Simple Example

Revenue for Time Period or Message: $189,433

Delivered Emails: 997,015

Rev/Del: $0.19

How it Helps: The revenue per delivered email metric provides a nice constant when comparing various email efforts. Campaign 1 may have a 25% CTR and $38,000 while Campaign 2 has a 28% CTR and $52,000. The latter may appear to have performed better (and in terms of total revenue it obviously did). But in the scenario that Campaign 1 was delivered to 80,000 and Campaign 2 was delivered to 260,000, the former outperforms with a rev/del of $0.47 compared to $0.20.

For far less effort, Campaign 1 in this example produced over 2X revenue for every email delivered. This is very helpful when comparing promotions, weekly/monthly/quarterly reports, and types of email efforts, such as segmented vs. non-segmented campaigns.

Get your data together and start reviewing some email reports!

For this post, we’ll focus on Google Analytics. Some email platforms will have turn-key integration which makes things effortless on your end as every URL in every email will automatically be appended with tracking parameters specific to your account and send.

However, many email service providers don’t provide integration with Google Analytics, but you can still get the same tracking with a few extra steps:

1. Visit the Google URL Builder

2. Enter in information that is specific to your email program and campaigns (this can be fairly top-level or get drilled down).

3. Generate the URL and copy the appending variables. Example: ?utm_source=ESP1&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=TextLinkA&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Feb15thNewsletter

4. Add your tracking code to the end of all links in your email (starting with the ?utm_source=…)

To make it simple, you can create 1 tracking URL to use on every link in a given email send. For a more detailed approach, you can create a different tracking URL for EACH link you have. While this may take some extra time, it can give you some helpful insights on your email efforts.

The much easier solution, however, is to use an ESP (email service provider) that supports integration with Google Analytics. In future posts we will be discussing various ESPs and suggestions for what to look for.

Cheers,

Forest

One area often overlooked is having a breakdown of your subscriber’s email domains. Knowing this information can be quite helpful when developing your creative. If you find a large portion on one domain, it may justify segmenting them and developing a separate creative optimized specifically for that domain.

Some email platforms will give you a quick graphic breakdown. If not, you can always do a sort in Excel and manually determine your ratios.

Below are breakdowns from 3 different clients I work with

Here we see some differing stats. In the 1st and 3rd example, Yahoo represents 5.6% at max, while the 2nd client has over 25% of subscribers with Yahoo addresses. We can also see that in the 3rd example at least 22% is represented by education or government addresses.

Looking at these three, I was surprised at the low amount of gmail addresses. We see 9.3% in the 2nd example, but none in the 1st and 3rd!

Takeaways

1. Every list will be different and it’s helpful to know how YOUR list breaks down

2. Knowing this breakdown will aid in testing your email creative on different domains. You should be testing on more than your breakdown, but this can provide priority.

3. If you find a large portion on one domain (25%+), it may justify putting resources into segmenting those users and providing creative optimized specifically for that domain. If you’re list is very small, this will be overkill.

4. Also consider segmenting by domain and testing deliverability. (Note – some email platforms will do this automatically).

Cheers,

Forest

Questions or inputs? Feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Nothing has changed with the fact that testing should be implemented and will inevitably improve your email marketing efforts. I do feel, however, that there can be a risk of over-testing, or ‘testing burnout,’ if you will. This mostly comes down to available resources a company has and the expected return on marginal testing programs. If we put 10X more resources into testing and only realize an x% increase in sales, our testing program could be producing negative returns.

This has a more costly effect on smaller companies, as the scale of return is much smaller. [The marginal return from an x% increase in open or click rate is much larger for a big company with a list size of 5,000,000 vs. a small company with a list size of 5,000.]

For that small company, testing is indeed important. They need to make improvements to their email marketing efforts and increase sales just like every other company. But at some point a negative return is realized.

Example

• Let’s say a small e-commerce site selling backpacks has a list size of 15,000. Their monthly promotional email brings in $1,350 on average. [25% open, 12% click, 5% conversion, $60 average order]
• This company creates a testing plan that will require an additional 3 hours per month of company resources.
• After the test, they increase their metrics to: [28% open, 15% click, 5% conversion, $60 average order]. In this case we see a $540 increase in revenue. Perhaps a decent result for the small e-tailer. Their gross testing return was $180/hour.
• Now let’s say they create a testing plan that is more robust and requires an additional 30 hours of company resources each month. (compared to no testing)
• After the new testing program, they increase their metrics to: [30% open, 19% click, 6% conversion, $62 average order]. In this case we see an $1,830 increase in revenue. Their gross testing return was $61/hour. Depending on their margins and several other unknown factors, this may or may not be a profitable scenario

These same metrics with a big competitor would have a much different result. e.g. If another company had a list size of 750,000, their marginal return on the last scenario would be $91,530 with a $3,051/hour testing return. Probably quite favorable.

So where do you find that testing equilibrium? It comes down to the unique situation of each business. Regardless of size, start small with your testing program and work up from there. Pay close attention not only to the increased results of your tests, but the amount of resources that go into your various testing programs. Time for different content, designers, approval, segmentation, deployment, review & analysis etc, can add up when you are introducing complex testing strategies.

In the end, you should test to see what testing portfolio is optimal for your email efforts.

Cheers,

Forest Bronzan 

Questions or thoughts? Leave a comment or feel free to shoot me an email

There are of course several other elements besides the subject line that you can be testing. But first, a few things to keep in mind:

1. Why Test?: To get better results. If you are not testing, you are not fully leveraging the email channel and not getting the best return on your efforts. Testing allows us to make incremental improvements to our email metrics. Below is a simplified visual description of the email funnel, where every metric counts. In this example, an additional 3% click through rate would result in 28 additional sales.

2. Be Structured: select a variable to test and keep other variables as constants. You will want to isolate your variable in order to test each variable independently.

3. Create a Plan: Don’t just go in and start testing. Create a structured plan of how you are going to implement your tests and keep detailed records of metrics so you can use the data to make meaningful adjustments to your program.

Some Elements to Test

• Subject Line
• From Line
• Content
• Creative
• Number of Links
• Promotion
• HTML vs. Plain Text
• Frequency
• Time of Day
• Day of Week
• Pre-Header Content
• Text to Image Ratio
• Landing Pages
• Location of Images
• Personalization

With the availability of tools to help us execute our testing strategy, there is no reason email marketers should not have a testing plan in place. Proper testing can help us make key incremental improvements to our marketing programs. If you’re starting out, start small and simple and build up from there. If you are running a sophisticated program, make sure you have a road map in place and system for accountability and measurement.

Happy testing!

- Forest Bronzan | Follow Me on Twitter!

Questions or thoughts? Leave a comment or feel free to shoot me an email

Many people ask about ‘average metrics’ with the desire to see how their campaigns are measuring up. Some industry wide statistics may be interesting and somewhat useful, but even more value comes out of measuring your campaigns with your own previous metrics. Every company is different and every list will behave in a different way. While it may be nice to know that the average open rate in the first half of 2008 was 24.86% for the transportation and travel industry, I would be very interested in knowing that MY travel company’s open rate was 22% during that period and now averages 26%.

Moral of the story here:

1. Look at some big industry averages, but pay closer attention to how your campaigns compare to your own historical metrics.

2. In addition to viewing and keeping track of metrics on a campaign or monthly basis, establish a system for keeping historical records of all the metrics you track.

Below is an example of a monthly snapshot of metrics. (Note these are arbitrary numbers for illustration)

(Click on image to enlarge)

It’s nice to see how our campaigns performed in that month, but I also want to see how they did compared to my own historical average. Comparing just to the previous month does not give us an accurate picture of how things are doing. One of the simplest methods is to create a trailing twelve month record. If you are keeping track of metrics each month, pull the average for the previous 12 months. This helps correct natural variance and provides a better picture of the direction your campaigns are going.

Below is a simplified example of how this might look for you. (Note these are arbitrary numbers for illustration)

(Click on image to enlarge)

In this example, we can see that compared to the previous 12 months, our total revenue this month was $2,266 lower. If we were looking just at the previous month we may be higher for certain metrics, but this does not paint an accurate picture of performance.

Setting up a historical benchmark guide for your email program will provide you great insight on how your campaigns are performing. In addition to looking at averages as we have focused on in this post, you can compare months, quarters etc. This can then be as simple or complex as you need and want to implement.

Questions or thoughts? Leave a comment or feel free to shoot me an email.

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It is, however, important to focus on the right (or best for a given situation) metrics – and talking about email marketing, it’s important to not measure success on one metric alone.

Different goals call for different metrics. What is the focus of your email campaigns? Is it a product recall announcement, brand-building newsletter, order reminder, special promotion, announcement of a new store?  Each of these would prioritize a different set of metrics.

For the product recall example, you’re probably not concerned that your sale conversion rate is near non-existent, but do want to make sure the message was opened and read. For your big email promotion email, it does not matter much if everyone opened the email, but no one made a purchase.

Below is a starter list of email marketing metrics:

1. Open Rate: [ratio of unique opens to total delivered] Don’t get too caught up here. Some companies base their entire success on the open rate. Do monitor this metric for every send, but don’t make it the only metric you monitor.

2. CTR (Click Through Rate): [ratio of unique clicks to total delivered or unique opens] The CTR can be helpful, especially when you have different links and you monitor the CTR for each. Knowing that your ‘Basketball Shoes’ link had a CTR of 39% while your ‘Soccer Shoes’ was 10% can be helpful.

3. Conversion Rate: [ratio of a 'goal' conversion to the total click through, or opens] If you are an e-commerce site, the conversion rate from your email initiatives is pretty important. In this case, the percent of visitors from the email that made a purchase. If you find that Promotion/Campaign X converts at 10% while another at 1%, you have some valuable data to work with.

4. Campaign Revenue: In addition to the previous metric, how much revenue did a campaign (or group of campaigns) bring in? This of course can be monitored for different email sends, or based on time to see how much money the email channel brings by month, quarter etc.

5. Bounce Rate: [ratio of bounced emails to total sent] This metric is universal no matter what the goals of your campaign are. Increasing bounce rate = look into the issue quickly. While not really as sexy as the conversion rate or total revenue, it is very important and will affect other metrics.

6. Delivery Rate: [ratio of delivered emails to total sent] See comments from Bounce Rate — the same apply, but here: decreasing delivery rate = look into the issue quickly.

7. Opt-Out (or Unsubscribe) Rate:[ratio of opt-outs to total delivered] Clearly we want to keep this one low. We will inevitably have some occurrences of subscribers no longer wanting our emails, but we need to monitor this metric to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand.

8. Link Revenue: Going off of our campaign revenue, let’s dig a little deeper and see how much money each specific link in our email is generating.

9. Time-Delay Metrics: What percent of our opens, or clicks, conversion etc occur on the day the email was sent? Within 3 days? Within 7 days? 2-4 weeks? On a somewhat related note, when providing reports to clients, we like to do so in delay, to account for that delayed engagement.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, some metrics won’t be a priority for all emails. It’s important to know what your goals are for a particular campaign and for your email channel at large. This will let you identify and prioritize your key performance indicators. This data will then allow you to make meaningful decisions and improvements to your email efforts.

In a future post, we will discuss the importance of creating your own historical benchmark guide.

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Too many marketers try to follow ‘day of week’ trends from big stats groups. I recommend against paying too much attention to what national surveys say for two reasons:

A. If a report says ‘Tuesday’ is the best day to send, and everyone in the country starts sending on Tuesday (I know it’s a bit exaggerated), then Tuesday would quickly diminish in quality with everyone being blasted with emails.

B. More importantly — every industry is different, every company is different, and every list has the capability of behaving differently.

So then what is the best day to send email? Let’s look at a few elements:

1. B2B or B2C? If your subscriber persona is a strict 9-5 business employee, then Friday at 4 or over the weekend probably isn’t the best idea.

2. Are Weekends Always Bad? No. In the example above, I wouldn’t recommend weekends. But what about a B2C product that targets mothers age 35-45? Might they be logging in some email checking over the weekend? I vote yes. I had one client that tested a weekday vs. weekend for a similar type of audience and saw a 85% increase in conversion with the weekend groups.

3. What about Monday? Going off of the 1st example, Monday probably isn’t too great either (aren’t you quite busy getting back to work on Monday?). This leaves us with 3-4 days for testing our B2B sends.

4. So Tues/Wed/Thurs for B2B? That looks like a decent starting point, but still does not completely answer our question of what the best day is to send email.

What to Do:

A. Know what you want to accomplish. Is your main goal a quick read for a timely notice, a click through to read more content, a click through and purchase of a product? etc…

B. Understand your recipient’s profile. Create a persona around them and among other things, determine what they are doing at different times and on different days. When will they be most likely to engage in the way that you want them to?

C. Use some common sense to eliminate some possibilities.

D. TEST. We love to throw this around, but it’s true. Do some day of week and time of day testing and you may be very surprised at what you find. If there is a huge difference, then great – you have now identified some valuable information for YOUR email program. If after significant testing you find microscopic difference between day 1, 2, or 3 then you now have some flexibility.

E. Test again.

For those marketers that don’t want to take the time to work through the elements above and must have a quick answer, I vote Wednesday at 3:00pm or Thursday at 9:30am

- Forest Bronzan

Follow me on Twitter

Other posts you might find of interest:

Introduction to Email Segmentation

Email List Building Mistakes

There is no exception with email marketing. With proper analytics integration, we can see how much money (or how many leads) a specific email campaign produced; compare the dollar value of different links within the email; segment out high-value subscribers for more targeted campaigns; and the list goes on. This is key for any email initiative, no matter how small.

However, one analytics item that I see a lot of email marketers omit is call tracking. A call tracking platform allows you to create new numbers (auto-directing them to any number you want) and have detailed metrics about your calls. On a simple level, it is nice to have more information about your incoming calls, but more importantly it’s key to see what campaigns are generating what calls to your business.

Now if you only sell online and have no number to reach you, then this is obviously obsolete. But if you take sales orders over the phone, receive phone leads, or have customers call for other information, call tracking is very important. For the calls to your business last month, do you know how many were from site visitors that came to your site through your email initiative?

While call tracking can be helpful for all of your online marketing efforts, let’s look briefly at how it works with your email program.

1.Create Call Tracking Number: The first step would be to create a call tracking number to use for your email initiative. On a basic level, this could be one number that is used for all email activity. To get more granular, you can create different numbers for different campaign categories. Don’t go overboard though unless it makes sense for your list and size of business.

2. Static Number Within the Email: The starting point would then be to have this number in the actual email that goes out (wherever you normally have your toll free or local number). This way anyone that makes a call after receiving the email will be tracked.

3. Dynamic from Click-Through: Taking it one step further; we have the number on your website dynamically change to our email number if someone clicks through from the email. This then allows us to see how many calls came in from the website specifically from people that clicked through from our email. Only those visitors will see this call tracking number, all other site visitors will see the standard number (or whatever other call tracking rules you have in place).

This may sound complicated, but with the right platform it is pretty quick to implement. In a nutshell: a small piece of code is placed on every page of the site where there is a phone number. Another line of tracking code is placed on the end of all links within the email. Finally a quick instruction on the call tracking platform admin and you’re ready to start reviewing metrics!

One more cool thing: with many call tracking platforms (the one I license has this), you can have a quick ‘whisper’ audio clip play right before the receiving end connects with the caller. Something like: “email call” so your sales team answering the phones knows the source.

- Forest Bronzan

Follow me on Twitter

Other posts you might find of interest:

Best Day to Send Email

Introduction to Email Segmentation

Email List Building Mistakes

In a previous post I commented on a nice subject line from Blinds.com. A/B Subject line testing is usually the quickest place to start of you are new to email marketing testing, and one of the easiest tests to have in place if you are already running more complex testing programs.

The concept is simple: Test 2 or more different versions of your subject line to see what performs better.

To keep it simple, let’s assume we are using the open rate (number of opened emails/number of delivered emails) as the metric of determining a ‘winner.’ Let’s also assume we are sending to a list of 50,000 subscribers.

Let’s do a sample of 7,500 for each for 2 subject lines, and then roll the winner out to the remaining 35,000 subscribers after 2 days. The diagram below shows this scenario:

In my own testing, I’ve seen everything from near microscopic differences (15.04% vs 15.06%) to significant winners (12% vs. 30%). See how your lists perform under a testing scenario. The larger the list, the greater the impact of even a small improvement. With email marketing, we want to systematically make improvements to all of our key metrics. While one may be more important than the other, they all play an important role in the success of our campaign.

- Forest Bronzan

Follow me on Twitter

Other posts you might find of interest:

Best Day to Send Email

Introduction to Email Segmentation

Email List Building Mistakes