The intention was to use the 3 most common email marketing metrics:
- Bounce rates
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
Typically, email-marketing software (such as the G-lock example below) provide these metrics. They offer a high level of granularity (to the extent you can have data for each recipient). Other metrics I look at are: forward rate, unsubscribe rate etc …
I also added 2 behavioral online performance metrics, drawn from traffic to the various blogs and websites we promoted in the newsletter.
I would like to go through each of these 5 metrics and discuss some of the limitations, as I stumbled upon some legitimate roadblocks, which makes success measurement quite complex to perform.
Metrics and limitations
1. My bounce rate was excellent (close to absolute zero). Only one or two emails were returned to sender. This did not come as a surprise since the database I was using was spot-on. The community was launched recently so we would expect all email addresses to be accurate. However one can argue the bounce rate is misleading in one way since it does not take into accounts those emails that might have been deleted silently by anti-spam system. On way around this is to use delivery monitor services such as Delivery monitor. This service allows you to track what happens to your emails to major ISPs.
2. The second metric I looked at was open rates. The open rate is often referred as a percentage of the numbers of emails delivered to recipients. It varies by industry, company, how well has the segmentation was performed (loyal customers are more likely to open all emails they receive form their favorite brands). The headline (in particular if there is a monetary offer) can also boost this rate.
Some of the limitations related to the open rates are:
- First it is a rough proxy for reader’s interest. It does not really measure whether the recipient read the newsletter or recall its content. I would use click-through rates and other measures to determine the ‘engagement’ of community members.
- Second, some email clients have a preview function where part of the email is being displayed (one the side or bottom of the email client). In other words, an high open rate might not take into consideration these recipients who did not actually read the newsletter.
- Third, open rates are calculated differently. The most common approach is to look at open rates as a percentage of email being delivered. Others looked at the same percentage over emails being sent.
3. The third metric I considered was the click-through rate. A CTR is the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in the newsletter. I like CTR in the sense it provides a better measure of recipient’s engagement.
However, the primary limitation to CTR is it does give an accurate representation of positive shift in recipient’s attitudes and behaviors. In the case of my newsletter, having a number of CTR to let’s say a blog does not indicate whether recipients enjoy the blog content or have a stronger affinity for the community we are building. In the case of a purchase/ re-peat purchase driven newsletter, we will need to link CTR with actual purchase to evaluate the overall performance of the email campaign.
4. The fourth metric I took into account is the number of hits the various blogs and web addresses got in the 24hours after the e-newsletter was sent. Along CTR, this is another way to make a connection between newsletter and traffic generated. In this case, we will need to subtract regular traffic from overall traffic to come up with a good grasp of incremental traffic. CTR is easier to compute.
5. Lastly, one of the call-to-action in the e-newsletter was a phone number community members could call to attend a seminar. This proved to be a reliable success measure (even though it is hard to differentiate the incremental measure form the regular measure since community members could have obtained this phone number by other channels).
All in all, bounce rate, open rate, click-through-rate and other behavioral measures are great to have. Any email marketing software usually provides all of them. Just watch-out for some of the limitations that might bias results.
For more information on this topics, check-out this amazing resource from Email Marketing Report.
