create a prioritized action plan based on this email campaign analysis. Include the recommended action, the reason for the recommendation, the metric to monitor, and a proposed test. Do not claim that any recommendation will guarantee improved performance.”
Your plan might include:
- Test two subject lines on a future campaign.
- Compare performance by audience segment.
- Review the landing page used by the strongest campaign.
- Examine conversion and revenue trends, not just clicks.
- Run a controlled test before making a permanent change.
The goal is to use the report to determine what to test next—not simply to declare a winning campaign.
Step 6: Create a Summary for Leadership
Marketing teams often need to communicate campaign performance to stakeholders who don’t want to review an entire spreadsheet.
Ask Copilot:
“Write a concise executive summary of the email campaign results. Include the strongest-performing campaign, the most important performance metrics, two limitations of the analysis, and three recommended next steps. Use a professional tone and include only conclusions supported by the data.”
Review the output carefully, verify every number, and make sure the summary reflects the actual business context.
You can then use the approved findings to prepare a PowerPoint presentation or a Word report, depending on which Microsoft 365 features your organization has available.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Using incomplete data: A campaign with more revenue may also have had a larger audience or a better offer.
Treating correlation as causation: If one campaign performed better, that doesn’t prove which individual element caused the improvement.
Ignoring conversions: High click volume isn’t necessarily valuable if those visitors don’t take the desired action.
Sharing sensitive information: Follow your organization’s policies for uploading customer and campaign data to AI tools.
Skipping human review: Verify calculations, recommendations, and business conclusions before sharing the report.
Final Thoughts
Microsoft Copilot can help marketers move from spreadsheets to insights more efficiently. By preparing clean data, writing specific prompts, checking the calculations, and translating findings into tests, you can make campaign reporting more useful and less time-consuming.
The biggest benefit isn’t simply generating a report faster. It’s creating more time to ask better questions, understand customer behavior, and improve your next campaign.
Start with one email report, test this workflow, and refine your prompts as you learn what works for your team.
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