Exploring the Metrics of Email Marketing

Note: Folks…say hello to David Lindop from Setfire Media. He’s here with E-MoneyMarketing’s first ever guest post. Glad to have his input. And hope you guys enjoy his article on email marketing – Jag 

Email marketing gets a bad rep these days.

What has the potential to be a powerful customer retention and sales tool has been used and abused to the extent where it has to justify itself as legitimate communication the second a customer opens their inbox: guilty until proven innocent.

Learning how to better understand your email marketing campaign is the first step to making it work harder; delivering more positive reception, more sales, and of course, more revenue. There’s a slew of email marketing metrics and it’s vital you are confident in cutting through to the metrics that matter most, and how to use them to improve your email campaign performance.

Delivery Rate

Delivery Rate is most often derived from how many emails were originally sent out minus the number that were bounced back. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? However, it offers no further advice on whether the email was deleted immediately by a spam filter, or diverted into a spam or junk folder. It’s important to remember that email clients like Gmail have the ability to recognize and label familiar communications as spam without ever alerting either the sender or the recipient.

What can you learn from this?

· A percentage of all delivered email WILL end in a junk folder and you’ll never know about it.

· Thus there will never be an official unsubscription from the recipient because chances are they’re not even aware they have received anything from you.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the exact opposite of delivery rate, although it’s often split up into hard bounces and soft bounces. Bounces of the hard variety are being sent to an email address that doesn’t exist; like sending a letter to a completely fictional address. If the domain or recipient isn’t recognized, the email will be returned to the sender. Soft bounces can occur for a number of reasons such as when the recipient’s inbox is full. This doesn’t happen very often these days except in the cases of free services like Hotmail and Yahoo.

· Remove hard bounce addresses as soon as possible to reduce wasted budget, but don’t delete them from your records.

· You should be aiming to reduce your email marketing bounce rate to make your campaigns more effective overall.

Unsubscribe Rate

Many of the reasons why people unsubscribe from email marketing lists is down to how you got their email address in the first place. There are three general ways to procure email addresses:

Buying a list of emails – When you send your email communication out to a cold list of people who have never heard about you, be prepared for a significant unsubscribe rate.

Compiling a list from your previous customers – Unsubscribes from previous customers on your database can mean you are sending too many emails and none of them are of any particular interest to your recipient base. Unless you have some real news worthy of telling your customers or you have a significant offer that doesn’t insult them, I’d seriously reconsider if you need to send that particular email creative you’re working on.

Opt-in emails – An unsubscribe from these guys is far more telling. If they signed up in the first place then perhaps you are bombarding them too much, or they have received some unacceptable service from you recently.

· Use a form on your unsubscribe landing page to offer people the chance to tell you why they have decided to remove themselves from your marketing list. Be prepared for some cutting remarks.

· Find ways to top up your email base (your recipient list) to counter the effect of unsubscribes and provide the opportunity to engage a wider audience.

· Don’t treat low unsubscribes as a measure of recipient interest; use more active metrics like opens, clicks and conversions instead.

Open Rate

The Open Rate is a bit of a misleading metric… use it with care. It doesn’t show you how interested potential customers are in what you have to offer, and it’s certainly no indication they are a gentle nudge away from actually clicking through to your website.

Most email clients (Hotmail, Gmail, Thunderbird, Outlook etc.) display a snippet line which needs to be clicked on to load the full content of the email, which will usually contain a piece of tracking code or pixel image that allows the sender to get reports back. What this actually means is that the recipients email client displayed this code; nothing more, nothing less. However, as long as you understand this, it’s still the best indication we have of judging how many human readers actually opened the email.

· The open rate tracking can be activated without the user ever having read the email.

· Identify those customers who never open your emails and send them a completely different type of offer, something you’ve never tried before! It’s a great way to try out your ideas on an audience that won’t negatively affect your sales figures and you never know: you might just discover a way of reaching a new type of customer for your business.

· If you’re paying for your email marketing on a per email basis, and the above tip doesn’t work, delete these non-responders from your mailing list and reduce your budget.

Click-through Rate

Now we’re cooking! This metric starts to give us some solid insight into how interested the target audience is in your product or price (or story if you run an informational website). Industry sectors can experience wildly different click-through rates, ranging from an average of 57% in the restraurant sector to 5.7% in the automotive sector (source Harte-Hanks Postfuture Index™ for January-June 2006), and it’s often a sign of how saturated the email marketing arena is in your chosen industry, and how loyal customers are within that market.

Aim for the highest click-through rate as possible by including a clear and compelling call to action in your email communication; don’t trust the recipient to decide the next course of action. What constitutes a compelling call-to-action is down to your understanding of your audience and market but here are some examples from my experience:

· Buy 1 Get 1 Free Voucher Code – Ends at midnight!

· Enjoy 25% off your regular purchases – Click here to order before we run out of stock!

· Send this offer to your friends and earn a $5 gift voucer with one who signs up to our program.

· Call us for a free, no obligations chat on 0800 123 444 to discuss your policy

Notice, Grasshopper, how retail calls-to-action often rely on two elements to encourage email click through: an good offer and a compelling deadline. You can develop this even more by including personalisation to really connect with your customers on a individual level. If you employ these tactics, make sure your landing pages are ready to convert this traffic and deliver on your promises – otherwise your readers may feel conned and your unsubscribes will rocket.

Conversion Rate

The term conversion isn’t necessarily limited to securing a sale online. It can mean any goal that you define as a secured milestone of customer engagement: email signups, brochure downloads, calls in to the business, installed firefox addons… they’re all conversions to various industries. Most ecommerce businesses will consider straight up purchases as conversions, and email marketing is a proven way of boosting sales and revenue.

Conversion rate depends on many factors coming to together on your landing page to bring the customer to the point where they are willing to commit to a purchase:

Timing

8am on a Monday morning isn’t a great time to launch your email campaign. Similarly schools won’t respond outside of term time.

Pricing

Get this right and customers will forgive a lot of mistakes. Remember, email marketing is not the place to shout about your average pricing policy.

Relevance

Dear old Mrs. Ogden probably isn’t going to be interested in a 18-30 holiday to Ibiza. Match your message to your database for an instant conversion quick win.

Urgency

If you decide upon an arbitrary deadline for an offer or voucher code you must stick to it ruthlessly. The next time it happens people will know it’s for real.

Trustworthyness

You have literally seconds to convince your potential customer that you’re legitimate and credible. Red Comic Sans and premium call numbers are a definite no no.

Call-to-Action

Tell your customer what you want them to do next. People don’t like to think on the internet so give them a clear direction what to click, call or download.

—

David Lindop is a Search Specialist at Setfire Media, a leading digital marketing company who specialise in Adwords management, SEO, linkbait & social media marketing.

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[tags]E-MoneyMarketing, online marketing, linking, search engine optimization, SEO, email marketing, metrics, click through rate, response rate, conversion rate[/tags]

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I think because some greedy guys email marketing as been paying for all…thats not right!

soaress last blog post..Como descobrir password do Windows

You basically covered email marketing in its entirety. Plus, a lot of that stuff I didn’t know, so I got to learn a few things. Thanks!

i dont think email marketing is nearly effective as it once was… especially with so much spam mail nowadays. i guess we can thank those nigerian scam artists for a good junk of it :/
-Jack

too bad there are so many emailing spammers making an email marketing campaign that much more difficult.
-jay

The term conversion isn’t necessarily limited to securing a sale online. It can mean any goal that you define as a secured milestone of customer engagement: email signups, brochure downloads, calls in to the business, installed firefox addons… they’re all conversions to various industries. Most ecommerce businesses will consider straight up purchases as conversions, and email marketing is a proven way of boosting sales and revenue.

What you say is absolutely true. Basic understanding of the tactics and speedy delivery are the keys to success in this business.

Tracy

Tracys last blog post..1 Powerful Trick To Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Income

Now a days world is advancing at a very fast speed which increase the completion. Customers have many alternative, If you don’t deliver your product on time then they might shift to your competitors.

What has the potential to be a powerful customer retention and sales tool has been used and abused to the extent where it has to justify itself as legitimate communication the second a customer opens their inbox: guilty until proven innocent. Learning how to better understand your email marketing campaign is the first step to making it work harder; delivering more positive reception, more sales, and of course, more revenue. There’s a slew of email marketing metrics and it’s vital you are confident in cutting through to the metrics that matter most, and how to use them to improve your email campaign performance.

I actually know very little about email marketing, so I appreciate this entry. Thanks!

I think email marketing is not effective as before… there are so many spammers that they’re making email marketing more difficult…

Bruces last blog post..Low Traffic To Your Web Site?

Quick question, (also thank you for your article)

now i see big companies when they send emails, they send it as an image.. is this a good or bad thing?

Nice post. I found all the information on this post about email marketing which i wanted to know. I saved this post for future reference. Thanks for sharing lovely information with us. :)

Hi Jordans:

To send email is an image – to me – is not a good thing.

Why?

Some email software block images! That means some readers will not be able to read your email! And that defeats the purpose of sending out any email, when your reader can’t even reads it.

So…stick to text or normal html. I definitely won’t recommend the whole email as a single image.

@ Bruce:

For those that willingly opt in, and especially those that double opted in to your list, you shouldn’t have much problems. Because the key thing is that they have given you permission.

@ Nicole:

You are right about the conversion bit. It’s just a generic term.

As for sales, there is no doubt email marketing works. And it will continue to.

Jag

What a great post on the basics of email intelligence. As the CEO of Message Slinger, http://messageslinger.com, I give you and A+ for your content and messaging.

You address some really important terminology and the value of its understanding….keep the guest bloggers coming.

Sales Trainings last blog post..Book review: A quickie on a decent read, an apology, and another promise

@Karl:

Hey..it’s good to see you again. Message Slinger looks way cool. Very nice service you are offering there.

Accepting any JVs? =)

Cheers,
Jag

Inspite of the issues email marketing is one of the most effective forms of advertising available today. The role of traditional direct mail marketing is limited today and emil marketing seems to be the best way to get your message across to your intended audience. However email marketing should be used carefully. Never send unsolicited emails as it is no only illegal but you also risk a negative branding for your website.

web design companys last blog post..How Can a Small Company Maximise the Benefits of Internet

Thanks for all the comments guys, lots of great discussion going on there.

Jag is right about sending email marketing as images. I’ve seen some very effective image-based emails (I ran the email marketing at DSGi Business a couple of years ago). Just remember that if you’re going to use images in your email, do three things to minimise unsubscribes:

* Make use of the image ALT attributes, but don’t spam them.

* Ensure you offer a link to a plain text-only version. This can easily be hosted in a directory of your website and will take up hardly any file size.

* Give your customers the option to choose text-only as a preferred method of email.

Hi,

Now a days world is advancing at a very fast speed which increase the completion. Customers have many alternative, If you don’t deliver your product on time then they might shift to your competitors.

Joselyns last blog post..Cincinnati, Ohio

Instead of annoying people with sending them emails they don’t want to read, why not try to communicate with the visiting companies on your website?
Chances of success will be higher as they are already interested.
You just need to use a web service that reveals the company names of your website visitors.
Those companies you can email.

This is an interesting post. Allows me to know more about email marketing. Thanks for the useful information !

Email marketing is something I really need to take into consideration while running an ecommerce site. I believe it has the best conversion rate. I ‘ll take this info to the brain, thanks!

Ahh.. been looking for good views about email marketing, I found only a few helpful and free info such as this one.. Thanks for sharing us this info, Creating good landing pages is one of the biggest challenges that I’ve encountered… I don’t want to just create some junk pages ’cause I want to maximize my profits and finding good info like this really means a lot..

Thanks a bunch, will also add this to our web copy resource list..

Kudos!

You basically covered email marketing in its entirety. Plus, a lot of that stuff I didn’t know, so I got to learn a few things. Thanks!

Inspite of the issues email marketing is one of the most effective forms of advertising available today. The role of traditional direct mail marketing is limited today and emil marketing seems to be the best way to get your message across to your intended audience. However email marketing should be used carefully. Never send unsolicited emails as it is no only illegal but you also risk a negative branding for your website.

E-marketing is a type of business in this future and it is very useful to our upcoming guys and i accept all those things which you exploited in the above.so i wish you to give more and more tips to this world.

inspite of the issues email marketing is one of the most effective forms of advertising available today.i saved this post for future reference.However email marketing should be used carefully. Never send unsolicited emails as it is no only illegal but you also risk a negative branding for your website. Thanks for sharing a lovely information with us. :)