Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

5 Emails Where Metrics Mislead

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

Email metrics are critical to our understanding of how well our messages perform. Except when they’re not. Sometimes metrics do not tell you the whole story, and they even tell a misleading story on occasion. One of the most common misrepresentations we see in email metrics is where a relatively small number of clicks is interpreted to mean that a message was not particularly engaging. This isn’t always the case.

Here are a few examples of messages that won’t draw a lot of clicks, but which may nevertheless be working as hard as anything else in the inbox:

The Thought Leadership Newsletter
Newsletters are many brands’ benchmark messages, and carry the brunt of an email strategy. If your newsletter is built around a number of story abstracts with links to more information on each on your site or across the web, seeing clicks register is an indication of engagement. But if the purpose of the newsletter is to be useful right within the inbox, such as a thought leadership piece which includes a complete article , a lack of clicks may be OK. Messages designed to build engagement right within the inbox do not need clicks (or even links) to be successful. It’s true that you give up some insight on what people like, but there is also a brand impact and engagement that comes from the very act of subscribing, noticing and reading. The other upside to messages like this is that they help cement your subscribers’ engagement with the email channel. Messages designed to send them to your website underscore the value of your site and its content, while messages that reward the very act of opening and reading show the usefulness of your emails themselves.

The Coming Soon or The Week Ahead Email
Some retailers (like the Clymb) will send an email about “upcoming sales this week,” or a trade association may publish a weekly update about relevant dates and deadlines over the coming few days. Like the thought leadership newsletters, these messages earn their keep simply by being read, and help build pre-engagement for the messages later on with clearer and more immediate calls to action. Not seeing clicks on messages of this type is fine. The metric to watch instead is unsubscribe rate, as you want to make sure people find them useful enough to continue devoting some inbox real estate to them.

The Narrow Topic to a Broad List
If you do a good job with your subject line letting subscribers know what’s in an email, those interested will click. Likewise, those not interested will not. That’s also good – you’ve respected their time and kept them attentive until the next message. You will not see opens and clicks from this audience but that doesn’t mean your message was a bust, particularly if those who did read found the narrow content particularly engaging. The important element here is the narrow content, not the broad list. Broad content to a broad list that does not generate clicks may well signal that in an effort to be a little relevant to everyone, the message was genuinely interesting to few.

The Announcement
Some emails are meant to simply announce something – the appointment of a new CEO, a change in the company’s privacy policy or the opening of a new location. In many cases, these messages see few clicks because they include few links, or the ones they do simply link to “more information” on a topic that the newsletter has just effectively exhausted. In these messages, however, including contextual links to enable some measure of tracking may actually be a good idea just to make sure they are worth sending in the first place. Many messages in this group fall into the “let’s tell everybody” category, and end up with such low engagement that they come closer to telling nobody.

The Offline Call To Action
If the call to an action in a message is “visit us at Booth 45” or “print this out to receive 20% off your next in-store purchase” a lack of measurable activity might not signal a lack of engagement at all. Brands focused on clicks may overlook offline calls to action altogether, which can be a mistake. Some of your best customers exist in the real world almost as much as they do online.

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A New Way to Look at Engagement Metrics: By Subscriber Instead of Campaign

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

When most marketers hear the term “engagement metrics” they think of open rate, click rate and conversions – the analytics we use to track a how well a message performed. Analyzing our messages in this way is useful because it allows us to compare this week’s to last week’s, isolate why changes in responses occur, and try to improve our subsequent messages based on what we learn.

However, there are also some shortcomings with this approach to engagement metrics. While measuring response at the message level ostensibly tells us how well our messages are performing, it is prone to error. For example, if you sent a message between Christmas and New Year’s and saw that your open and click rates were depressed, you would likely conclude that many of your subscribers were on vacation and not paying attention to emails. But some of your subscribers are on vacation every day, which means that every message you send suffers from the same audience absenteeism you see during the holidays. Look also at open rates. If you write excellent subject lines that telegraph the content of your emails very well, the people interested in that content are likely to open them. By the same token, a well-written subject line tells subscribers who are not interested in that content to ignore the message, which many do. You have a record of the openers being engaged, but can’t you also make the argument that those who read the subject line and decided that this particular message does not apply to them (maybe promoting a white paper on a topic that is outside of their area of responsibility) are engaged also? They have engaged with your message by not reading it, though the brand interaction may well be as strong as those who did read it.

What we normally think of as engagement metrics then do not really measure subscriber engagement as much as message engage-ability. A better metric to evaluate the health of our email program would be one that measures how many of our subscribers are engaged, and how deeply. Put another way, when you launch a series of emails to promote an upcoming conference, you are less interested in how many opens and clicks each message will generate as you are in how many of your subscribers are likely to attend. Subscriber engagement metrics can give us visibility into the results your email program might yield.

Here are a few ways to begin looking at subscriber engagement metrics:

Add the element of time.
When you look at a message’s engagement metrics, you might see that 200 subscribers out of your 1,000 subscribers opened it, and 50 clicked. You can deduce then that the 800 who did not open the message are not engaged with it, but does that not mean they are not engaged with your brand? To find out, add the element of time. Instead of tracking the number of opens and clicks for a single message, track them instead over a month or a quarter or a year. If you mail a weekly newsletter it is bound to reach some people when they do not have the time or inclination to read, which depresses that message’s metrics. But how many of your 1,000 subscribers have opened or clicked at least one time in the past month, or 4 sends? Chances are very good that if you average 200 opens and 50 clicks for each one, your total number of engaged users will be higher than that as it is not the same 200 people opening and 50 people clicking each time. Tracking over time lets you better size your engaged audience. You may have the attention of fully half of your list, instead of the 20% suggested by each message’s results.

Weight for recency.
A subscriber who clicked on yesterday’s newsletter may be no more engaged with your brand than one who clicked last week but not this week, but at some point the duration since a subscriber’s last interaction does matter. What that duration is depends on your content strategy and frequency. For example, many retailers see a huge percentage of their subscribers go dark for 11 months, only to return predictably during the holiday season. Trade associations that focus on a large Annual Conference see similar patterns. Other brands are relying on email to keep their subscribers engaged and connected throughout the year, so a lapse of even a few weeks can signal waning engagement. When you track subscriber engagement over time, consider weighting recent interactions more heavily. For example, someone who opened or clicked in the past two weeks might be considered engaged, while someone who last interacted between two and four weeks ago might be 50% engaged (or rather, you will need two of these people to equal a single fully engaged subscriber).

Identify tiers of engagement.
With engagement tiers you are not looking just at how recently someone interacted, but how likely someone is to interact with your next message. Recency alone does not get you there. For example, Subscriber A may have opened and clicked on a message yesterday, but had not interacted with your brand at all for the past three months. Subscriber B did not open or click yesterday’s message, but did open and click six of the past eight messages. Which of the two is more likely to interact with the next message? Build your engagement model to account for both recency and frequency in order to group your subscribers into tiers that more accurately reflect their level of engagement, and predict future interaction. Then compare your results on subsequent sends to see how what percentage of subscribers in each tier actually did interact. Does “Fully Engaged” mean that 100% interact with at least one message in a two week period, or 75%? Does “Moderately Engaged” mean that 25% interact, or is it as high as 50%? After a few sends, you will know how many subscribers are in each of your tiers and how likely each is to interact over a period of time. That allows you to calculate – and track – how engaged your list is overall.

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Benchmarking Data: What to Use, What to Ignore

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

As email marketers, we naturally pay a lot of attention to data. It isn’t just our own data that is of interest, of course. Just as our own campaign analytics help us shape subsequent email messages, turning to benchmarking data can help us identify initiatives we ought to be considering for our email program. And also like analytics, benchmarking data is best used to change our behavior. Knowing a data point – whether it is your own open rate or the aggregate open rate of representative companies in your industry – does not make your email more effective. Understanding the data point – why it is that number, what direction it is trending, what factors have influenced it – is what makes the data valuable, and that value is only recognized if we act on it. If we believe our open rates can go higher, we need to know what is suppressing them so we know what to change.

Not all benchmarking data is helpful in this regard. It is easy to get wrapped up in benchmarking data because it helps us “measure” our own program, but if it does not help us identify what to change in order to improve it loses its value and its claim on our attention.  Here are a few examples of some benchmarking data we should use, and some we should ignore:

What to Use:

Competitive Spending: Seeing where other marketers are investing in the coming months or year is valuable because changes in marketing technology drive a change in consumer expectations. If the brands whose emails are book-ending yours in the inbox exhibit greater personalization and targeting, integrated multimedia or interactive elements, your subscribers will grow to expect the same. It is not about keeping up with the Joneses as much as staying in sync with the constantly evolving technology landscape.

Data That Reflects Consumer Trends: Knowing the average open rate doesn’t tell us what we should do to improve, but learning for example that 40% of all opens are now on a mobile device points out a consumer trend we should be prepared for. Another example was the recent report that 70% of messages marked as Spam are legitimate marketing emails. This tells us that consumers are not distinguishing between unsolicited messages and those they just don’t want to receive any more, which suppresses delivery rates through an increase in spam complaints. Data like this does not just tell us we need to improve; it clues us into consumer sentiment in a way that allows us to address it specifically.

Data on Message Type Effectiveness: A revelation to come to the fore in 2012 is that triggered messages wildly outperform business-as-usual emails. Unlike trends in subject lines or time of day, this is replicable for all email marketers: send more triggered messages (confirming a subscription, purchase, survey, etc.) and you will create more engagement.

What to Ignore:

Industry-level Engagement Benchmarks: The first problem with benchmarking engagement metrics is that it represents the industry average of a particular metric like open rate or click rate, and we all aspire to be better than average. But the bigger shortcoming is that it lacks context. Maybe the average open rate for your industry is published at 18.5%. Does it change for list size? Message frequency? Subscriber tenure? How is each brand represented in that average segmenting and targeting? How many are using subject line tricks that move the needle on open rate but suppress engagement afterwards? If the only point of commonality we can be sure of between the average and our own email program is that we are part of the same industry, we are learning very little from this data. Without context, we do not know if the comparison is valid, or what we should do to improve.

Micro-analytic Trends: For this example I’m going to pick on all the reports I’ve seen lately that promote the best time to send an email. No doubt there are some defensible studies that show open rate is higher at 4pm on Tuesdays than at 10am on Mondays. Does that mean a message sent at 10am on Mondays will fail, or that one sent at 4pm on Tuesdays will break records? Again, data like this lacks context. We don’t know if the brands aggregated in these studies were B-to-B or B-to-C, if the messages were promotional, newsletters or triggered, or if sending later in the day or week simply means the marketer had more time to create a more engaging message. The data may be interesting, but it is not instructive.

Seeing how your program is performing relative to others can be very valuable, but not because it gives us a new level to aim for. We should already be trying to improve our email program with each message, even if we don’t know how our click rate compares to the rest of the industry. The real value to benchmarking data comes from telling us which route to take to improve.

 

Posted in Analytics, Data Points and Benchmarks | Comments Off

Email’s Ultimate Metric

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

I often hear marketers ask what email metric they should pay the most attention to, or which one best represents the condition of their email program.

That’s easy. The answer of course is your Delivery Rate, or the percentage of your messages that are getting the greenlight from ISPs and email administrators. Nobody reads what they don’t receive, so delivery rate is the lever with the greatest purchase. Note, however, that the number of delivered messages is not the number of people who actually receive your emails. Because of client-side spam filters and other rules that sequester some delivered messages outside of the inbox, about 1 in 5 messages that pass through to your subscriber never show up where they can be read. So maybe Delivery Rate doesn’t tell you everything you need.

In that case you need to focus on your Open Rate, definitely. Open rate is a proxy for read rate in that it lets you know how many times your message has been visibly displayed in someone’s reader or preview pane. Of course, being visible is not the same thing as getting read, so as proxies go this one is not able to boast six sigma accuracy. When your subscribers click on your subject line so that your message fills the preview pane or the reader briefly – even if their intention is to delete your message or filter it off to some other folder – that message may still be recorded as opened, even though it is not read. Open Rate then has some issues of its own.

What you really want to measure is engagement, right? Emails are supposed to drive clicks so monitoring the Click Rate of your messages is a great way to see how well you’re engaging your audience. There is one small problem with this metric though. Close to 40% of opens are now occurring on mobile devices. Opening a message on a phone can have profound implications on what actions someone takes. On the one hand, smaller screens and slower loading make the web experience on mobile devices less satisfying, prompting many people who read messages on their phones to hold off on clicking until they see the message again on a bigger screen. And a lot of people who do click end up fat-fingering the tiny links or buttons and go to someplace they didn’t mean to. So you may have more engagement than your clicks suggest, and your audience may be engaged in topics other than what they actually clicked on. Also, click rate is calculated by the number of clicks over the number of delivered emails. If you could boost your deliverability and your open rate, you’d have more clicks, right? Click Rate is useful, but no panacea.

If the focus is really about creating engaging content, the critical metric is Click-to-Open Rate, or the percentage of people who open your email and then click on it. This metric gives you much better insight into how well your email content creates engagement and drives action as it only measures responses from the people who read your email. Except that “opens” do not necessarily translate into people who read your email, and also because of that fudge factor about clicks I just talked about too.

OK, maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. We’ve been focusing on what we’re doing right with email, but what if we look instead at evidence that we’ve done something wrong? In that case, email’s ultimate metric may be the Unsubscribe Rate. The difficulty of earned media works both ways. Yes, it is harder to grow your list if you are earning permission from everyone on it. But you also have their permission until they say you don’t. Unsubscribe Rate then tells us how many people we’ve failed with, in a per-message percentage that is easy to track and trend. Even if we are not driving engagement and clicks, if we haven’t lost people to unsubscribe, we get another bite at the apple. But this treatment of unsubscribes is muddied by inactive subscribers – those people who technically haven’t unsubscribed but maybe have abandoned an email address or banished our emails to some filtered folder way down the list. We still have their permission, but not their attention. So even Unsubscribe Rate doesn’t give us a complete picture.

What’s left? ROI is flawed because the real expense in email is not what you pay to send, but the years you have put into earning your subscribers’ permission and attention. Lifetime Customer Value is a great theory, but with so many other contact points clouding attribution it is almost impossible to quantify what percentage of value comes from which channel. Metrics trended over time like clicks-per-subscriber-per-year or a homemade engagement score based on a number of metrics tighten the focus a bit, but even these leave off after the inbox, when the real measure is what subscribers do after the email has compelled a click.

Email is often considered a narrow marketing channel, definable by simple direct response metrics. That simply isn’t true. Understanding how well your program is working takes a big picture view with a conversational fluency in each of the metrics available to evaluate it – both in what they tell you and what they don’t.

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8-Minute Analytics

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

Email analytics should not be on the bubble for email marketers, first to bounce off the to-do list when the workload increases. Email is valued for its ROI, but without spending some time in analytics ongoing improvement of your email program (or merely keeping step with landscape changes) comes down to luck. The good news is that analytics need not be a full-time job. Of course the more time you can spend learning about what works and why the better, but even a little time can make a big difference in understanding what drives performance.

How little time? Less than you think, and just barely more than none. Here’s my guide to 8-Minute Analytics for the email program you’ve always wanted:

Step 1: Scan and Record Top-Line Analytics.
For each message you send, take 90 seconds to scan and record the top-line analytics: delivered (number and %), opens, clicks and unsubscribes. Keep a spreadsheet or a whiteboard or a piece of graph paper where you record all of these for each message. Even though you can pull up the analytics at any time and compare as many messages as you want, the recording part of this step is still the most important. What you are looking for are not absolute results, but trends. Taking a moment to record your numbers into a table allows you to spot trends quickly. Knowing that your open rate is 20% this month means a lot more if you know that last month was 30%.

Step 2: Use Visual “Heat Map” Tracking.
In the Message Tracking section of Real Magnet’s analytics we offer something called Click-View tracking. It works like a heat map, displaying your actual message and then showing how many clicks each link within the message received. Heat maps allow marketers to quickly glean which sections of the message drove the most activity, and also lend some insight into the copy, design and content elements responsible. Additionally, by seeing how many clicks occur further down the page it is possible to take the pulse of your audience’s engagement as well; the further down they click, the more of them are reading the entire message. No clicks below the fold and your engagement is tenuous.

Step 3: Look at % of Mobile Opens.
Mobile is the most disruptive technology change in email right now. The iPhone is now responsible for more email opens than any other client, including Microsoft Outlook. When you track your message, be sure to glance at the percentage of opens that occurred on mobile devices. The first time you do, it may be quite an eye-opener, as many of our clients are seeing 30%, 40% or more opens on mobile devices. Is your design mobile-friendly? What about your content strategy – would you draw more clicks if you knew that many people are reading on a small screen?

Step 4: Review Analytics Before your Next Message, Not After the Last One.
We all know that the majority of our responses to an email come within the first 24 hours, and that further activity reaches diminishing returns after 3 days. Most marketers look at their analytics sometime within this time frame – from 1-3 days after sending. But the objective of analytics is not just to inform you about what worked in your last email; analytics’ higher calling is to make your next message even better. So reserve your analytics work until right before you start working on your next message. What you learned will be fresh in your mind, allowing you to immediately capitalize on your new insights.

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How To Improve Open Rates Without A/B Testing

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

There are two kinds of people in this world – those who A/B test their emails, and those who don’t. The reasons why we don’t always A/B test are very defensible; it requires extra time from already thin resources, the focus is on getting the some of the email out and not necessarily read, and even without A/B testing email has outstanding ROI. I empathize with all of these.

Still, wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy some of the performance benefits of A/B testing without taking the extra step? It would, and you can. It is possible to improve your open rates even when you are not A/B testing. Here’s how:

1. Study Subject Lines by Open Rate: A/B testing works best because it isolates a single variable for a clean analysis. If you send two emails, each to a randomly selected half of your list, at the same time and with the exact same creative, design, copy and call-to-action, changing only the subject line, you can confidently attribute any delta in performance to the subject lines. As I said, that’s the cleanest analysis, but it isn’t the only one. Try running a report of all your emails ranked by open rate. (In Real Magnet you can run this very report as “Highest/Lowest Opened Subject Lines.”) Study the list of your top performers, looking for points of commonality. Does an offer appear frequently? A number or a % sign? Do many end with a question mark? Does length seem important? Now do the same thing with your worst performers. You won’t learn with the same certainty as you do with A/B testing, but there are conclusions to be drawn in that data. At the very least, you should be able to come away with some new hypotheses to work into future subject lines.

2. Segment More: When you run your reports on top performing subject lines, look also at your list size. I’d bet my sender score that as a rule, the messages you are sending to smaller lists have higher open rates. There are a few reasons for this, and all of them have to do with relevance. A smaller list means narrower segmenting, allowing you to lead with a subject line that has a greater chance of being relevant to your target audience. So if you want higher open rates, segment more – break your big list into smaller lists and modify your creative or at least your subject line to better reflect your audience. For example, if you are sending a conference promotion to your entire list your subject line might read, “Keynotes and Workshops Announced for the Annual Meeting.” But if you are sending the same message to a segment of people who attending the Marketing Track sessions last year you might switch the subject line to something that will get their attention better, like “ABC Company CMO To Keynote On Mobile Marketing at Annual Meeting.” The rest of the message can be the same, but you’ve used the subject line to telegraph the content a particular segment will find most appealing.

3. Reap Additional Segmenting Benefits: When you segment, you are not only able to use more targeted subject lines; you also end up sending more messages, and generating more data points about – generally – what aspects of a subject line boost performance to you. So by increasing your segmenting in Step 2 (above), you’re boosting the learning you can extract from Step 1 (above above). Improve your performance by getting smarter, by improving your performance, by getting smarter.

4. Experiment with the Unexpected: Now that you’re looking for how differences in your subject lines impact open rate, make them easier to spot with bigger changes. Try some subject lines that are clear departures from your usual practice. Use a 3-word subject line, change your tone, remove a regular prefix like “Newsletter”. The more variation you can include the better, because only by doing something different can you expect your results to change.

Posted in Analytics, Segmenting and Targeting, Tips | Comments Off

Emailioration Monday, 6-25-12: Create (and Distribute) a Monthly Email Report

Monday, June 25th, 2012

A monthly overview report of your email activity and metrics won’t make your next message perform any better, but it does improve your program in a few other ways:

1. Compiling a reports are the best way to remind yourself to watch trends. Your open or click rate on your last newsletter is meaningless without context. Reports that you compile and distribute compel you to analyze your performance data over time, which is the best way to keep your thumb on its pulse.

2. Distributing the report includes more people at your organization as stakeholders. In most organizations, every single business and product relies on email in some way. Sharing its successes helps ensure the channel gets the credit it deserves, and being clear about the challenges you face in email can help secure the resources you (and the other stakeholders) need to keep moving your business forward.

 

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Each week on “Emailioration Monday”  we spotlight a single tactic you can implement this week in order to improve your email marketing. Share tips of your own on Twitter at #Emailioration, and see the full collection of Emailioration tips here.

Posted in Analytics, Emailioration, Tips | Comments Off

Using Google Goals for Conversion Tracking

Friday, June 8th, 2012

Very soon we will be launching Conversion Tracking with Google Goals, which allows you to integrate the Goals you set within Google Analytics into your Real Magnet application. This allows you to see which messages – across email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – are responsible for any of the conversions you track, and even roll up the revenue per message so you know exactly how much this email or that tweet is really worth.

Normally when we hear “conversion tracking” we think of e-commerce, conference registrations, subscriptions or other online sales. But Google Goals goes beyond sales and allows you to measure almost any other activity on your website. Which means that the Real Magnet integration with Google Goals allows you to attribute almost any activity on your website to the exact message that prompted it.

Here are a few of the visitor behaviors you can track back to the channel and message level through Conversion Tracking with Google Goals:

Completion of an Action: On many sites, every conversion (whether it is a subscription to your email list, a request for a product demo, a purchase or registration) is concluded with a “Thanks for doing that” page. Google Goals allows you to use the specific URL from that page to signify the completion of the action that preceded it. Every time someone hits that page, you know what action they just took. (And now you’ll know what email or Tweet started it all.)

Google also introduced what it calls Event tracking last year. An Event could be the download of a specific white paper, or watching a product demo video for at least two minutes. Event tracking is useful for those activities you want your website visitors to take, but which may not have a specific URL associated with completion.

Site Engagement: You can also use Google Goals to measure the number of people who meet certain engagement criteria, such as viewing 5 or more pages in a visit, or spending at least 3 minutes on the site. Engagement trends can provide a lot of insight into the quality of your visitors. For example, you may find through Social Magnet that your Facebook posts are bringing in twice as much traffic as LinkedIn, but that your visitors from LinkedIn are far more likely to spend a meaningful amount of time on the site. Conversion Tracking with Google Goals allows you to see where your quality – as well as your quantity – is coming from.

Content Consumption: If you are promoting a new product, you may be particularly interested in all the activity on the page that promotes it. Conversion Tracking with Google Goals lets you turn that product page (or any page on your site) into a Goal, so you can see which messages result in the most visits to it. Note that with Google Goals the visit to the page does not have to be the first thing your audience does. Someone could follow a link on Facebook to your homepage, see a house ad to your featured product and then reach the page that way – that conversion would be attributed to Facebook (as it should be).

You can also track a “conversion” to an entire product category. For example, you could set up a Google Goal to measure the number of times any of your visitors reach any page in your blog, or view any of the offerings in your “Services” category, or read any of the pages in your “Case Studies” section. The system is very flexible, which makes it extremely powerful. All you need to do is take about 3 minutes to set up each goal that is important to you to measure – all the way back to the messages that drive your most strategically important website activities.

If you do not yet have Google Analytics, now is a great time to create an account (it’s free). If you do have it set up already, here’s a tutorial for creating Google Goals so you can get the most out of Real Magnet’s Conversion Tracking with Google Goals when it launches.

Posted in Analytics, Channel Attribution, Email+Social | Comments Off

3 Ways to Tell if Your Email Copy Works

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

In order for your email program to be effective, it needs to fire on all cylinders: deliverability, targeting, relevance and creative. If any of those don’t work well, your email’s results will also sputter. For example, the most cleverly crafted offer can only persuade the owners of the inboxes it reaches. Similarly, there is little benefit to 100% deliverability to an audience that simply does not want what you’re selling.

Today I’m going to focus on creative, or rather, one aspect of creative – copy. You can find plenty of recommendations out there on the interwebs for how to write strong, scintillating and even irresistible email copy, but with so many aspects to your email program it makes sense to identify the areas that are most in need of improvement and work on those first. Your copy may be fine – even great – in which case you should work on tuning up the cylinders that aren’t running as smoothly.

Here are some ways to figure out if your email copy is driving your email program forward, or riding the brakes:

Click-to-Open Rate: Your click rate is the number of Clicks on links in your messages divided by the number of people to whom the message was Delivered (not sent). It is a useful metric for your message’s macro-performance, though it tells an incomplete story on how effective your copy is. The reason is that the only people who can click on your message are those who read it. Many of those to whom it was delivered – and who therefore figure into the message’s click rate – do not read it. To better measure the effectiveness of your creative – and in particular your copy – calculate your click-to-open rate by dividing the number of Clicks into your total number of Opens instead.

For example, let’s say on Week 1 you have 10,000 messages delivered, an open rate of 25% (or 2500 people) and 500 clicks. Your click rate is 500/10,000, or 5%. Your click-to-open rate is 500 clicks divided by your 2500 opens, or 20%. That is, 20% of the people who read your email were moved enough by your copy to actually click on a link. (We’re assuming that “opened” is the same as “read” which is not entirely true, but necessary for any sort of insight from metrics.) Is a 20% click-to-open rate good? Like any metric, it depends – principally on context. How well does it stack up to the following week?

On Week 2 you again deliver 10,000 messages but your subject line bombs and you only get an open rate of 15% (1500 people). Your clicks are down also, to 400. This gives you a click rate of 4%. But your click-to-open is 400/1500, or 27% – 7 points higher than Week 1. So even though your click rate was lower on Week 2, your higher click-to-open rate suggests that your copy did a better job moving your readers to action. If you hadn’t chundered the subject line, you would have had even more readers taking advantage of your expertly-crafted prose.

Click-view Tracking: On every Track Message page for email you will see in the right hand sidebar a thumbnail image of the message. Click on it to open Click-view Tracking, a full size version of the message with tags on every link indicating the number of clicks each link received. It works as a sort of heat map, showing where in the message people clicked, and giving you some insight into the blocks or lines of copy that were the most effective.

In addition to showing you the sections of copy that work best, seeing how your clicks are distributed across the message is very useful. If you have a sidebar and many clicks are there instead of the body copy, it could mean your body copy is either not particularly interesting, or that you have a design problem that pushes your readers’ eyes away from the section you want to hold their attention. If you see a lot of clicks at the bottom of your message, chalk one up in the win column. This means your copy was interesting enough to hold their attention all the way through the message.

Replies: The sad irony about email is that despite its billing as a 1-to-1 communications channel, marketers have done a superb job conditioning subscribers to regard it as the do-not-reply channel, regardless of what email address is in the sender field. So when your messages actually do get a direct reply from subscribers, it is usually an indication that they have been extraordinarily engaged by the copy. This clue is more anecdotal than the other two listed here, owing to the statistically insignificant number of replies. To change that, add a line in your footer or even a PS that reads, “If you have any questions or comments, visit our Contact us page here or simply reply to this email – we’re listening.” By telling your subscribers explicitly that email is NOT a do-not-reply channel for you, you’re inviting them to provide the sort of feedback that can dramatically improve first your perspective and then your copy.

Posted in Analytics, Copywriting | 1 Comment »

3 Ways to Make Email a Means and an End

Friday, May 11th, 2012

I’ve said before that the hardest thing about marketing is that you’re never finished. Your brand will always benefit from one more blog post, a new strategic partnership, a little extra thought on the copy in that collateral piece, a couple new search keywords to test, one more tweet of 140 cleverly crafted characters. It is very easy for the practice of marketing to devolve from the pursuit of building the strongest and most differentiated brands to just getting all marketing’s many tasks done.

In my experience, this phenomenon exists commonly within email marketing. Many of the marketers I know are responsible for 50%, 75% or even 100% of their company’s entire email program, yet it is only 10% of their job. The rest of the time is split between everything from social media to sales support, from public relations to strategic relationships. Fifteen years ago when I got started in email, it was more than a marketing channel we could use to drive sales and other activity. It was a source of customer insight, as exciting because of what it told us about consumer behavior as it was for how much smarter it was making us as marketers. Email throws off so much eye-opening and actionable data, it contributes as much marketers’ human capital as it does to marketing ROI. All we have to do is be really selfish and learn as much as we can from what email is teaching us, every time we send a message.

Am I wrong in perceiving that this has changed since 1997, and that change has accelerated in the past few years? Whereas email marketing used to be a means of becoming really smart about your audience (and marketing in general), email is more commonly viewed an end – one of the channels marketers need to tick off in their weekly communications to do list. This is understandable, given all the tasks and channels marketers must now juggle, particularly in light of lower budgets, smaller staffs and raised objectives. Getting smart is the nice-to-have, but getting it done is need-to-have.

While I empathize with marketers’ shift in priorities, I nevertheless believe that marketing’s true function is not to drive results today, but to build programs and accumulate institutional knowledge that will continue to drive results for many years to come. Marketers should not just be giving their companies a fish, or even teaching them to fish. Rather, we should be building reefs that attract enough fish to sustain our brands in perpetuity.

The good news is that getting smart and getting it done are not mutually exclusive. Here are three things you can do to speed up your email composition and increase its effectiveness, and which make you smarter at the same time:

1. Look at your last message’s analytics right before you send the next one. Most marketers look at analytics within the first 24 hours of sending a message, but knowing what worked (and didn’t) is more effective when you’re about to start working on the next message. This practice can also help with message composition, as knowing what content was effective last time can make the next message easier to write.

2. Find commonalities in effective subject lines. Include the phrase “subject line” in any question to an email expert, and somewhere in their response will be the phrase “A/B testing.” A/B testing is great – it is often insightful and lifts results. But it is an extra step, and extra steps require time that is often at a premium. Test when you can, and when you can’t spend 3 minutes looking at a report of your Highest Open Rate Subject Lines over the past 3, 6 or 12 months. It is less scientific, but you may find some commonalities among the subject lines that work well. (Then re-sort the table to show the real duds so you know what to avoid.) You may find that 6 of your top 10 include a company name or person’s name. Are 4 of the top 7 questions? Wouldn’t it be exciting to learn that exclamation points work! Or four word subjects. Having a suggestion of what works makes you smarter about your program, and helps you write today’s subject line (which for many emails is half the work, and most of the impact).

3. Scrutinize unsubscribes. Just as examining subject line trends gives you examples, taking note of which messages drive unsubscribes provides you with warnings. Before you write your next message, run the Messages With Highest Unsubscribe Rate report over the past 3, 6 or 12 months depending on your email volume. Look at the messages with highest unsubscribe rates, particularly if they are outliers with an unsub rate of .1% or more higher than your average. The principal reasons that people unsubscribe from email is because the messages are too frequent, or have become too boring. Look for evidence of either in your greatest offending messages. This makes creating your emails easier because knowing what not to write is as valuable as knowing what kind of content should go in an email.

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