Written By:
Penny Ashley-Lawrence, iContact Manager, Enterprise Services
The holiday shopping season is upon us. Hopefully you’ve made your marketing list and checked it twice.
By November, most of you are already in full swing with your holiday marketing campaigns. But are you also reviewing your metrics and making adjustments? Let’s talk about how to look at your results and make appropriate tweaks. Accurately measuring metrics and drawing the right conclusions can be the difference between a stocking full of coal and a sled full of profits this season.
Opens
Beginners to email marketing often equate a high open rate with a successful email blast. But when you feel the urge to celebrate a high open rate, remember that the importance of a metric is disproportionate to how easy it is to find it. To understand the real success of a campaign, you need to measure it against your goals and to dig deeper into the metrics, including your site analytics.
To help illustrate this point, let’s look at a pretend company called Chloe’s Closet, which sells designer accessories for women. Chloe sends an email using a subject line she thinks has worked well for other retailers. After the email has time to marinate in her subscribers’ in-boxes, Chloe takes a look at her email analytics. She is thrilled to discover a 40% open rate for her email! Chloe is convinced her subject line resulted in a big boost in sales. So what did Chloe miss? A lot.
Clicks
Chloe’s subject line indeed generated interest. When subscribers looked at the email, however, the images were too small, and the call to action was lost in all of her text. The click rate was much lower than the rates for her other emails, but Chloe did not benchmark against her averages. If she had looked at the clicks, she would have realized that the subject line got the opens, but she left revenue on the table because the content and layout did not generate clicks.
Chloe also forgot to check the social media metrics for her message. She included the social media sharing buttons in her email, but the content and layout of her message were so underwhelming that the number of Tweets, Likes, and Shares was well below average. Missing the social media mark meant that her offer didn’t get the exposure it should have.
Bounces on Site
Now let’s pretend Chloe had a great subject line; a beautiful, compelling email; and lots of interest from her subscribers in sharing the offer socially. Her marketing skills paid off and resulted in 5% of her subscribers clicking through to her site. All they have to do now is buy a designer hat! But when Chloe logs into Google Analytics, she sees that 73% of those visitors bounced. Few potential customers clicked or viewed other pages on her site, and even fewer spent money! So what went wrong? Most likely, the landing page did not motivate the subscribers to engage with Chloe’s Closet. It’s a good thing Chloe checked her bounces, because now she can change her landing page or send subscribers to a different page next time. Additionally, Chloe could resend her email to everyone who clicked on her message but did not buy. She could also use social media to promote the offer further and to send people to a more enticing landing page.
Revenue
The perfect email was sent. Opens and clicks were high, and the bounce rate was only 20%. However, revenue was only 50% of what Chloe’s emails normally bring in. What happened, and what can Chloe do to improve? Was the offer attractive? For example, if Chloe offered $20 off any order of $100 or more, could customers find $100 in accessories—typically lower-priced items—that they wanted? Did Chloe’s checkout process change? Did she have adequate inventory of the product she featured in her email? There are many reasons people abandon a shopping trip, but in these cases, it was probably due to the site and NOT the email. This is when you WOULD use opens and clicks to measure the success of the email, and revenue to measure the offer and site usability.
As you continue your holiday marketing campaign, remember to look at all of your metrics, from opens to transactions. Attributing the correct metric to the desired goal can help you make the most effective adjustments to your campaign.
