26th/NovemberMeasuring your online channels part 1: email marketing

By Pieter GAP // 20u10 // category: Dive deeper, web analytics

Email marketing is probably one of the most matured online marketing methods out there. Almost every company is able to send out newsletters or special promo emails to their email lists. They should be, because email is evolving to be the single most important medium of human communication.

Despite of the wonderfull results one can book with email marketing, this medium has built up a very bad reputation over the years. Everbody knows the annoyance of a spam stuffed email inbox, or even worse: having missed an opportunity because your provider marked that important email as spam!

In a climate of sophisticated spam filters and an audience that is very wary of anything that looks like spam, conducting successfull email marketing campaigns has grown beyond merely sending out some emails and hoping for the best. It is about finetuning your message, lay out, email frequencies, email list segmentation, etc. to optimize typical outcomes such as conversion rate or ultimately revenue on your campaigns. But how to start?  Analytics to the rescue!

What happens in the email client?

The first thing we are going to look at are the so called “response metrics“. They will provide you insights on how people perceive your message. A few examples of typical response metrics and the things they can tell you:

• Delivery rate:  number of emails that were delivered / number of emails that were sent. This metrics enlightens you on the quality (and probably recency) of your email list.  
• Open rate: number of people that opened your email message / number of people that received your email message in their inbox. how big was your real audience? Did your email title convince people to open the email?
• Click-to-open rate (CTOR): the number of people that clicked in your email message to go to your website / the number of people that opened your message. So people looked at your message, did you manage to convince them to take action?
• Soft bounces: emails that have made it to the recipients email server, but not to the inbox. This can occur because the recipients ‘ email box is full. Future email campaigns could still reach this recipient.
• Hard bounces: emails that are permanently undeliverable, for instance the recipient has changed his email address, has blocked your server as spam,… This email addresses are not going to convert anymore (RIP).
• Unsubscribes: how many recipients unsubscribed during this campaign? If this metric is much higher in this campaign than average, maybe you didn’t define the right audience for the campaign.

These metrics should be present in all standard email marketing tools on the market. If you don’t have them, question your tool .  With this metrics, you get a pretty good idea whether you managed to bring your message to your audience, but as always, we want to know more. Especially, how many bucks did that email marketing campaign made us? To know that, we will have to digg a little deeper into the outcome metrics.

What happens on the website?

The first step into measuring success of our campaign is to define success of our campaign. Within E-commerce, probably this will mean that recipients order your promoted products. For lead generation websites, maybe you want your audience to contact your company. To keep it simple, let’s stick with the lead generation for now. To measure this, we could use the following metrics:

• Email conversion rate: # recipients contacting the company / # delivered messages. This is a very good metric to benchmark campaigns if your website converion process remains the same. However, if you have a low email conversion rate, ask yourself the following question: did my campaign fail or did my website fail? Taking a look at some more specific metrics such as the open rate, CTOR and the website conversion rate should enable you to pinpoint the problem.
• Website conversion rate: # recipients contacting the company / # unique visitors coming from the email campaign. If your campaign drives many visitors to your website but still nobody is acting on your call-to-action, probably you should look at your website. Is your contact form accessible? Are you using a landing page consistent with your email message?
• Campaign bounce rate: # recipients coming to the website and leaving immediately / # recipients coming to the website. As Avinash Kaushik always says: “these are people who came to your website, puked, and left“.

 To measure these metrics we will have to dive a little deeper than the standard metrics provided by your email marketing solution because the conversion mostly does not take place in the email message itself but somewhere else, in this example on the website. But don’t worry,  web analytics solutions such as Google Analytics, WebTrends Analytics, SiteStat or Sitecatalyst can easily cope with this problem. Check on the possibilities of your web analytics solution to track these metrics!

Email marketing funnel

With email marketing, as with all marketing channels, you can not expect to convert every person you send an email to. So we know that a lot of people will drop out the process somewhere and for some reason. Well, off course we would like to know where they drop out and for what reason. Mmm, I feel a funnel coming up .

 

The visualization of this funnel with the right metrics enables us to quickly detect specific problems within our email marketing campaign or website and act upon them, causing your email marketing campaigns to be much more effective. Improving your conversion rate will bring you a lot more revenue without having to invest heavily in more acquisition.

I wish you lots of success with buildig your own email marketing funnel. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to react or contact me.