Key Data to measure your Email Marketing Campaign

What is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing Reports (2012) defines Email Marketing as the use of email in marketing communications. The term covers every email you send to a customer or potential customer. It is used to refer to:

·         Sending direct promotional emails to acquire new customers and persuade existing customers to purchase again.

·         Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship.

·         Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people.

Entrepreneur (2012) state that Email Marketing can help businesses keep in touch with customers and prospects. However there is a huge difference between simply adding people to your contact lists and running a savvy campaign that drives traffic to your company website and generating sales. 

Things to Measure

Hubspot (2011) claims that to assess your email marketing performance, you must conduct ongoing trend analysis of several key metrics. Organisations use their Email Service Provider (ESP) to gain information on the success of their campaigns.

Pamela Vaughan blogged the most important email metrics to measure and how they can be used to improve performance.

1.      Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient's inbox. This metric is used to uncover problems with your email list. There are two types of 'bounces' - Hard and Soft.  A Hard bounce is the result in an invalid, closed or non-existent email address. These should be removed from your email list as internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates as one of the key factors to determine an email sender's reputation, therefore make your organisation look like a spammer. A Soft bounce is one where there is a temporary problem, for example the recipients inbox is full or there is a problem with the server.

2.      Delivery Rate

This is the percentage of emails that are delivered to recipients' inboxes. This determines the success of an email campaign. Organisations should look for a delivery rate of 95% or higher. If a particular campaign has a lower than average delivery rate, it is worth examining the subject line and content of that message as some elements may have been flagged as spam by corporate firewalls or major ISPs, causing more messages than usual to be blocked.

3.      List - Growth Rate

This is a measurement of how fast your email list is growing. It is important as your email marketing program needs to be continually refreshed with new names. Many of the email addresses on your list will overtime stop being used, therefore you need to keep adding new ones to the list to make up for this.

4.      Click - Through Rate (CTR)

This is the proportion of the audience who clicked on one of the links contained in the email message. Monitoring this is a cornerstone of email marketing analytics, because the CTR indicates whether the message was relevant and the offer was compelling enough to encourage the recipient to take action.

5.      Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate

This is the percentage of recipients who clicked on the 'share' button to post email content on a social network or clicked 'forward' to one of their contacts. Sharing rates are another indicator of the value and relevance of your email message. Email offers that get shared or forwarded can be your best performing campaign as you have  drastically increased the reach of that message through social networks. It is useful to discover which types of articles and offers tend to get shared most and use this knowledge when planning future campaigns.  

6.      Conversion Rate

This is the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action, for example, purchasing a product. This is the ultimate measure of an email campaigns effectiveness. The higher your conversion rate, the more relevant and compelling the offer was for your audience. They are however, dependent on factors beyond the original email message, such as the quality of your landing page. Measuring conversion rate requires integration between your email platform and your web analytics through creating unique tracking URLs for your email links.

Examples

Consumers jump for joy when they actually do get an email that is helpful, interesting, or innovative. Hubspot (2012) show various examples of successful email marketing. Two are explained below.

UncommonGoods lets their customers sell for them. This campaign leverages the power of social proof. Not only doess this email provide recommendations for those struggling to come up with a gift, but it also highlights what other customers say about them. According to Hubspot (2012), 8 in 10 people's purchasing decisions are influenced by user-generated content of complete stranger. 

In this campaign, ModCloth promotes its referral program. Many companies have a referral program, however they do not promote it. ModCloth saw a benefit for this and created a campaign, making sure that even though their engaged customers who are likely to refer customers, need to know they offer referral benefits. Email marketing is ideal for ongoing communications with engaged leads and prospects.

I feel that if you spend time creating a campaign, and put effort into it including researching what your customers want, then it will be a success. These examples shown have come up with a different approach to Email Marketing which is innovative and creative, therefore has paid off, ensuring an increase in their sales.

References

Email Marketing Report (2012) 'What is Email Marketing?' [Online] < http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/intro.htm> [Accessed 17th May 2014]

Entrepreneur (2012) 'The 8-second challenge: Email Marketing for our shrinking attention span' [Online] <http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232266> [Accessed 17th May 2014]

Hubspot (2011) 'Your Complete Guide to Measuring Email Marketing Success' [Online] <http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29510/Your-Complete-Guide-to-Measuring-Email-Marketing-Success.aspx> [Accessed 17th May 2014]

Hubspot (2012) '10 Simply Awesome Examples of Email Marketing' [Online] <http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32854/10-Simply-Awesome-Examples-of-Email-Marketing.aspx> [Accessed 17th May 2014]