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Tracking Part III - Leverage the three "T's" of Email Marketing -- by Chip House Before I began focusing my marketing efforts online, I worked for several years in the direct mail industry. Most of us doing direct mail in the 80's and 90's had evolved significantly over the years since Sears began selling everything from tires to t-shirts in their catalogs. Computers and statistical analysis helped us do so. We made direct mail a science by tracking and adjusting every variable we could affect to both reduce our costs and increase our response rates. Just as computers revolutionized the analysis of direct mail, email is revolutionizing the speed, type and quality of the data available for marketers. Faster is Better Back in my catalog marketing days, we had to wait several weeks or months for our data to come in. Not so with email. Email tracking allows you to send a campaign and begin seeing the results in the very same day. If you're conducting testing, as much as 70% of your response will happen in the first 48 hours after the mailing, giving you the opportunity to pick a test "winner" in only two days! The reduced time to read results allows you to react quickly to changes in your business climate and take advantage of late-breaking opportunities. Try this with Direct Mail Imagine if Sears was able to peek into your house on the day their catalog was delivered. They could see if you opened the catalog, watch which sections of it you read, or if you didn't want it, watch you throw it in the trash. In many ways this is the power available to you via email promotions, since leading technologies allow you to view the following statistics:
- Emails that were undeliverable - Total emails delivered - Emails opened - Links clicked - Unsubscribes The ability to read the "Email Open Rate" is one of the statistics unique to email. HTML, graphical emails allow a marketer to not only track the number of emails opened, but who opened them. The email open rate is calculated by dividing the number of emails opened by the number of emails delivered. Typical open rates range from 40 - 60% for opt-in email campaigns, going even higher for more qualified/targeted lists. Being able to identify who is reading your messages provides you tighter targeting opportunities for your next newsletter or campaign by allowing you to send your next email to only those that opened or that didn't open your last email. Hypertext links give us the opportunity to track which links inside emails are clicked on, how often they are clicked, and who clicked them. Marketers call this tracking feature "click-through." Click-through rates are calculated by dividing the number of click-throughs by the number of emails delivered. Click-through rates for email average 5 - 15%*, higher than for other online media such as banners which now average click rates below 0.5%. The ability to track click-throughs gives you an idea of what interests your subscribers. This is revolutionary for you as the publisher or marketer, and closely monitoring click-through rates can help you hone your content for your next mailing. For example, though your editorial section of your newsletter may be your personal favorite, it may not receive many subscriber clicks - meaning that you might think your topic is more interesting than your readers do. Good news is, you'll always have your next newsletter to develop more popular content. Undeliverable Emails Email delivery shares at least one thing in common with snail mail; if the address is wrong, the mail won't get delivered. Unique to email, however, is the fact that email will "bounce" if it finds a mail server that is "down" or out of service temporarily. Most email software will just stop there and not attempt to deliver the mail any longer, assuming that the address is wrong. More sophisticated software will re-send to these bounced addresses at some predetermined time interval after the initial delivery attempt. This will ensure the highest number of your emails reach the intended audience. Undeliverable email is the reason that most email marketing software will allow you to track the emails sent as well as the number of emails delivered. The emails delivered number is the best statistic to use to determine how many subscribers received your email since it doesn't include undeliverable emails. Unsubscribes If you are doing email marketing correctly, you are practicing permission-based marketing and are only sending to subscribers who have asked to receive your communications or have "opted-in." (See my article entitled "Opt-in Optimizes" for more information). Allowing your subscribers to unsubscribe or opt-out at any time is a must, and tracking the rate that subscribers are leaving your list is one way to understand how strong your list is, how loyal your subscribers are, and how well your content is being received. Unsubscribe rate is calculated by dividing the number of your email recipients that unsubscribed from a mailing by the number of emails delivered. One of the tenets of permission marketing is that your messages should be relevant to your audience. Unsubscribe rates should average less than 1% for each mailing you send. A higher unsubscribe rate could mean that you are missing the mark with your communications and your messages do not contain the content your audience expected. It could also mean that your messages are being sent too frequently, and your subscriber base is growing tired. What is the ideal frequency for mailings? See my article on "Timing" for more tips. When catalog marketers dream, they dream of the tracking capabilities available in email. Not so long ago they thought they had access to all of the data you could possibly collect in a marketing campaign. Email changed everything for direct marketers and small businesses alike by allowing a new level of tracking and analysis. Save time. Save money. Improve your business' messaging. Retain more customers. All good. |
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