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Resolution #1: It's Time to Track Your Results
By Regina Brady
At the end of 2001 my crystal ball told me the economy would start to pick up during the first half of 2002, and that by the end of the year, marketers would enjoy resurgence in business. These days, I use that crystal ball as a paperweight.
Now it's another new year. Times are tough. You've had to figure out how to do more with fewer resources. It's a challenge, but with creativity and focus you can find some bright lights on the current, murky landscape. Many marketers have spent the last couple of years building better Web sites with more functionality. These marketers are seeing a higher percent of their revenue generated on the Web, and with good technology they also are seeing lower order entry costs and customer service costs.
E-mail goes hand-in-hand with Web marketing. And "everybody" is using e-mail—particularly to communicate with customers. We've all read the studies that show the ROI from e-mail can be significantly stronger than from other channels. I'm a firm believer in the power of e-mail.
But here's the million-dollar question: Do you really know what e-mail means to your company?
I've recently noted an alarming trend: A substantial number of marketers aren't measuring results. The Direct Marketing Association published its 5th Annual E-commerce Survey earlier this year and reported that only 34 percent of marketers measure the effectiveness of interactive media (including e-mail). Only 43 percent use segmentation techniques on their customer files. In September, MarketingSherpa surveyed close to 2,000 e-mail marketing professionals and found only 60 percent track their e-mail results. Yikes!
I hope you're in the right bucket and are among those already analyzing performance. If you don't track results, you can't improve. And in today's environment you want every edge available to wring out possible sales and profits.
Looking to the year ahead, here are some ideas to help you watch your own e-mail efforts—and hopefully to give you a starting point for more e-marketing success in 2003.
Watch Open Rates
Open rate refers to the number or percentage of e-mails opened in a campaign, and usually this figure is only available for HTML messages. Use open rates only as a comparative metric. They aren't a true indication of how many people actually viewed your message, but watching them will give you an indication of what is happening with your e-mails.
And don't look at just one campaign—there are multiple factors that might affect a particular e-mail promotion. Examine your open rates for a six- or eight-week period in aggregate. This will establish a baseline. Then you can monitor subsequent performance against the baseline over time to see if it goes up or down. If it starts to consistently erode, that's a wake-up call.
Track Click-throughs
This measures how many recipients clicked on a link within a campaign. Most campaigns have more than one link. Total click-throughs provides an aggregate view of all click activity, even though one individual may click on multiple links or on the same link multiple times. You also should look at unique click-throughs, which will be lower but provide a more accurate reading of individuals who click.
This is a very important metric to watch, but it also can be overwhelming to make sense of results. You likely have multiple links in each campaign and a regular e-mail schedule. Here are some ways to approach measurement:
Measure Conversions or Web Site Sales
This is where "the rubber meets the road." You already may be able to track sales resulting from e-mails on your site or through a later match-back process, but you may not get immediate tracking of results.
There is tracking functionality offered by many e-mail deployment companies. I call it "buy-rate tracking." It requires an hour or two from your IT department; but you'll then be able to associate sales (usually total sales and total number of items purchased) on a list by list, segment by segment or individual level. And the results are usually integrated directly into your e-mail reporting dashboard.
With this capability you can turn your analytical group loose to uncover the gold within your e-mail list. And it will allow you to develop segments for future marketing efforts.
So, make a New Year's resolution to track and analyze your e-mail results. I guarantee the effort will be worth it.
Regina Brady is president of Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions, a direct and e-mail marketing consultancy. She can be reached at (203) 838-8138 or reginabrady@compuserve.com.
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