It’s a new year, and with it come the inevitable pressures of resolutions. Many resolutions are unsuccessful because they require a fundamental change in behavior: “Exercise more,” or “Find more time to spend with friends,” or “Be nicer to my in-laws.” As an email marketer, you already know that the quickest route to success is not through a vague desire to improve, but through the implementation of processes. For example, if you want to make sure your messages render cleanly on a mobile device, you add an address to your test list that you can read on your iPhone.

For your email program then, mere resolutions are not as likely to drive the improvement you want as much as a few new processes. Here are three that you can proactively add to your program now, which will pay year-long dividends like no resolution ever has:

1. Identify up to 3 Objectives for the coming year. These may actually sound a bit like resolutions, but don’t worry – they’re just the first part of the processes you’ll build around them (see #2 below). Think of the major improvements in your program you’d like to achieve this year. Maybe you need to improve deliverability, or lower your unsubscribe rate. Growing your subscriber base, driving greater readership of your newsletters or other messages, or maintaining the same results but with fewer resources are all candidates for this list. Depending on your current resources, business needs and ambition, you might choose a single objective to focus on. Or you could choose more, though I don’t recommend more than three. Trying to get better at everything all at once can diffuse focus, and result in only marginal improvements. Better to crush it in a small number of areas than to inch forward everywhere.

2. Customize your Dashboard to track the metrics relevant to your objectives. You can track almost any aspect of your email program through the Dashboard in MagnetMail. And it’s highly customizable, allowing you to zero in on exactly what’s important. Instead of using the dashboard as a quick snapshot of your email business (which is what its default settings provide), tailor it to give you an ongoing progress report on what you’ve decided is important this year. For example, if one of your objectives is to lower your unsubscribe rate, load up your dashboard with unsubscribe metrics: track your unsubscribe rate, along with the messages with the highest unsubscribe rate, and the groups with the highest unsubscribe rate. (If you’re not sure which metrics to watch for your objectives, drop me a note – I’ll be happy to help.) This way, every time you launch MagnetMail and click over to your dashboard, you’re tracking your progress against your year-long objective. And you’re also ensuring that that objective stays top of mind.

3. Include your objective-measuring-metrics in your regular reporting. The precursor to this step is the regular reporting itself. If you are not already circulating a monthly or even weekly report on the topline of your email program, 2011 is the year to start. Yes, it is some additional work. But you can minimize the impact by creating a spreadsheet at the beginning of the year with the 2011 weekly or monthly reporting dates already mapped out. Select the metrics that a) communicate the most salient points about your email program, and b) are the easiest to collect and communicate. “Number of messages sent” is much easier to communicate on a report than “top open rate by domains.” Pick up some of the metrics from your tailored dashboard to include, so that you’re not just tracking success against your objectives – you are opening the progress up for discussion every time you circulate the report. Like the dashboard, this keeps your eye on the prize all year long. Even better than the dashboard, regular reporting allows you to continue to communicate the impact email has on your organization’s goals. In an era of cutbacks, a little internal marketing goes a long way towards securing budget and resources for next year.

Share this article

What is the purpose of email marketing? To create awareness? Build interest? Generate purchase intent and drive transactions? Engender loyalty?

Yes. No matter what stage in the customer lifecycle you are focused on, email marketing can help. What’s more, there are email metrics you can examine to measure how effective your messaging is at achieving each of these objectives:

Awareness: Normally we think of email as a tool for communicating with existing customers and subscribers, and not one to create awareness. But email is such a powerful word-of-mouth tool that it is very useful at helping a company reach new prospects. Pay particular attention to your Forward-to-a-Friend and Share-with-your-Network (SWYN) metrics when you track emails. These metrics will allow you to see how much sharing is occurring. Look also at the comparison of Unique Clicks to Gross Clicks. Gross Clicks includes all the clicks on links within the email, including duplicate clicks on the same email within a message. Some of these clicks will certainly be the recipient clicking a link within a message more than once, but these could also include clicks from recipients of a forwarded email message. Clicks on the unique URLs within the links will be credited back to the original subscriber, even if it is a colleague who did the clicking.

Interest: A high Open Rate is normally a sign of interest, as it indicates your audience’s receptiveness to a message from your company. Naturally, Click-Through rate is another indication, and connotes an even greater interest. Use also the Click-View tracking available in MagnetMail, so locate visually where in the email the links are seeing the most attention. Normally links near the top of messages drive the most clicks, but if you have links all the way at the bottom that are also strong producers, this too is a sign of interest: your audience is engaged enough with your message to read clear through to the end.

Purchase Intent and Transactions: The best way to measure purchase intent from emails would be to attribute purchases or registrations to specific messages, which is possible by integrating Real Magnet with Google Analytics (talk to your Account Manager for details). But even without the integration you can use your email to measure types of behavior that are a proxy for purchase intent. For example, if you are using your email to promote an upcoming conference in Orlando and include a link to “Find the lowest Orlando Airfares here,” your subscribers who follow that link are likely strong candidates to attend the conference.

Loyalty: Retention and loyalty are email’s stock in trade. You already have a relationship with your subscribers and you use email to maintain and even build on their engagement with your company. Sometimes it is by pulling them into conferences and webinars or driving other transactions. Often it’s a softer touch, like a monthly newsletter or the delivery of a subscriber or member benefit. There are several ways of tracking how much loyalty you have actually engendered. One way is to use the Advanced Search in the Contacts module to identify a core group of loyal readers. Using this tool you can identify all of your subscribers who have opened or clicked all of the last 2, 3, 4 or 5 messages they have received. (You can also limit this search by specific groups.) Not every message includes a strong call-to-action so for most organizations I recommend searching by “Opened” rather than “Links” – it will yield more results and give you a better idea of how many (and who, exactly) of your subscribers are loyal readers. You can then move these loyal readers directly into a group of their own, if you’d like to target them with special messages designed to take better advantage of their engagement. Recipient Level Reporting allows you to customize searches further, allowing you to identify subscribers who opened or clicked on X of the last Y messages.

Share this article

Much of email marketing is organized around the click rate. We know that if our subscribers click on our emails, then the emails are doing their job of driving activity, registrations, readership and engagement.

But what if nobody clicks on our emails? Does that mean that the emails have failed? Not necessarily. Just because we don’t have evidence of engagement doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Engagement is like the loch monster, or UFOs, or God. A lack of irrefutable evidence that they exist is not the same thing as evidence that they do not exist.  You can’t disprove the existence of something.

Of course it is easier to believe our emails are working when we see the evidence laid out in front of us. But if we think of our experience as email consumers instead of marketers, we can at least find anecdotal evidence that the mere acts of receiving and reading can drive engagement, regardless of clicks.

Consider these scenarios, where emails may not be clicked, but the message contained within the email is still delivered:

Subscriptions in Stereo: A husband and wife both subscribe to a local daily discount service, such as LivingSocial or Groupon. Mrs. Subscriber is checking email on her iPhone at home in the morning and remarks to Mr. Subscriber, “Hey, do you want to try that new tapas place? We can get 50% off.” Mr. Subscriber loves tapas, so his wife buys the deal on the spot. Later that day, Mr. Subscriber sees the same email at his desk, which he reads to make a note of the address. Does he click? No. Is he engaged. Surely.

Meeting Multitasking: Your co-worker has taken to bringing his iPad into departmental meetings. “To take notes – my handwriting is atrocious,” he explains. But you know the conference room has wi-fi and you see him spending as much time in his Inbox as he does on his meeting notes. He’s adroit enough to toggle back and forth between the apps, but knows that if he clicks on a link within an email he’ll be discovered. He does manage to clean all the unreads out of his inbox, but fails to click-through when he might otherwise. Your email may have registered with him, but circumstances conspired to thwart the click.

Extreme Anticipation: It may be that your subscribers are so well attuned to your emails that they know which they can ignore because they expect a follow-up reminder. For example, an organization may have several different registration deadlines with discounts in advance of its annual meeting. The deadlines always fall on a Friday, and the organization sends out reminder emails on Monday of the deadline week, and again on Thursday, without fail. The meeting is highly anticipated and has many repeat attendees. As a consequence, many subscribers have learned the Monday-Thursday reminder schedule for the deadline emails, and know that Monday’s email can be read but not clicked, and that they’ll get a tickler on Thursday that they do intend to click through to register.

Understanding this helps combat metrics myopia – the condition where an emails entire value is summed up in a number visible in an analytics report. The impact of email is more complex than a single number can communicate. If your emails are not driving the clicks you would like, consider the above scenarios as explanations. But look also for other metrics that give some insight into whether or not the engagement exists regardless of the click-through: are people still attending your conferences? Is your unsubscribe rate low? Has your open rate held steady? Is your business growing? Your email may be contributing to engagement, but doing it subtly.

Share this article

Sports metaphors work for me. It’s winter and the Olympics are running so let’s use ice hockey. If you’re an ice hockey coach, your objective is to get the puck in your opponent’s net and keep it out of yours. In email terms, that’s roughly equivalent to driving transactions from click-throughs while avoiding unsubscribes and spam complaints. Focus too much on offense and you’re leaving the net unguarded. Too much defense and you’re not going to put up enough points.

But you don’t win when you score a goal. You win when the game is over and you’ve scored more goals. Or when the season is over and you’ve won more games. Or when your career is over and you can boast more winning seasons.

Here’s how winning coaches approach their profession. How much of this are you doing to give your email marketing the best chance of winning?

Line your shots up before shooting: My colleague Dave wrote about this last week – making sure you know what you want your emails to do before you write them. You don’t win just by shooting a lot – you win by putting a lot of shots on goal.

Watch the game video: Every coach studies video of his team’s performance to see what they did well and where they missed opportunities. It’s not for nostalgia; it’s for learning. The same approach to analytics is critical to email success. And we’re lucky – we’ve got much better data than game films to rely on. For each message you send, try to find something that worked really well, and something that needs improvement.

Design and practice new plays: If you’re comfortable with the basics or have hit a plateau with your results, maybe it’s time to roll out some new features. Add SWYN to your templates. Build a preferences center. Include a mobile channel in your messaging.

Study your competition: OK, that’s an unfortunate comparison, because your list isn’t really your competition. Rather, your rival is any unresponsiveness in your list. Defeat it by analyzing your list and weeding out names that haven’t opened or clicked on messages in the past few months. You may well find that you lose nothing in ROI, while boosting your overall engagement metrics.

Build a game plan for next week: How will you use everything you’ve learned since your last message? The more you can incorporate, the faster you’ll recognize some gains from the practice time you put in, and the more your skills will develop.

In most sports, 90% of success happens before the contest even starts. Email is no different. If you’re not getting the results you’d like, some dedicated practice sessions before the next game can go a long way towards putting you on a winning streak.

Share this article