Archive for the ‘Data Points and Benchmarks’ Category

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 Most Staggering Statistics of 2012

Friday, December 28th, 2012

All modern marketing is defined by numbers, with none more quantitatively organized than email. It is only fitting then to take a look back at some of the most remarkable numbers generated by and associated with email marketing over the past year. The data points below shed a bright light on the effectiveness of the email channel in 2012, as well as the challenges we email marketers face in 2013.

Here are email’s most staggering statistics of 2012:

1. 70% of messages marked as SPAM are legitimate marketing emails.
Consumers do not differentiate between “I never asked for this” and “This bores me – make it go away,” and are using the spam button interchangeably with the unsubscribe button. You can’t blame them really. Inbox overload is reaching a fever pitch and marketers are making the unsubscribe process more challenging, either by camouflaging the link in the footer or entreating subscribers to stick around on the unsubscribe page. For marketers, this means that the legal definition of spam is largely irrelevant and has been displaced by a consumer call for (much) greater relevancy.

2. There are more opens on mobile devices than either web-based or desktop clients.
Mobile email reached an inflection point this year, with more opens occurring on mobile devices (37%) than either  desktop clients like MS Outlook (33%) or web-based email like Gmail or Yahoo (30%). In fact, more emails are opened on the iPhone than in any other client. Mobile should not just be an afterthought in your email program; we’re at the point where we need to lead with mobile. Design, copy length, even calls-to-action should all be organized around a highly mobile audience.

3. Most of the $690 million raised by the Obama campaign was generated by email.
The Obama campaign’s use of email in its fundraising and mobilization initiatives was groundbreaking. Unprecedented big data integration and marketing automation were supplemented by good old-fashioned email best practices, taken to a new order. Instead of A/B testing a couple of subject lines, the campaign would routinely test 12, 15 or 18 subject lines, an exercise which lifted results by over a million dollars per message. Campaign directors revealed that most of the $690 million raised was directly attributable to email. Obama may have been named the victor, but it’s clear that email won the presidency.

4. Email generates $39.40 in sales for every $1 spent.
The Direct Marketing Association tracks ROI across channels annually, and calculated that in 2012 email earns brands almost $40 for every dollar spent. That is down a few dollars from last year, but is still steps above other channels: search came in at $22.38, online ads at $19.70 and social media had about 1/3 the ROI of email at $12.90 for every dollar spent. In 2011, brands worked hard to find ways for their email program to support their social channels. In 2013, I think we’ll see the opposite trend, with marketers trying to lure as many people as possible into email with its higher ROI.

5. 60% of holiday shoppers visited a physical store because of email.
We all knew about email’s superb online ROI even before reading stat #4 above. What is less frequently quantified however, is the impact that email has on offline purchases. A study that came out during the holiday season found that 60% of holiday shoppers went into a brick-and-mortar store as a result of an email they received. Social media drove people to stores only 1/3 as often, comparable to the ROI ratio above in #4 as well. What this means is that the call-to-action in an email can be more expansive than “click here, buy now!” Emails can create a brand impression that lasts longer than an online session and can drive action days in advance.

6. 1 in 5 messages never make it to the inbox.
When we look at deliverability, we might see a 98% delivery rate and assume that all but 2% of our messages reached the inbox. Actually, what that number means is that all but 2% were accepted by the email administrator or ISP and passed along to the subscriber. But as we all know from seeing messages pile up in our own junk mail folders or being filtered off to some other email purgatory, getting the nod from the ISP and landing in the actual inbox are not the same thing. Actual Inbox Placement Rates declined this year, from 85% to  82% according to Return Path. That means that almost a fifth of the people you think of as your audience never even see your emails. There are a couple of key takeaways from this statistic: 1) Keep growing your list, because the size of your effective audience is shrinking every year; 2) lift relevancy, anticipation and engagement so your messages are less likely to be filtered off on their way to the inbox.

7. 91% check email daily.
Email remains the essential digital communications channel for most people, with 91% of us checking our inboxes every day. However the role that email plays in personal communications is evolving. A 21% drop in personal emails is attributable largely to mobile and social. I don’t think this makes email any more relevant to marketers, however. Even if people switch ALL their personal communication to other channels and reserve email just for commercial messages and business, that just means that we as marketers are only competing with other marketers for attention, not with spouses and book club members and poker night buddies. Less clutter and personal distraction could actually boost the effectiveness of marketing emails.

8. Several gazillions of dollars invested in email company venture capital and acquisitions.
That may not be the exact figure, but the M&A and VC activity in the email sector was somewhere between healthy and remarkable. Email companies acquired social dashboards to evolve into digital messaging firms; technology companies bought email platforms to more deeply integrate data and communications; new email companies emerged with sizable VC backing; and existing companies involved in email began taking steps towards the public markets. There is more optimism about the future of email as a marketing channel today than I have ever seen.

So that is the email year that was. Happy New Year to you. May you keep your subscribers engaged in 2013.

 

 

 

Posted in Data Points and Benchmarks, Industry News | 2 Comments »

Learning What to Learn from Email + Social

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

I had a boss once who introduced me to the phrase, “in position to be in position.” He would use it to mean we had made enough headway on an initiative to almost be ready to see some results. It would be nice if all initiatives in business worked like a light switch, and you could just switch them on and they’d go. The reality though is that most initiatives – whether they’re a product launch or a marketing promotion or a new business partnership – have a discovery period that you enter with a hypothesis, but one you should be prepared to modify if your initial assumptions don’t bear out. In my experience, I’ve found myself “in position to be in position” after this period, where I have some conviction in my hypotheses and can start to execute on the strategy.

Now that we’ve started using and testing Social Magnet, we’re in position to be in position to learn a lot about email + social. Combining email and social in the ways Social Magnet allows is all new, and I don’t yet know what we’ll learn. In fact, we’re in the stage of learning what we’ll be able to learn – another version of being in position to be in position. Here are some of the assumptions we have going into this process, what we’re testing, and what we hope to learn:

Impact of social media on email results: One of our assumptions is that there is a lot of crossover between the email and social audiences of many companies, particularly in the B-to-B space. If that’s the case, then messaging in all channels increases frequency among the people who are attentive in all channels. So what happens when the same message is promoted across email and social? Will social messages lift email results from the added frequency? Or will the results from social cannibalize the results from email if they reach the audience first? We ran a test earlier this week promoting a webinar to see. We ran an A/B test of the email list, mailing to the first half before we promoted the same link on Facebook and Twitter, and then mailing to the other half after the social messaging. We saw a difference, but not one that was statistically relevant. Not yet anyway – if we see the same small difference over the next 4 or 5 tests, we might be onto something. Or we might have to revise our assumptions. Or our results may change as our list and audience sizes change (our email list is significantly larger than our social audience currently). As you can imagine, there are a ton of variables that can’t be isolated for a perfect testing environment. So for now, we’re not testing our results as much as testing our tests.

Impact of email on social media results: Social Magnet allows us to measure the number of clicks and (if we’re using Real Magnet’s events module for registrations) even conversions that come from all of our channels. Just as social messaging may impact email’s results, it’s equally likely that people who see something in their inbox may be more inclined to act on a message from the same brand on Facebook or Twitter. It’s plausible, at least. So we’re looking at ways to test that, and see if we can identify some situations where email messages that may not drive inbox engagement still lift results measurably in other channels. Intuitively, it makes sense. It’s only now that we’ve had a tool to put some serious thought into how to measure it.

Performance of different message types by channel: Like most marketers, we promote everything in all our channels. If something goes onto the blog, it may also show up in an email newsletter, on Facebook, Twitter and in LinkedIn. Some of what we do I’d classify as informational – like this blog, for example, or Tuesday’s blog about Subject Lines, or Chris’ blog earlier this week about Deliverability Numbers. Other messages are promotional or direct response, like a webinar registration reminder or a whitepaper download for lead generation. In Social Magnet, you can categorize any message – email, Twitter, Facebook and soon LinkedIn. It works very similar to a blog, where you determine what content categories you would like to group messages within, and then simply select one when you publish your message. We currently have a number of informational message categories, including Blogs (where we measure how much lift our own blogs get from our social channels), Articles (similar to Blogs, but measuring the clicks to articles we publish or are quoted in such as MediaPost and Mobile Marketer), Images (used to measure the pickup of any kind of images we post, principally socially) and Pass-Along (where we group any social messages that pass along links to articles that have nothing to do with us, but which we find interesting or influential enough to share). We have another category for Webinars on the promotional side, and one more for Newsletters. Once we have enough data, we might have some insight about which channels are best for different message types. It could be some highly actionable learning, as marketers could then fine-tune their messaging by content, improving targeting by channel while at the same time reducing clutter by limiting messages to the channel they perform best in.

You’ll notice I haven’t once said “best practices” in this whole piece. My hypothesis does not allow for them. I don’t expect to find any universal truths about combining email and social, and fully expect that what I learn is only partly applicable to other marketers. Instead, what I hope to learn – and share – is the process by which we’re discovering what works for us. The findings may not be replicable from one company to the next, but learning what you can learn from email and social is something that we can all do.

Posted in Data Points and Benchmarks, Email+Social | Comments Off

Email Deliverability Numbers from 2011

Friday, January 20th, 2012

I have to admit, I was really impressed with the figures in the article “Internet 2011 in numbers” (http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/01/17/internet-2011-in-numbers/).  Of course, I paid close attention to the email numbers, but the other trends they discuss in mobile, social media, and domain names were also fascinating. Here’s the list that caught my attention:

  • 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
  • 27.6% – Microsoft Outlook was the most popular email client.
  • 19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.
  • 112 – Number of emails sent and received per day by the average corporate user.
  • 71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).
  • 360 million – Total number of Hotmail users (largest email service in the world).
  • $44.25 – The estimated return on $1 invested in email marketing in 2011.
  • 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.
  • 0.39% – Percentage of email that was malicious (November 2011).

I’m not going to go into all the numbers and trends, but some of the items caught my eye and I wanted to dig deeper into them. Symantec reports that in November 2011, spam accounted for almost 71% of email traffic (down 3.7% from October 2011). If you couple that with the article’s number of 19% of spam emails are delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters, spam can cause companies a lot of money in storage and lost productivity. Email marketers need to continue delivering relevant content to engaged subscribers to get into their subscriber’s inbox. I would also venture to take that a step further and make sure that email marketers are paying attention to their IP and domain reputation to make sure that they stay out of these email filters.

I also found it noteworthy to mention that the article stated Hotmail was the largest email service in the world with over 360 million users. Hotmail (which also includes msn.com and live.com domains) has come a long way in the past 15 years.  With the new “Sweep” feature, SkyDrive integration, and ActiveViews, I can see why Hotmail is growing. As someone in the deliverability space, I use Hotmail’s Smart Network Data Services portal (https://postmaster.live.com/snds/) on a daily basis to keep track of how my customers are performing at the Microsoft domains. The tools that Microsoft provides to the email world has made a difference in many customer conference calls concerning email deliverability.

The last point that I want to mention is the article states that there are 3.146 billion email accounts worldwide. That is an astonishing figure to me considering the first email was sent almost 40 years ago! I have seen figures where that number is expected to grow over 4 billion by 2015. As an email marketer, it is so important to remember that your list hygiene and data security practices are high priority. Continually segmenting your list and removing those inactive accounts will help with your email delivery.

Who says that email is dying?  Stay relevant, stay engaged, and get delivered!

Posted in Data Points and Benchmarks, Deliverability | Comments Off