Spring is a delightful time of year. Everything starts to bloom and the sun comes out to warm us up. Unfortunately, when the sun shines in your home or car or office, it also illuminates all the clutter and dust that has accumulated over the winter! Once you see the dirt in that bright spring sun, you have to do something about it.
During the flurry of holiday promotions your email marketing lists can hide a lot of clutter and “dirty data,” that can result in some serious consequences, like reduced deliverability and effectiveness of your email marketing program.
I am sure you track how many emails were sent, how many customers opened the email, how many bounced, and how many unsubscribed. Hopefully you are maintaining your lists by ensuring your email solution provider removes bad addresses and complaints.
As you spring clean your lists, this is also a good time to refresh your email marketing metrics to improve overall ROI.
It is becoming clear that email marketers need to look deeper into the way their emails are being used with the help of the rich world of analytics. Use this spring cleaning time to measure your campaign’s success to:
Improve your deliverability rates. Maintaining your email list will keep you out of spam traps and on Internet service providers’ black lists.
Help you diversify your marketing efforts. Exploring these analytics will get you out into the world, so to speak, to see what channels work best and what other businesses are doing.
See room for improvement. I have said many times before that it is so important to test different types of campaigns.
Improve email monetization. Measuring your success in monetary terms will show very clearly if your efforts are on the right track.
Top metrics email marketers should be tracking include:
Click through rate: A mainstay of email marketing metrics, click-through-rates help you understand how many users click on links to visit your website to see your offer will help you determine if you presented a compelling enough call to action. If you are using an email marketing service or auto-responder, click-through rate should be one of the pieces of data they collect for you.
Conversion rate: You don’t need complex analytics to measure how many people are buying what you are selling. But it is important to keep track of how many people did the action you planned in response to your campaign. If you are not getting the conversion rate you expected, then it is time to rethink your campaign.
Social Networking: Businesses have been made (or unmade) by social media. Tracking how many of your subscribers “like” your Facebook page or follow your Tweets can give you yet another indicator of the success of your email. Be sure to have social media sharing buttons in your emails.
Complaint Rate: The number of subscribers that labeled your message as spam is important to track and should be kept under 0.2%. Keeping your unsubscribe link in plain sight will help reduce a user’s frustration that often leads to hitting the spam button.
Forward Rate: Are people sharing your email with others? Are you asking them to? Have you written something that is compelling enough to share?
Churn Rate: After you remove unsubscribes, complaints, and hard bounces, you should keep track of your list’s growth rate. Losing 25% of your subscribers per year – a churn rate of 25% – is average. Hopefully, you will have added at least 25% of new subscribers to your list to make up for the loss.
Time on Site: A more advanced metric, how much time a user spends on your website after clicking through is helpful to know. Every website can use a makeover and if users aren’t spending much time there, maybe it is time to freshen it up.
How Your Email is Viewed: Knowing whether your email is viewed in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! or on a laptop, desktop or mobile device will help you to be sure your mailing can be successfully viewed on any platform, as well as provides information about your subscriber’s habits and preferences.
Advanced Analytics: Predictive Marketing is a whole new field of campaign analysis has arisen because of all the data now available. For example, Anomaly Analysis looks at all the elements of your campaign and digital marketing that you track such as website visits, email signups, whether the visitor found what they are looking for, what products they viewed, what they found and couldn’t find, and revenue.
Customer Propensity Scoring predicts each visitor’s likelihood of completing an action in the future. You can see how likely it will be for a visitor to convert. Lift and gains metrics can tell you how powerful a campaign will be before you execute it.
With some study and thought, you could make a routine of mining the data you need to make your campaigns more engaging and successful. It’s not as complicated as it might seem and I think you will see it is well worth the effort.
Spring brings new growth out in the world and it can bring new growth to your business as well. Happy Spring!
Alyssa Nahatis, is the Director of Deliverability at Adobe Campaign