One of the great things about email is the fact that you can measure opens and clicks. Which should make it really easy to know what’s working or what isn’t working right? Well not necessarily.
Take Email-Worx as a case in point; 5 issues into the campaign, we can tell you that the average open rate is 56%. This has dropped from a high of 63% in issue 1 by an average of 2.2% an issue. The average unique click rate for the same period is 24% dropping from a high of 31% to 17% in the last issue. Even if you take a close look at the click quotient (average clicks per clicker) and what links are being clicked on as we do below; what campaign based stats don’t tell us is WHY? An even bigger frustration for email marketers is the fact if you don’t know why it is very hard to know what to do to improve.
The problem is the fact that the reporting toolset of almost every ESP provides reports and results by campaign. And thinking about things from a campaign based perspective makes you average. Get it?
What you are doing is looking at averages not segments or people. So for example our open rate for the last 3 issues of Email-Worx has been 56%, 53% and 51% and most people would say that was very good indeed. Assuming it was feasible how would we go about increasing our open rate to 70% and keeping it there? This is the kind of question asked of and by email marketers every day and in almost every case one of two answers is given: Test Test Test
Be more relevant
What should we test? How do we become more relevant? Unfortunately if all you have are campaigned based metrics to work you can only guess at the answers.
The key to understanding what is really going on and knowing what to test and or change, is to analyse customer engagement over time rather than campaign performance. In other words, focus on the people and not the list.
The campaign based metrics we have presented so far may well be hiding invaluable information so we will be able to stop the guessing and start knowing. The next chapter of naked email will expose your behaviour over time and reveal:
• How many of you have opened and/or clicked at least one issue – Reach
• How many people have never opened an issue – Inactive Subscribers
And we will show how we will be using this understanding to optimise customer engagement.
Issue 1 Issue 2 Issue 3 Issue 4 Issue 5 Right Left Right Left Right
Deployment Date
12-Jan-09 26-Jan-09 09-Feb-09 23-Feb-09 10-Mar-09
TOTAL /Av.
Campaign Based Metrics
Pushed / Sent 1,689 388 654 647 659 676
Total delivered % 98% 99% 97% 99% 99% 99%
Hard bounced % 0.8% 0.5% 1.8% 0.2% 0.5% 0.6%
Soft bounced % 0.7% 0.5% 0.9% 0.8% 0.6% 0.6%
Unsubscription % 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Interaction Metrics
Opened % 56% 63% 58% 56% 53% 51%
Total clicks % 58% 93% 70% 54% 40% 33%
Unique clicks % 24% 31% 30% 22% 20% 17%
Click to Open Rate 42% 49% 51% 40% 37% 34%
Click Quotient 2.33 2.98 2.35 2.42 2.02 1.90
Pass along referrers % 2.8% 3.9% 3.6% 3.3% 2.0% 1.0%
Pass along referrers (% of opens) 4.8% 6.2% 6.3% 5.8% 3.7% 2.1%
Pass along quotient 1.83 2.67 1.91 1.38 1.62 1.57
What you’ve been reading
The following 2 charts give a detailed breakdown of what you have been clicking and reading; by content segment and issue. It is still too early to come to any meaningful conclusions however we are interested to see that you find a broad range of our content appealing. We have had a number of internal debates about whether we have too much content, one or two of you have made the same point. The click evidence would seem to indicate that you like having lots of content to choose from while the click quotient average of 2.33 clicks per clicker indicates most of you find more than one topic that engages you in every issue.
Given Email-Worx has been deliberately designed with image blocking in mind we are slightly surprised by the number of clicks on the hosted version. Our guess is that is people are reading Email-Worx on their Blackberry. Stop it! We can’t tell what you are clicking on (just kidding).
We think it looks quite good on a Blackberry too, do you?
The final chart did surprise us a bit and just goes to show that one of the benefits of conducting a forensic audit of your data is that it can yield unanticipated and valuable additional insights. It is generally believed that the more links you have in your message the more clicks you will generate and while we did find this to be true for training and deliverability – just; for most other topics the reverse has been true. In the case of metrics 6% of all the links we have included have generated 26% of the clicks. Good thing the Left Brain issue of Email-Worx is devoted to metrics, do we need more?
Last updated: Apr 20, 2015 admin
