BrightWave Marketing's founder outlines key considerations for analyzing and utilizing campaign metrics.
Email reporting data can be overwhelming in its sheer volume, providing a view to many marketers that looks more like a maze. But finding the prize inside can be achieved in many different ways.
With email metrics available in an immediate and specific format or a broad and historical viewpoint, the data rivals any kind of marketing analytics in the marketplace today. While there is no direct stat for measuring the influence on building your brand or strengthening the relationship with your audience, there is a metric for almost everything else.
Most marketers don't take full advantage of this voluminous reporting, and because of the depth of email metrics it is easy to fall behind and leave much of the numbers unseen or underutilized. By properly articulating what you are seeking in the campaign report and adapting your campaigns based on this data, you can make immediate improvements to your email marketing efforts.
Some key things to consider when analyzing and utilizing your campaign metrics:
Goals
Many email marketers are not looking for the right information. Yes, it can be like sorting for needles in a haystack, but by establishing your upfront goals for your campaigns and metrics, a proper first step is instituted. If your email campaigns primarily consist of newsletters, your goals may be purely clickthroughs in order to drive traffic to your website and enhance the value for advertisers. For promotional deployments, each mailing may have a specific revenue or profit goal, measured down to the level of each click. Every piece of reporting you analyze needs to be viewed based on these initial goals. Then you can dive deeper into the more specific campaign reporting.
Comparing to industry benchmarks
Many email marketers are unaware of how their metrics compare to the industry averages. While you don't want to place too much emphasis on this, every email marketing team should be cognizant of how they fare when compared to industry averages. The DoubleClick Quarterly Email Trend reports are the industry standard and should always be monitored. They also provide general email metrics as well as being broken out by specific industries. Everyone wants to know how their stats measure up; the information is there so use it.
Open rates
Marketers love this metric but you shouldn't bet the house on this often misleading stat, which is only available on HTML messages. I tell clients to take it with a grain of salt-- an open does not mean someone necessarily "read" your email. It could have appeared in a recipient's preview pane for a moment and then was deleted. With ongoing challenges to determining valid open rates, like with Gmail and Outlook not showing images in HTML emails, this has rendered this stat even more unreliable. Falling open rates in the past year further support this.
Regardless, be wary of placing too much emphasis on open rates, as they are an indicator only of someone potentially being interested in your email or company. This doesn't mean they scanned it thoroughly or more importantly acted on it. A high open rate but low clickthrough rate can be a red flag that your campaigns need help. The interest may exist with your brand, product or service but the low CT rate says the message wasn't very compelling. This is a great opportunity for working on improving the message.
Clickthrough percentage of opens
This metric can be more powerful and revealing than overall opens or clicks. This means that of all of the recipients who opened your email, how many of them than chose to click on a link. It is a genuine indicator of recipients who were interested in the email (opens) and then clicked on a link. Therefore, this indicates how good your message is to a certain degree, since your open rate is often more reflective of your brand and subject line.
Remarketing/sales qualifying
This is one of the most significant and underutilized areas in the email stat world. Companies spend thousands of dollars (usually much more) on using lead generation data from areas like telemarketing, direct mail and search marketing, but for email campaigns it is often left alone to rot in spreadsheet purgatory. Since almost every email deployment platform provides the email addresses (or more) of who clicked on a link, you must use this information for future marketing (including email campaigns) plans. These are your strong leads and these responders warrant their own follow-up campaign if they did not complete the desired action. Don't forget the sales power of email in addition to the relationship marketing portion of the program.
Timeliness
Email campaigns usually get the majority of their response in the first 72 hours, but with the immediacy of real-time metrics, a regular pattern of monitoring and pulling data should be established. A simple rule can be checking once within 24 hours, again seven to 10 days later and finally quarterly/annually as you compare campaigns across the board.
ROI
So many different successes can be achieved with email marketing, and every marketer needs to know what they are looking for to measure the ultimate success of the program (see goals above). In addition to reviewing opens, clicks, forwards, bounces and unsubscribes, the final judge of the campaign can often be metrics like revenue per click, value of each email address, revenue per campaign, profit per email, et cetera. This area should be observed judiciously.
Specific links
Aggregate clickthrough metrics can serve a purpose, but the real benefit of clickthrough stats can be in determining what links were successful and what were not. A healthy look at the specific CT stats can provide insight about proper placement of links and the success of each type of link (sales/cross promotion/privacy policy, et cetera). This understanding can help you edit your layout and link structure. Your creative team should be debriefed frequently on these results.
Monitoring of key external and internal issues
Metrics can help ascertain frequency issues (declining response rates may indicate you email too often), irrelevant content (if unsubscribes have an uptick) and user feedback (by reviewing reply volume). You can use the data to help identify a growing problem before it escalates into a major concern.
Forwarding/viral marketing
Is there a buzz factor for the email? While recipients that forward using their own email client and not a forward link won't show up in your viral stats, you still should pay close attention to any increases in this important metric. If forwards rise, you may be on to something and should model other campaigns after the viral feature that generated additional interest.
New subscribers
This is connected to the previous viral mention, with the key takeaway being: Did this email generate new interest and subscribers? Did your audience (and your message, of course) help acquire new subscribers to your emails? Don't forget to always add a subscription button on your emails regardless of the fact that your emails are going to an opt-in audience.
Testing
The depth and timeliness of email reporting allow marketers to have easily accessible data at their disposal. Use this data to determine the best subject and from lines and the best copy for viral links, as well as for testing creative and specific offers.
Next: Heavy email users share their biggest takeaways and benefits of email metrics.