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Quantitative
Metrics: The key to successful email campaigns.
There
can be little doubt that email campaigns have swiftly become
the marketing managers best friend. The apparent cost effectiveness
and speed of preparation has been difficult to resist. No
longer does regular contact with customers require enormous
lead-times, printing and postage costs. From conception to
completion, email campaigns can in some cases take little
longer than a day or two.
But
for many organisations the missing ingredient to really successful
email campaigns is adequately assessing what email is actually
doing for them. The biggest plus point with e-marketing after
all, is the ability to track, analyse and learn all manner
of key information regarding campaign performance. Through
performance measuring, details such as delivery, open and
click-though rates should be considered elementary. There
is evidence however, that many organisations don't even measure
these basic indicators. Instead, they simply put faith in
the modern marketing approach and believe it's the way things
are done. Crudely relying this type of rule of thumb measuring
and simply attributing an increase in sales to a recent marketing
campaign can obviously be dangerous, leading to mistakes in
future campaigns.
Sophisticated
email campaigns planners are not only measuring the basics
but also joining this up with website analytics. In many ways
marketing emails should be considered as an extension to a
website, attempting to seduce potential customers so that
they click a link and continue through to a predetermined
goal. These very same web statistics can also highlight some
unexpected results. After all people may be ignoring the campaign
goal and instead making a purchase elsewhere on the site or
indeed making no purchase at all. Marketing managers should
also be asking themselves if sending out an email midday on
a Friday produces a bigger response than first thing on a
Monday for instance. Simple technical issues can also come
to light such as web server performance during times of high
demand? Occasionally it may emerge that visitors are initially
gathering product information and purchasing several days
later? These are just a few examples, but there are a multitude
of questions we can and should be asking.
The
electronic feedback email provides is in any case where its
strength really rests. By ensuring emails are adequately tagged
and monitored, tapping into this data gives marketers an opportunity
to learn something about their customers and to hone future
campaigns for even better results and therefore good return
on investment (ROI). Unlike traditional marketing methods
where such instant, quality and in-depth information is rarely
available, or at best a little unreliable.
How
email recipients respond and the subsequent actions they take
is becoming much more important than just the measurement
of click-throughs etc. There is little use in getting all
excited over basic click data without following the entire
trail to its logical conclusion. High click-throughs could
just mean someone did an excellent job on the email creative
side, yet some other factor effectively spoilt the party.
Often it may just be that something fairly simple needs modifying
or tweaking in some way. Just a few small adjustments here
and there can have a dramatic outcome.
For
those who want to get the most out of their email campaigns
its essential that conversion tracking along with post click
and post view are properly monitored and analysed. Post click
illustrates the actions of web site visitors after clicking
through from an email, whereas post view provides details
of the people who visited the web site at a later date. Adopting
this kind of 'proof of the pudding……' approach
has to be more logical. It is after all results that count
not meaningless statistics.
This
article is free to republish provided the resource information
below remains intact.
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