Whole ‘Lotta Clickin’ going on…

First off, let me explain the title of this post – we saw Elvis at dinner last night in The Venetian. Now that that’s out of the way; let’s build off of Monday’s blog post.

On Monday, I blogged about tracking recipient click patterns; in the post there were four metrics included – but over time, I realized that there was another that should also be considered. Here in Las Vegas, the hotels are constantly marketing to former and future guests. I’m certain that the email marketers for these properties have a great number of opens and clicks but there are a smaller number of conversions (bookings etc.) as they are competing with the recipient’s schedule, budget, alternate destinations and even other properties along the Vegas strip.

My suggestion to remedy this would be to market based on geography, price and interest – since flights from the west coast are less expensive this group should receive one offer; further destinations should be categorized differently. The pricing should also play a role, track the offer the recipient clicks and/ or apply booking history so you’ll know what the guest paid the last visit. Interest categories should also be accounted, so that you’ll know if the recipient is motivated by entertainment events, gambling or shopping. As you can see, the data model gets very complex but if you make the offer, learn about the recipient and apply, you’ll win big.

Track that Click

One of the strongest ways to segment any campaign is through the click-through data collected. Personalization, relevance and even timing can all be improved through proper click-through analysis.

Most marketers look at the click-through as a summary of the analysis in the life of a single campaign. They then measure it across campaigns by looking at how the each campaign performed comparing the click-throughs over time. While this might give you great results to see how well you are doing; it does very little to improve the overall effectiveness of your campaign.

In an analysis of some of the best email programs in the country – here are some things you should do with your click-throughs:
1) Purchase Click – Thank the consumer for having purchased your product; set them up to receive survey about their purchase. Ask them about your product(s), your service and their feedback. Leverage this information into follow up campaigns – for better results, run this as a separate stream of communications. It is more targeted and will do better.

2) Click without Purchase – You now know what the user has clicked on, so leverage their click-through into your preference strategy for personalization. Highlight the item they clicked on as part of a follow-up campaign or include it as one of three offers in a subsequent campaign. In fact, it wouldn’t be bad to get user feedback on the item they clicked on in a non-buyer survey down the road.

3) Bunch of Clicks – Track all the items they click on and personalize. Put out an email featuring a number of life stages to consumers – now track and see what life stage they are clicking on. Perhaps a click on College Education might give the financial institution data to try and personalize an offer on College Loans or Automobiles (the kid needs a car). If you are selling cities or products – give them a number of options, watch what they click on and then try to zero in.

4) Unsubscribe Click – Respect this click and do what I do, ask the unsubscriber why they have unsubscribed. This is extremely good information to help you improve your email program. More importantly, I am able to talk three out of ten unsubscribers into understanding my email program; re-subscribing and some have even become vocal promoters.

Click through information is a vital gauge on your online marketing program. It can give you focus for your campaigns. In a subsequent article I will talk to you about how you can arrange the offers for your recipient based on the click through.

How to detirmine the success of an Email Test

We've stressed the need to test subject lines here lately, but what is the key factor in determining which subject line is successful? There are different metrics you can look at, but which will you use? Here is a sample case we can discuss:

We've tried 3 different subject lines here. The first subject had the highest open rate over all. However, the clicks and conversions were pretty low for some reason - perhaps the content didn't live up to the subject line? The next subject line had a lower open rate, but a higher click and conversion rate. Here, maybe the subject wasn't intriguing enough, but when people did open, they liked what they saw enough to buy. The third subject line had the second highest open rate, and blew the roof off with the clicks and conversions.

In this sample case above, subject 3 would definitely be the one to use for the rest of the population, even though it had a lower open rate than the first subject. Even if it had the worst open rate, the conversions and clicks were so compelling, it would have to be declared the winner.

There may be other factors to consider, such as unsubscribe rates, but generally, these are the three key factors in looking at which test was the winner.

The Value of Segmentation for Reporting Metrics

Most times when we think of doing segmentation for our email, we think about it in regards to how we're going to offer certain products, discounts, or content. But even if we don't have anything different in our offers or content, we should think about segmenting for the value of reporting metrics.

If you have buyer categories in your data, segment out according to these categories, even thought the offer and the content might be the same. This will help you gauge how customers in your list react to your offers and your emails. For instance, you might find that customers in one category seem to respond better to your email than customers in other categories. Or you might find how these different segments respond to clearance offers verse others.

Try running your campaigns with different segments for a couple of months. Based on the data you get from this, you'll better be able to target your list for future campaigns.

What is a good open rate?

A colleague of mine who is starting a small online media business recently sent out an email campaign. He got a 30% open rate on the email which prompted him to ask me, "is that a good open rate?" It's a question that both new and experienced email marketers deal with. So what is a good open rate for email campaigns?

The answer is there is no easy answer. There are a lot of factors involved that you have to consider.

Across all industries and email programs, a baseline average open rate is between 12.5% verses against emails delivered. When you break those out by industry, the numbers change dramatically:

These numbers also change based on the type of communication sent (transactional, promotional, or informative). So you have to take some caution when comparing your open rates to benchmarks across industries or even within your own industry. For instance, one retailer's promotional emails run open rates of 40% or more because of how engaged their audience is; so it wouldn't be fair to compare yourself to them if you were in the same industry.

The best measure of your success is to compare your opens against the own historical performance of your list. You know best the composition of your list, and what sort of performance you should expect from your list as far as opens and clicks. Take your data for the previous quarter, and use that as your benchmark for your current quarter's email.

Using your own historical data as a benchmark will also help you in better determining where you're improving and what is helping to drive better reposes within your own list. You easily be able to see how your efforts are directly impacting your success, better than comparing to a possibly skewed industry standard.