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Beyond Opens & Clicks: 5 Email Metrics to Boost Results and Prove Your Worth

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BEYOND OPENS & CLICKS: 5 email metrics to boost results and prove your worth

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ypically in any recession, there is tremendous pressure on marketers to do more with less. According to MarketingSherpa, 24 percent of B2B and 34 percent of B2C marketers reported budget cuts this year.1 Not surprising given its remarkably high return on investment, email marketing increases during tough economic times. For every dollar you spend on email, you get $45.65 back.2 Also in email’s favor is its measurability. Marketers can quickly and effectively measure who is responding to messages, which promotions work best and so much more. While email marketing is clearly effective, marketers are being called upon to do a better job of engaging recipients, communicating with them and learning what messages they actually look forward to receiving. And a key step in this process is to take measure of your customers and prospects.

Why Engagement Marketers Need Metrics Marketing metrics help you quantify the performance of your initiatives. They also enable you to act on your insights and make adjustments to your strategy as needed. And implementing a sophisticated, metrics-driven email program puts you ahead of nearly six out of 10 email marketers. Forrester Research found that 59 percent of email marketers use only standard metrics like opens and click-through rates.3 Your primary focus should be on delivering against “metrics that matter” for your business. These might be revenue, leads, downloads, cost savings and similar “output” business metrics. By measuring response to your engagement marketing program, you can: • Improve your understanding of customers and prospects. When you understand the reasons behind marketing response, you can send more timely and relevant messages, cultivating powerful relationships and increasing ROI. • Tighten the efficiency of your marketing program. Metrics and analytics—which uncover the underlying drivers behind response rates—act as a lens for focusing massive volumes of raw data into relevant, simple and actionable information. • Defend your budget and your worth. Accountability has become a marketing watchword. Metrics help you to make the case for your initiatives by proving the ROI of your efforts. They also help you hone your efforts, enabling you to deliver maximum effect at minimal cost. As a marketer in the trenches, you need to monitor and analyze metrics to help drive increased relevance and customer engagement, which lead to achieving your company’s business and marketing goals. www.silverpop.com

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Overcoming Barriers to Adopting Metrics Online marketing studies have consistently shown that more relevant, engaging messaging based on customer attributes and behaviors leads to increased response and conversion rates. Yet marketers still find it difficult to take full advantage of the data available to them. Indeed, Forrester Research has found that 48 percent of interactive marketers say their organizations struggle to prove the return on their efforts, and 69 percent say they are understaffed.5 As a result, marketers are overwhelmed by the volume of possible metrics available and fail to combine metrics to get a holistic understanding of their campaigns. But despite the challenges, simple steps can help marketers improve their programs. Here are three common challenges in using metrics and ways around them. • Sheer volume of data. For many marketers, gaining control over the volume of data generated by marketing and customer platforms across the enterprise can be like trying to drink from a fire hose.

Focus on customer needs, or lose them forever Marketers must use measurement tools in order to provide personalized messaging. In a 2008 Merkle study, half of email recipients said good email influenced their decision to make a purchase, and 38 percent said they tend to spend more money with a company that sends emails they read regularly. Thirty-two percent said they stopped doing business with a company because of poor email marketing practices.4

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Amidst the statistical deluge, it’s difficult to create simple and understandable data sets that you can act on to improve the relevancy of your messages. And when you’re wading through massive amounts of data, proving a marketing program’s value and ROI becomes much more challenging. So don’t try to evaluate every possible data point. Take it slow and make it easy. Select a measurement you believe would have an impact on your program and focus on just that. For example, taking a long, hard, comprehensive look at your deliverability data and improving results will yield dramatic improvements in your campaign results. Once you’ve tackled and improved one metric, move to the next. • Lack of perspective. Lists, mailings and campaigns don’t exist or operate in a vacuum. Yet many marketers rely on the measurement equivalent of a snapshot. To truly advance their programs, marketers must develop a more holistic view of results, understanding how metrics can dovetail into one another; how they trend over time; the implications of anomalies and outliers; and what changes can be made to improve results and increase satisfaction and ROI. Don’t fall into the trap of knee-jerk reactions to data. Rather, monitor responses over time to identify trends. And if possible, work to consolidate data from various departments (marketing, sales, customer service, accounting, etc.) in order to gain a wider perspective of campaign influences. • Not enough time or budget. Of course, marketers would love to adopt the sophisticated strategies and tactics they dream about. But the real-life challenges of running programs and getting campaigns out the door leaves little time for the luxury of poring over data and implementing plans in the hopes of improving programs down the road. But today’s sophisticated online marketing solutions enable marketers to pull detailed reports that deliver comprehensive, easily digestible information. Dashboard reports that are simple to pull and include graphic representations of results make it easy to incorporate findings when fine-tuning your email marketing campaigns.

The Right Metrics for Your Program With so much data residing in marketing systems and so many metrics to choose from, how do marketers decide which data to use, and how do they analyze it most effectively? The methodologies you use can be simple or complex, depending on the amount of data you have available and the types of measurements that will have the most benefit to your program. The important thing to keep in mind is that the metrics you focus on should enable you to answer the question, “What lies behind the response to this message or campaign, and how can I improve upon it?”

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To help you answer this question and adjust your campaign accordingly, here are five metrics you should consider. They’ll help you understand and better engage with your customers and prospects, paving the way to a stronger long-term relationship. 1. Deliverability: Where It All Begins There will be no other metrics to evaluate if you don’t make it into the inbox. As inbox providers tighten spam filters, it’s estimated that as many as 20 percent of permission-based email messages are turned away from ISP gateways. By actively monitoring your deliverability and using metrics that call attention to problematic mailings, you can quickly investigate and resolve deliverability problems before they seriously harm your ability to get messages through at the major ISPs and inbox providers. One powerful way to stay atop deliverability is to monitor delivery information each time you send—how many messages were accepted and rejected by the top ISPs and corporate domains on your list. Your report should also give you additional delivery metrics by domain, such as open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, mail blocks, abuse complaints, conversion rates and conversion amounts. With a complete delivery report for the top domains on your list each time you send, you can answer new questions such as, “Which domain is driving my overall increase in conversion or click rates?” or “Why did open rates suddenly drop for a domain, even though click rates remain consistent?” (Hint: the answer is probably image suppression.) By investigating anomalies in your deliverability, you can estimate lost ROI and make the case for enhancing your deliverability by


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pointing out how much additional revenue you could gain. Armed with this information, you can then determine how much improving your delivery will lift your overall marketing program performance. You can improve deliverability rates by following these tips: • Minimize spam complaints—don’t send too frequently; make it easy to unsubscribe; send only relevant, wanted content • Validate email addresses at opt-in to weed out spelling mistakes • Optimize design and HTML coding to minimize spam filtering • Use a dedicated IP address to build and protect your sending reputation • Authenticate your messages with Sender Policy Framework, Sender ID, DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail • Perform regular list hygiene—immediately remove all addresses that generate a “hard” (permanent) bounce or a spam complaint 2. Effective Rate: Percentage of Clicks to Opens This terrific measure of your message’s relevance combines open and click-through rates to derive email’s effective rate, or percentage of people who click after opening.

Rule to Remember! To get the most accurate view of recipient behavior, distinguish between aggregate (total overall) and unique (each recipient is counted only once) views in your response metrics. For example, if 10 people open your email and five people click, 50 percent of your openers have clicked. But if one of those openers clicked three times, that doesn’t mean 70 percent of openers clicked. This is a powerful metric to gauge the success of retention and loyalty-based campaigns. High effective rates indicate that your message content was relevant to those people who are engaged enough with your brand to open the message. Conversely, low effective rates mean your content isn’t sufficiently targeted to recipients willing to take the time to glance through your messages. 3. The Demographic Meaning Behind Response Rates More than 65 percent of database marketers say they use response rates as a key metric. But they only measure what users do, and not what drives them to do it, according to Forrester Research.5

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Analytics allow you to combine your campaign data with your list data to learn what drove the results. They can immediately affect your next campaign because you’ll know what kind of content resonates with what group and can focus on it. 4. Conversion Rate: What It’s All About When marketers send an email message, they don’t always think of tracking beyond the message itself. But email marketing software is available that enables marketers to tag their Web pages so that the actions of recipients can be recorded even after they have left the email. This is called “clickstream” or “conversion” reporting. A conversion report shows a marketer that a recipient clicked through to a landing page and records their actions on that page—for example, if they began or completed a form and made a payment. Depending on the level of Web page tagging by the marketer, the conversion report might even show that the recipient then clicked through to a second page and began or completed further activities and payments. The conversion rate is an important metric that gives you insight into how relevant your campaign is to your customers. To boost your conversion rate, create a clear and prominent call to action, and make it easy for the recipient to follow through. Design attractive, focused landing pages that match both your brand and your email campaign. And make the conversion process easy by populating forms with the person’s name, shipping address and other information at your disposal. Conversion reporting imports new levels of insight about your customers that you can use to target new campaigns and to achieve even higher degrees of relevance. 5. View Trends Over Time If examining data for a single message is valuable, then the additional insight of viewing a campaign over time is doubly so. For example, let’s say you view a deliverability report for a campaign over the last 12 months, and it reveals a peak during one month relative to the other months. This peak reveals a high percentage of returned email. Drilling into the mailing may reveal the anomaly that caused the bounces. Did you use different email creative that got caught in spam filters, or send to a different list? By viewing data trends over time, you can account for outliers and anomalies and fix any problems before they can damage your program, or conversely, build on any pleasant surprises or successes you discover.

Analytics add an extra dimension to your response metrics, helping you understand customer behavior at a deeper level. For example, how do demographics such as gender, income level or age affect someone’s likelihood to forward an email or click a specific link? Or, are there geographic differences in results?

Conclusion

For instance, a sporting goods retailer could overlay a click-through report with analytics to learn that recipients who clicked most on a recent promotional campaign were 18-to-30-year-old males who reside in the northwestern United States and like camping gear.

Considering how much valuable time people spend weeding out irrelevant emails from their inbox, they’re entrusting you to use good judgment when they give you permission to communicate with them. The key to rewarding that trust is to provide value, which you deliver by paying

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When it comes to providing ROI accountability, trending data also helps you to make a compelling case for the value of your marketing investments and initiatives.


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careful attention to what they tell you and what they do. By adopting metrics and analytics, you can use each message to encourage recipients to open the next one, creating communications so interesting and beneficial that they will make recipients eagerly anticipate future messages. When you incorporate metrics into your marketing program, be sure your engagement marketing solution offers: • Metrics that are relevant, easily accessible, easily digestible and easy to act on • The ability to view day/time of last open in order to optimize send times • Built-in, interactive analytics for customized, in-depth, real-time reporting • Built-in Web page and conversion tracking Savvy marketers realize that you can only achieve solid improvements on campaign elements that you actually take time to measure. A great strength of engagement marketing is its ability to be evaluated quickly and effectively. If you’re not measuring campaign performance, you’re missing out on key insights that can create happier customers, improve results and prove your marketing team’s value.

FOOTNOTES: 1. “2009 Email Benchmark Guide,” MarketingSherpa, 2009 2. “The Power of Direct Marketing,” Direct Marketing Association, 2007 3. “Benchmark Your Email Organization,” Forrester Research, Oct. 2008 4. “View from the Inbox, 2008,” Merkle, April 2008 5. “The Interactive Marketing Metrics You Need,” Forrester Research, May 2008

To find out more about Silverpop’s Engage solution and how it can benefit your company, please contact us toll-free at 1-866/SILVPOP (745-8767) or email us at [email protected]. Visit us at www.silverpop.com

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REPORTING & A N A LY T I C S


SILVERPOP ENGAGE REPORTING AND ANALYTICS

Providing marketers with the tools to better understand their customers and improve campaign results

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ngagement marketing is about information. The more you know about your customers and prospects, the better you can communicate with them. And by connecting with customers, you’ll see improved response rates, brand loyalty and lifetime customer value that drives revenue. Silverpop Engage includes more than 50 predefined reports covering basic metrics, data analysis, Web page tracking, reply management and deliverability. Additionally, the analytics module in Silverpop Engage gives marketers a customizable tool to understand how different recipient segments influence overall response rates. All of the reporting and analytic features offered by Silverpop Engage are included in the basic annual license. There are no extra fees, no additional logins or reporting portals and no confusing product choices.

STANDARD METRICS REPORTS The Silverpop Engage metrics report provides an interactive, real-time window into every message you send. Starting with the main page, the standard report provides a quick view of more than 30 metrics. From the main metrics report page, you can drill into perrecipient metrics, break out viral and original data, view data in graph or table form, sort columns to rearrange views and evaluate clicks by message format. Every report provides a one-click data export, making it easy to incorporate the report data into external applications. The Results Over Time Report shows you opens and clicks as they rise and fall throughout the life of your message. The Subscribers Report shows the changes in list size as new recipients subscribe and old recipients unsubscribe over time. The Click-Through Report shows you how each of your links is performing and allows you to change the click-through URL even after the mailing has been sent– providing an easy correction to inadvertent errors. The Multiple Mailings Report lets you select any set of mailings and all of their results. The Comparison Report lets you select a set of mailings and compare them in terms of opens, clicks, delivery and conversions.

ANALYTICS Understanding customer behavior at a deeper level Built-in, fully integrated and offered at no extra charge, the Silverpop Engage analytics module brings an unprecedented level of insight and detail to every campaign. The module is built around a proprietary, highly efficient data warehouse that lets you analyze literally millions of responses on virtually any dimension in a matter of seconds. The analytics module goes beyond static reports and provides an interactive tool for drilling into results by selecting views, changing metrics, sorting columns and adding, removing or nesting segments. In many ways, the Silverpop Engage analytics module is a discovery tool that helps marketers uncover the underlying drivers of their marketing response rates.

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ANALYZING WEB TRAFFIC Tracking responses beyond the message and into a Web site The Silverpop Conversion Reports show you which messages and which customers are going to your Web site and making purchases. The report can manage an unlimited number of products as well as unlimited detail per product (such as size or color). Web page tracking is another unique report available on the Silverpop Engage platform. This report allows you to track customers as they click around your Web site after they have clicked beyond the original message. For complex Web analytic needs, Silverpop has partnered and integrated with several major Web analytic tool vendors. Support for tools from Google, Omniture and Coremetrics are built into the Silverpop Engage platform.

Inbox Monitoring Recent studies show that for every message bounced back from ISPs or corporate spam filters, as many as twice that number are simply thrown away. A feature called Inbox Monitoring allows marketers to see beyond bounce reports and directly into the inboxes at major ISPs. Through a partnership with deliverability expert Pivotal Veracity, Silverpop Engage clients enjoy a state-of-the-art inbox monitoring solution. The inbox status of more than 200 U.S. and international domains is checked throughout the delivery of a mailing and updated in real time. And to avoid the added hassle of having to log into a separate application, Silverpop is the first marketing technology provider to fully integrate inbox monitoring into the standard deliverability reports. The Top Domains Report provides a new level of deliverability insight that goes beyond bounce rates. This unique report breaks down key metrics, such as open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, blocks, abuse complaints, conversion rates and conversion amounts, by the top domains in a mailing list.

Deliverability Dashboard The amount of information available through the deliverability reporting in Silverpop Engage can be daunting, especially if marketers simply want to know “when something goes wrong.” To help automate the process, the Silverpop Engage deliverability system constantly monitors every ongoing mailing against dozens of rules and thresholds. Whenever any aspect of a mailing crosses a deliverability threshold, an alert is added to the deliverability dashboard. This unique tool makes it easy for marketers to keep track of any deliverability issue that arises and quickly react.

VISUAL CLICK-THROUGH REPORT Visualizing your message’s performance One of the most powerful and unique reports on the Silverpop Engage platform is the Visual Click-Through Report. This report provides you with an instant view of your click-through data, overlaid visually on your original message. Each link on the message is color-coded to show how it performed: above average, below average or overall best.

DYNAMIC CONTENT REPORTING Understanding which content elements are driving response rates The dynamic content reports in Silverpop Engage drill into each content block, each rule and each content element to show marketers which part of their dynamic message is generating the best results.

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LIST VALUES REPORT Providing easy viewing and cleaning of fields in your customer records Not only can you get a quick breakdown of every value in any list field, the report makes it easy to create a targeted segment from a subset of the values. Even better, this report provides a wizard that helps clean up your data, ensuring that targeting and dynamic content rules will find the proper matches every time.

REPLY REPORTING Capturing replies, automating responses and reporting on results The Reply Manager runs in the background, constantly listening for and responding to every reply sent by your recipients. It will handle most unsubscribes and complaints automatically and then categorize and forward the remaining messages to an address you specify.

DISTRIBUTING REPORTS Making it easy to share your results The reporting module in Silverpop Engage provides a variety of simple but powerful ways to distribute your reports. The report export feature lets you move the results from any report into an Excel spreadsheet with a single click. Additionally, many reports can be made “printer ready”—with a single click, all the navigation and branding is removed and you have a Web page ready to print and distribute.

EXPORTING REPORT DATA Using your mailing data outside of Silverpop Engage Silverpop Engage makes it easy to export the results from any report with a single click. Data can be exported into a variety of formats and then easily reused in other applications. However, if your export needs go beyond even the most complex Silverpop reports, the Export Tracking capability can export all of the raw data used in creating Silverpop’s reports in the Silverpop Engage platform. You can export literally any combination of response data and list fields with just a few clicks, and then use that information with virtually any application that can read CSV or TSV file formats. Best of all, when your external analysis is complete you can load the results back into Silverpop Engage and use it for targeting your next set of campaigns.

To find out more about Silverpop’s Engage solution and how it can benefit your company, please contact us toll-free at 1-866/SILVPOP (745-8767) or email us at [email protected]. Visit us at www.silverpop.com

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