Now things get really interesting…So far, Metric of the Month has looked at conventional email metrics. Essentially, these ‘campaign based’ metrics examine how the message performed and treat each message as a discreet event. They do not tell you anything about subscriber behaviour over time. Whilst campaign based metrics are useful they can be frustrating because they give you a sense of what, but not why leaving you with more questions than answers.
For example, Email-Worx has an average open rate of 54% so does this mean that after sending out 7 messages, everyone who has signed up has opened at least one message? Probably not. And, more importantly, what should we do to improve our open rate?
To answer these questions and see the full picture of how effective your email programme is, you need to aggregate data from each individual campaign over time, and analyze your results at a subscriber level. This information is invaluable – it will give you a much better understanding of your subscribers’ needs and provide valuable segmentation and targeting opportunities. The first customer engagement metric we recommend is REACH which can be defined as the Cumulative Unique Interactions over a specified time.
Open & Click Reach
Open Reach – cumulative opens is the total number of subscribers who have opened at least one of your emails over the time period you are measuring (12 months in the above example). Your open reach tells you what percentage of your subscriber base has engaged with your email campaigns over a quarter or year, but perhaps more importantly it shows you how many subscribers have not engaged with your brand at all.
The ‘period of time’ you use to select your lapsed subscribers can be based on your product’s lifecycle, and your Reactivation trend – which we’ll cover later in this series.Alchemy Worx has been measuring open reach for around 4 years and have found that a regular monthly newsletter programme will achieve an open reach of between 50 and 65%. Which means that between 35% and 50% of the subscribers to any email campaign we have looked at, did not open a single message in 12 months!
Calculating your open reach requires you to think of your subscribers as individuals or groups of individuals; the first step on the road to personalization and better targeting. A good place to start is to think of ways to reengage the inactive people on your list.
Tracking Open Reach will also give you a better sense of the value of new subscribers because steep increases in open reach often coincide with the addition of new subscribers.
Reach can be calculated for every other metric you measure, and interpreted in the same way as open reach. For example:
Click Reach– highlights a deeper level of subscriber engagement and how relevant and valuable your subscribers find your content. As a benchmark we aim for a click reach of around 50% of the Open reach i.e. 50% of the people that open at least one message go on to click at least once.
Purchase Reach– is probably the most valuable indication of your subscriber engagement and well worth incorporating into your analysis if you have the data available.
Sent / Delivered Reach – is also worth measuring particularly if you do a lot of segmentation.
Last updated: Nov 05, 2014 admin
