Archive for the ‘ROI’ Category

Same Resources, Better Results: 5 Ways to Spur Your Email to More ROI

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

There is an abundance of articles all over Twitter, LinkedIn and the trade pubs’ sites about how to improve your email program. Already today in fact you have probably seen something on big data, marketing automation, triggered messages, mobile first design and guides to rich segmentation strategies. All of these work, if you have the resources to implement them. But what if you don’t work at a company with a dedicated email marketing team, and instead are the email marketing team, as well as the conference marketing team, collateral development team, social media team, communications strategy team and order more toner for the printer team? Surely there must be ways to improve email’s effectiveness without first altering the time-space continuum to add 8 more hours to each day.

In fact, there are ways to spur your email to greater ROI using the resources you already have. Here are 5 of them:

1. Find more subscribers.
Sending to a larger audience is the single most important way to squeeze more productivity out of the time you are already putting into email, as the time it takes you to create and send an email is the same whether you are mailing to 1,000 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers. Make sure you are pulling in new subscribers from every touch point – highly visible locations on your most popular website pages (not just buried on a “Subscribe here” page), on your brand’s Facebook timeline, and at point-of-sale or in-person venues like trade shows or meetings. Review also every place you are already collecting customer feedback and information, such as conference registrations, surveys, membership registration pages and customer service requests. You are requesting email addresses in all of these anyway; are you including an opt-in box so people can join your list in the process? And equally as important, are you remembering to import them directly into your list if these forms aren’t fully integrated? (You would be astonished at how often brands ask for permission, receive it, and then forget to add many would-be subscribers.)

2. Improved inbox placement.
Inbox placement is different from deliverability. Your delivery rate is the percentage of emails that make it through the ISP’s or email administrator’s gateway and are passed on to the subscriber. But many of these messages never make it to the inbox because of local spam filters, rules which siphon off messages to different areas, and inbox management applications. Knowing that your messages are not hitting the inbox and therefore not read right away is an advantage you can use. To encourage your subscribers to keep your messages in the A-List and mark them for inbox placement, try time-sensitive offers in your emails and then use your social channels to let people know they are coming to the inbox only. Many b-to-b brands and associations also have significant telephone contact with customers and members. Use these opportunities to educate subscribers about inbox placement and let them know the benefits of whitelisting your brand to ensure your messages land front and center. (I’ve even seen some brands use dedicated telemarketing efforts for this purpose, to great effect.)

3. Include more links.
Making it easier for your subscribers to click will naturally drive more clicks. This is especially important with the rise in mobile readership, where the small screen limits the visible message. Make sure you have a contextually relevant link at the top and the bottom of each section, and link images as well if you use them. Note that this recommendation is not necessarily to include more topics to choose from, only to make it easier to find and click on a link by adding one or two more for each call-to-action.

4. A/B test your subject lines.
I realize this one does take a little extra effort, but the lift can be so profound that it’s worth it. Start with 2 (or more) segments of your list that are large enough to yield meaningful results on open and click rate. How large that is is a function of your engagement metrics, but a good starting point is 1,000 in each segment. Send your test messages to each segment and then wait for the results to roll in, in order to identify which test won. Conventional wisdom says that most results come in within the first three hours, though the advent of inbox management applications and tactics is stretching that time frame out a bit. If possible, wait a full 24 hours before analyzing the results and declaring a winner. Then send the rest of your list the message with the winning subject line. Minimally, a list or segment of about 5,000 names is needed to derive a benefit from A/B testing. The bigger the list, the more lift you’ll enjoy from that extra 1%, 3% or even 10% in opens.

5. Increase mailing frequency.
You hear a lot about inbox clutter, and I certainly talk about it a lot. While it is true that some brands overmail (or at least create the perception in their subscribers that they do, even if it is not yet borne out in their metrics), there are also a surprising number of brands that are not mailing enough. If your brand’s engagement metrics are consistently strong, stepping up your frequency may give your program a nice lift. You don’t know at what point the demand peaks until you scale up the supply, so go ahead and try.

 

 

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Email and Social ROI: Improved Results and More of Them with Conversion Tracking

Friday, August 3rd, 2012

Over the last few days I have seen a number of articles cross the transom on the topic of conversions as a measure of ROI. Fast Company, for example, last week published one called “3 Steps to Measuring Your Company’s Social Media ROI” where the author cited Sales Conversions, Value of Increased Traffic and Depth of Engagement as the three different measures. All of these can be measured with Google Goals, which we have now integrated into Real Magnet’s analytics across email and social.

And just yesterday in CMO.com an infographic appeared with comparative conversion data across email, social and search (email was highest). To illustrate the relative ROI across channels, the info graphic presents data on average Add-to-Cart Rates, Conversion Rates and Page Views per Session across email, social and search. Like the three steps in the Fast Company article, these too can all be measured with Google Goals (which means you can see a running tally of these too, every time you fire up your Real Magnets analytics).

Here is one more: Forrester Analyst Robert Brosnan pointed out to Target Marketing that tracking and reporting email and social ROI not only results in more marketing resources added to the channel, but that it also makes customers happier:

While spending on display and search dwarfs email, mobile, and social, the return on investment (ROI) is flipped. And not only can marketers deliver much higher incremental revenue from shifting spend to this type of engagement media, they can also deliver on other corporate goals, such as improving customer experience and satisfaction.

Email marketers are quick to cite email’s ROI, but I think we could do a better job backing up our claims with hard data. The competition for marketing budgets continues to intensify and pointing out that email and social are inexpensive and have tremendous reach will ensure that they remain inexpensive (ie, marketers will not receive the resources they need to expand, enhance and improve these channels) while the reach becomes ever more tremendous (ie, management will expect ever improving results).

Instead, email marketers need to shift the conversation to measured ROI of these channels. Demonstrate that traffic from Twitter results in more visitors who view 6+ ad-filled pages on the site, that Facebook visitors are subscribing to your newsletters, or that 60% of your webinar registrations came from email and the result will be more resources thrown into these channels. Look at search marketing for an example. If you know that every $1 invested results in $3.50 in sales, you invest as many dollars as possible, right? We can now do the same thing with email and social, using ROI to propel these channels forward, instead of holding them back.

 

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Evaluating Email Through Return on Resources (ROR)

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

I spend half of my time thinking about email, and the other half thinking about social media. I probably spend a quarter of the time thinking about mobile as well, 30% on blogging, 20% on webinars and a good tenth of the time on other types of content marketing. Butmost of the time I’m focused exclusively on channel attribution and integration. It’s a wonder, then, that I was able to write a column for MediaPost at all, though no wonder that the topic I chose for this month was resource allocation. Dividing up the pie that is our time across all of the marketing channels we operate in is becoming increasingly complex. With email and social and other forms of content marketing, examining ROI is not enough, as the principal input is not money, but resources. So I propose that we use Return on Resources (ROR) to better measure each channel and ensure they get the attention they deserve.

Evaluating Email Through Return on Resources (ROR)
by Mike May
Published on 5-2-12 in MediaPost’s Email Insider

Return on investment (ROI) is the metric marketers most commonly use to compare ads, campaigns and even entire channels. ROI makes sense for evaluating marketing when the primary input is external spending: buying media, printing expense, postage, creative costs or sponsorship fees, for example.

Email, however, does not fit neatly into the same model. Sure, there is an expense associated with email, but the principal input into an email campaign — where your audience is earned over time and not bought (or rented) with a lump sum — is the amount of time and energy your company has devoted to it. Because the monetary “investment” denominator in email is comparatively low, using a strict ROI calculation will always allow it to shine. That’s fine with those of us in the email industry, as we always win the ROI contests. But it misrepresents what must actually be invested in email in order for it to perform: the internal resources that nurture and grow the program.

I’m sorry to be the one to blow the whistle on this ROI game email has been winning, but it’s high time we stopped looking at email in the context of ROI altogether. Now is the time to consider a return on resources metric. Am ROR measurement will better evaluate how relevant inputs affect results, which in turn can help ensure that email gets the resources it needs to perform at the highest level.

Here is why evaluating your email program through ROR can make your email program more effective and better understood:

Better absolute gauge of email’s return: Measuring marketing is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to anoint a winner, but to improve each channel. Email’s appeal is not its efficiency, which is what ROI measures. Rather, it is its effectiveness. ROR removes the emphasis from the direct expense and draws attention to what results email actually drives.

More accurate comparison to complementary channels: Email is not alone in benefiting from a ROR measurement. Social media, video, webinars, blogging and other forms of content marketing are similar to email in that the principal input is not money spent, but resources devoted. And in many organizations, the resources devoted to email are also involved in these other initiatives, so ROR helps organizations identify how much of the resource pie each should receive.

Renewed emphasis on the resources needed: I worked in the online advertising industry during its dark years. That industry had a very difficult time recovering once CPMs plummeted. Two things happened when the out-of-pocket expense (the “I” in ROI) for buying online media dropped: 1) ROI naturally increased, even when the actual return from lousy “Punch the Monkey!” ads was also dismal; and 2) Advertisers had a hard time justifying the need for better creative since the media expense was so low, and ROI appeared so high. As a result of the low expense and high ROI, advertisers took their eyes off the ball — not necessarily to have an impressive ROI, but to actually drive results from the channel.

I see the same thing happening in email, even today. Because it costs so little to send a few hundred thousand messages, many marketers do not put the necessary energy and resources into campaign planning, segmenting, content strategy or creative. Focusing on ROR reminds us that the real input in email is not what you pay your ESP, but the years you have spent gaining the permission to contact tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the first place.

Improved understanding of scale: Ultimately, marketing metrics of all kinds should drive some action. Analyze your search advertising, for example, and you may find that it has among the highest ROI of all your channels, and that increasing search spending is the best way of spending the extra 10% in your marketing budget next year.

Again, email is different. Only in the largest organizations can an increase of 10% actually be actionable. If the staff tending email and/or social channels is small (and it is commonly part of a single person, right?) any change to the “budget” simply translates into “you need to spend more time doing this.” Email suffers when email marketers are responsible for a lot more than email, so better evaluating the return on the time marketers put into email can help protect the channel’s claim to that time. Keeping the emphasis on the actual results is the only way to affect headcount (or reallocate other responsibilities) in a way to scale email aggressively, which will lift email’s results more than squeezing more blood from the stone in the cubicle by the kitchen.

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Measuring Email’s Shifting ROI: From Performance Metrics to Quantitative Return

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

MarketingSherpa released an interesting piece of research this week from its Email Marketing Benchmark Report. According to a survey of 2,735 CMOs across a range of industries, the leading factor in helping to identify and communicate the value of an email program is its quantitative financial ROI (65%). The second most popular response was post-click metrics (62%) followed by performance metrics such as open and click rate (56%). The same question asked in last year’s survey saw post-click metrics (73%) and performance metrics (69%) at the top, with financial ROI trailing in next (57%). Here is the full chart of results:

Click to enlarge.

Why the shift from performance to financial ROI? According to MarketingSherpa, email’s relative maturity compared to social media is responsible. Now that CMOs are using both email and social, it is natural to expect more accountability from the email program they have been relying on for a decade, relative to the social channel they’re just getting off the ground. Whereas performance metrics used to be sufficient for identifying email’s value, MarketingSherpa says that CMOs now look at click and open rates as a measure of program health, but not value.

Benchmarking your own company against this research can be an alarming experience. Quantifying financial value from a marketing channel is exceedingly complex, and even post-click metrics attributable by channel often take resources beyond many organizations’ reach. As a result, what is perceived as “mission-critical” data in some marketing departments is categorized closer to “nice to have” for more thinly staffed marketing departments.

Don’t despair just yet. In research, context is king. When evaluating data like this, the nature of the question is important. Specifically MarketingSherpa asked, “As CMO or senior marketing executive in your organization, how important are the following factors in helping you determine and communicate the value of email marketing programs?” It is unclear how each responding CMO interpreted the question. Some may have read it as, “Which of these do you use?” though others might have gone with, “Which of these would you find the most valuable?” I suspect there were many of the latter perspectives in there. It seems unlikely that the usage of post-click and performance metrics – which decreased Year-over-Year in the survey, has decreased from a year ago, though certainly possible that their perceived importance relative to financial ROI has dipped. I read this chart more as a popularity contest than a catalog of existing best practices.

The key takeaway from the research, however, remains the same: the drive for increased accountability is on. Marketing budgets for email and social are on the rise, but after a few lean years in marketing departments it’s clear that no new spending will go unscrutinized. The scalability and low cost of email and social promise significant ROI, but more than ever CMOs are pressed to deliver on, measure and communicate ROI – promised or otherwise. And now more than ever, a measure of success for a marketing professional – at any level or functional responsibility – will be the ability to measure and communicate the value of marketing channels, in order to justify marketing spend.

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