Two weeks ago in Naked Email we discussed how limiting Basic Metrics, which look at the campaign and not subscriber behavior, are. The problem with Open and Click Rates is that they tell you what, but not how or why! This makes it very difficult to know what to do to improve performance. It’s a bit like providing a football coach with nothing but the final score after every game and asking them to win the league without ever watching the team play. To win the league you have to watch every game and analyse how your team, and the individuals within it, perform over time.
Improving the performance of an email campaign requires open, click and conversion rates (the score) to be placed in some sort of context and this can only be done by analyzing subscriber behavior (team performance) over time. Here at Alchemy Worx we start by looking at Reach, how many people interacted with the campaign at least once (and how many did not); Frequency how many times they interacted and Recency how long it has been since their last interaction. Over the next few weeks we’ll be analysing each of these metrics of engagement starting with Reach and showing how we use them to improve the performance of our campaigns.
Email-Worx Reach
The last issue of Email-Worx achieved an open rate of 48%, an increase of 2% over the previous issue, but below the campaign average of 54%. However Issue 7 of Email-Worx took our Open Reach to 80%! This means 80% of you have opened at least one message over the past 4 months. The Click Reach for the same period is 51%.
We have been measuring Reach for multiple campaigns for over 4 years and generally find that over a 12 month period, Open Reach will be between 45% and 65%, and Click Reach will be between 20% and 30%. So as you might expect we are delighted with our numbers. Despite this being the highest reach for both opens and clicks we have ever seen, we actually expected the numbers to be a little higher because everyone who receives Email-Worx opted to do so very recently.
Apart from the overall reach, the graph above also highlights how interactive new subscribers are. In Issue 2 our list grew by 68% and you can see a steep corresponding rise in cumulative opens and clicks. Following that, our reach has increased steadily from a combination of new subscribers and people opening for the first time, even after 7 issues.
One of the most important things that reach highlights is people who have not engaged with your campaign at all and we now know that 20% of our subscribers have never opened a single issue (or have opened without downloading the images) and 49% have never clicked on any link. So our next challenge is to persuade non-openers and non-clickers to engage with Email-Worx.
We will also be trying to ascertain how many non opens are false negatives, i.e. opened with image blocking enabled, by testing an image heavy template designed to encourage image downloads.
Stay tuned to find out how we get on.
See this issue’s Metric of the Month for details of how to calculate your own reach.
Basic Metrics
Issue 7 performed better than the past few issues, with a 22% unique click rate and 48% total click rate. As all other factors have remained stable, we believe the most likely factors influencing these metrics are the content, and the time that has elapsed since people subscribed.
Issue 1 Issue 2 Issue 3 Issue 4 Issue 5 Issue 6 Issue 7
Right Left Right Left Right Left Right
Deployment Date Total / Av
12-Jan-09 26-Jan-09 09-Feb-09 23-Feb-09 09-Mar-09 23-Mar-09 06-Apr-09
Campaign Based Metrics
Pushed / Sent 4,437 388 654 647 659 676 704 709
Total Delivered % 99% 99% 97% 99% 99% 99% 98% 99%
Hard Bounced % 0.7% 0.5% 1.8% 0.2% 0.5% 0.6% 0.9% 0.7%
Soft Bounced 0.7% 0.5% 0.9% 0.8% 0.6% 0.6% 0.7% 0.7%
Interaction Metrics
Opened % 54% 63% 58% 56% 54% 52% 46% 48%
Total clicks % 58% 97% 72% 59% 44% 38% 48% 48%
Unique clicks % 23% 32% 30% 23% 21% 19% 17% 22%
Click to Open Rate 43% 50% 51% 41% 38% 37% 37% 45%
Click Quotient 2.46 3.06 2.41 2.56 2.13 2.02 2.83 2.18
Pass along referrers % 2.5% 4.2% 3.9% 3.3% 2% 1.2% 1.9% 1.1%
Pass along referrers (% of opens) 4.5% 6.6% 6.8% 5.8% 3.7% 2.3% 4.1% 2.4%
Pass along quotient 2.18 2.75 2.08 1.71 2.08 2.25 2.38 2
What You’ve Been Reading
To date, these have been our most popular articles. We’ll be using this information to develop future content, headings and subject lines to make sure we’re giving you what you want.
Issue 2’s Metric of the Month: Think soft bounces are caused by full mailboxes? Think again…
Issue 7’s Email by Design: Using Images: Opportunity or threat?
Issue 5’s Talking Email: Forget relevance – it’s about value!
Issue 4’s Naked Email: Email Worx achieves 58% open rate across the first 3 issues
Last updated: Nov 05, 2014 admin
