Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

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34 ANALYTICS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007 ANALYTICS Page 34 There’s more to e-mail than e-mail, by Bob Hale, Alterian Send. Analyze. Target. Resend, by Dan Robbins, ClickTracks Page 36 Benchmarketing e-mail response metrics, by Liz Bross, Harte-Hanks Page 37 Measuring e-mail results: Using the wrong end of the stick?, by Michael DesRochers, Salestream Software Page 38 Understand and respond to your customers through analytics, by Jack Felsheim, Ovation Marketing Analytics Studying analytics is the best way for a marketer to see results in their e-mail campaigns, test how a campaign is doing and keep up-to-date information on customer behavior and profiles to help increase ROI. Key topics include analyzing data, targeting and retargeting, setting benchmarks to e-mail metrics and monitoring clicks and interactions. There’s more to e-mail than e-mail BY BOB HALE How does your company approach direct mail? Do you just randomly send the same package to everyone on your list, without regard for past behavior or purchase models? Probably not. So why is it that when it comes to e-mail marketing, so many organizations apply an entirely different — entirely lax — standard? All too often, while marketers are busy applying analytics to every other facet of direct marketing, e-mail is being handled on its own, segregated from the rest of the communications strategy. Sending thousands of e-mails to thousands of addresses, even if you have permission, isn’t much better than spamming. All it takes to inform your e-mail marketing efforts is a little knowledge of your customers’ behavior. If you think you don’t know enough about them, Bob Hale Alterian you’re wrong. In fact, what you know about their online activities can go a long way toward rounding out your overall customer view — and a long way toward increasing revenues across your organization. According to the Direct Marketing Association, e-mail drove more than $16 billion in revenue last year and influenced nearly $100 billion more. Those are impressive numbers, but it’s clear that of the 83 percent of marketers that use e-mail, many aren’t mining it as well as they could be. What do you need to tap into that potential? ■ Deep customer data, not just aggregated Web data or click throughs. Interact with your customers. Find out their preferences. And pull together everything you know from every source. ESSENTIAL GUIDE ■ Insight into that data. Find the right software and tools to learn about your audience using demographic, tracking and account data. Using disparate applications to accomplish these tasks usually doesn’t work. It’s not practical. “Right software and tools” means, using a single integrated platform. Don’t worry, they’re out there. ■ Action. You’ve got the facts, now act on them. Data-driven decisions are easy to justify and easy to measure at the back end. ■ Measurement. If you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t be doing it. You need to know what works, and what individual customers and prospects prefer. ■ The ability to fine tune and change directions. Responding to what you learn lets you continually tighten future campaigns. Using e-mail as a full-fledged direct marketing channel, and applying the same analytical standards you’ve set for offline efforts, can help you get a better look at your customers, build stronger relationships and increase returns in every possible way. That’s the value of real relationship building and acknowledging the real value of your customer. Bob Hale is vice president of business development for Alterian. You can reach him at bhale@alterian.com. Send. Analyze. Target. Resend. BY DAN ROBBINS There’s a lot more to be learned from your e-mail campaigns than open and clickthrough rates will tell you. By using a Web analytics tool to analyze the behavior of respondents, you can gain valuable insight to just how effective your e-mail campaign is — or isn’t. Many marketers consider conversion the holy grail of campaign success. But a lack of conversion doesn’t necessarily constitute a failure. By examining two key metrics — your visitors’ average time on site (ATOS) and your campaign exit rate — you can understand where the conversion
36 ANALYTICS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007 process needs improvement. Focused analysis Segmentation is the key to gaining actionable insight on any of your marketing activities, including your e-mail campaigns. You need to be able to focus on visitors who share common behavior when responding to a particular campaign. Using your Web analytics program to segment campaign respondents will provide valuable information when formulating followup campaigns. Time is on your side Time on site measures your Web site’s ability to successfully hold each visitor’s interest. It’s also a good indicator of how well you’re meeting visitor expectations. Using average time on site for all visitors as a benchmark, you can analyze the average time on site for just the visitors that came through your e-mail campaign and then compare. If you have large groups of visitors with high ATOS but few conversions, examine your cam- Dan Robbins ClickTracks paign offer and look for ways to create a sense of urgency in your follow-up campaign. Give your lingering window shoppers a catalyst to convert. Leaving like a jet plane? Your campaign exit rate is also an effective way to gauge whether you met visitors’ expectations. If you’re dealing with high exit rates, your first move should be to see how well your landing page reflects the promise made in your campaign. For example, if you send out an e-mail message with a free shipping offer, your landing page should clearly restate that offer. Final judgment It is also important to note that you shouldn’t look at any one metric in a vacuum. Instead, you should take a holistic look at your metrics — including ROI, conversion and visitor volume/response rate — to ensure that you have an accurate picture of the value of each campaign. By combining your e-mail provider’s metrics with a few key metrics from your Web analysis software, you can improve the experience for customers both in their inboxes and on your site. Dan Robbins is director of marketing at ClickTracks. You can reach him at drobbins@clicktracks.com. Benchmarking e-mail response metrics BY LIZ BROSS In the first half of 2007, the travel and hospitality and entertainment industries received the highest delivery, open and clickthrough rates of the 13 industries monitored by the Harte-Hanks Postfuture Index, a periodic e-mail benchmarking monitor. The Postfuture Index provides comparative e-mail metrics in aggregate, and includes business and consumer e-mail campaigns executed using the Harte-Hanks Postfuture Enterprise Edition from January-June 2007. Altogether, the findings represent more than 6,800 single-send broadcast and more than 1,200 transactional e-mail campaigns across 13 industry sectors. Metrics reveal that marketers using dynamic personalization, print-at-home incentives and behavior-driven delivery enjoy the highest e-mail open and click-through rates. Among those industry categories with at least a dozen campaigns executed during the first half of the year, travel and hospitality fared best, recording open rates of 28.6 percent and click-through rates of 8.8 percent. Entertainment ranked second for open rates (26.4 percent) and click-through rates (5.4 percent). The lowest click-through rates were found in the government sector (0.7 percent). Cross-industry metrics Overall delivery rates across all industry sectors and campaign types from January through June 2007 averaged 88.6 percent. Open rates averaged 20 percent of all delivered messages. Click-through rates across all industry sectors averaged 3.8 percent. B-to-b and b-to-c audience comparison Business-to-business email open rates for the year’s first half were recorded at 21.8 percent with a 3.5 percent click-through rate. By comparison, business-to-consumer open rates were at 16.3 percent with a 3.4 percent click-through. Transactional, send-to-a-friend and coupon metrics Given the cross-industry average open rate of 20 percent and click-through rate of 3.8 percent, transactional, send-to-a-friend and online incentives campaigns fared much better for both opens and clickthroughs. For example, average open rates for transactional e-mail were recorded at 50.1 percent, with an average click-through rate of 11 percent. E-mails with coupons averaged 59.6 percent opens and 38.31 percent clickthroughs. Implications for direct marketers Marketers that accelerate rollout of customer-centric e-mail strategies, including personalized product recommendations, behavior-driven messaging dialogues and print-at-home incentives to deliver individual- Liz Bross Harte-Hanks ESSENTIAL GUIDE ized marketing offers are more likely to find success in open and click-through, and ultimately more e-mail conversions. The best-performing e-mail campaigns combine personalization and behavior synchronization. Transactional cross-sell is also effective and combines account status e-mail with dynamic product recommendations. Likewise, momentum toward the outsourcing of transactional and customer service e-mail delivery continues to increase as marketers realize the value of transactional e-mail messages for crosssell and up-sell marketing. Liz Bross is vice president of digital interaction at Harte-Hanks. She can be reached at liz_bross@harte-hanks.com.
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