Time to take a deeper look at your email

Some members of the Email Marketing Council recently published a paper introducing a new email metric called open reach. This metric very simply measures the proportion of your list that opens at least one email over a period of time. The authors of the paper (of which I am one) would freely admit that this metric is not the panacea for email marketing success. What this paper highlights however, is that email marketers need to start looking at their performance metrics differently to drive our email programmes forward.

Change hats
The first change is to take our marketer's hat off and start thinking like an email recipient. Marketers tend to look at email programmes as a series of discreet events.

Recipients view all of their interactions with your brand in their totality, regardless of channel, message, or service being sought. While most businesses strive to get this single customer view, very few have achieved it.

That is not an excuse however, for not looking at our email programmes in totality. We need to stop looking at campaign-level process metrics and instead look at user-level performance metrics.

The question should not be whether a 25% open rate for a newsletter programme is good but rather, "how many of my recipients have interacted with my email marketing in the last 12 months?"

The second change is to stop focusing so much attention on rates and percentages. These are useful for comparison purposes but are useless in the absolute.

Getting a high open or click-through rate is very simple; all you need to do is limit the mailing to the recipients whom you know open and click regularly. This approach might get you a great bonus the first year but when the revenue from your email programme quickly dries up as your send volume shrinks, you are looking at a P45.

Stop focusing on rates and focus on traffic
How many people saw your brand in their inbox, how many got the message by opening it, how many extra hits to your website did you get because they clicked, and finally how many extra sales were generated off the back of the email? Marketing is a numbers game and as the cliché goes, you have to be in it to win it.

This brings me on to the last point, that you need to get a thorough understanding of the value driven by your email programme. Notice that I used the word value and not revenue.

Surprising research
It is important to understand not only the revenue but also the direct and opportunity costs driven by each interaction with your email. In the Open Reach paper we discovered that more value was driven by a recipient opening once rather than a recipient opening a second email over the period.

That insight lead to the conclusion that we should apply our limited time and budget at getting as many people to open one as possible. If people opened more than one that was great, but focusing our energies there was not the most efficient approach.

This is a little counterintuitive and would certainly not be the case in all situations but until you have a deeper understanding of these performance metrics, you will not be able to reach these insights.

For too long email marketers have focused on campaign process metrics of opens, clicks, etc. You need to focus on recipients rather than campaigns and start to answer questions like "who on my list has interacted in the last six months and how has that interaction impacted the bottom line?" It is time to stop looking at the symptoms and start looking at the performance metrics that really drive your business.

Skip Fidura, Managing Director, dotAgency