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E-commerce Link : Does Your List Measure Up?

How to slice and dice your e-mail list and measurement

April 2009 By Regina Brady
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As direct marketers, you know “the devil is in the details.” Being able to drill down on results is important to determine future strategies. Then you can fine-tune your results, target better and reap the rewards.

Give Your List an Annual Physical
It’s wise to make an appointment with your doctor for an annual physical. It’s just as important to determine the health of your list. Use your “churn” rate as one metric to assess your overall list fitness.

Picture a bucket with a leak. Once you determine how much fluid leaks out, you can determine how much additional liquid you’ll have to add to keep the level in the bucket even or increase capacity. With e-mail, the negative factors that reduce list size are opt-outs, hard bounces, soft bounces retired after a certain threshold is hit and spam complaints. The frequency of e-mail campaigns also affects churn. A monthly e-mail results in losses to your list size; campaigns that are sent twice weekly (or eight times a month) incur many more opportunities for churn.

To examine churn, you want to log the number of names you have at the start of a year and then plot, over time, the average patterns you’ve seen for each of the negative factors mentioned. Create a simple spreadsheet and chart this activity for a year, based on the frequency of your campaigns. This allows you to see how many new names must be added to stay steady or to increase your list by a factor that you set.

Examine Performance Attributes
Your e-mail database should be composed of multiple fields. Now may be the time to rethink the data you collect at sign-up and add additional fields.

Most e-mail systems allow you to run queries and analyze performance based upon the data fields that have been set up for the list. It takes preplanning to do this right. And there is no magic bullet. What is right for one marketer may not be practical to another. Consider the following:

• Maintain the source of each name. You might separately code site e-mail sign-ups, names collected from contests or sweepstakes, appended names, trade show leads, and more. Each source is likely to perform differently, so the addition of this field to your database should give you valuable insights. For example, you may find contests and sweepstakes as a source yields very low opens and clickthroughs, while e-mail addresses collected during checkout perform remarkably well. This allows you to fine-tune your marketing strategy and invest in efforts that yield the most responsive names.

 

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