You must look beyond open and click-through rates.
Many marketers base the success of their email programs on two misleading stats: open and click-through rates (CTR). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a conversation that goes something like this.
Marketer: Our email program is great. On average we get 30% open and 20% click-through rates.
Me: That is great, but do you know how many conversions you are getting on these emails?
Marketer: Conversions? Sure we are getting a 20% CTR. So those people are interested in what we’re writing about and clicking through the email.
Me: Not how many clicks you’re getting on each email, but how many leads. How many people are downloading a white paper from your email? How many are filling out your contact form? How many are picking up the phone and calling you? Beyond driving traffic to your website, are your emails working to generate and nurture leads?
Marketer: Oh, I have no idea about any of that.
The Problem with Opens and CTRs
Opens and CTRs are a good place to start. They allow you to measure overall engagement and interest in your email.
Measuring those metrics alone, however, can be very deceiving. First of all, open rates are tough to gauge because they are measured only if someone downloads the images from your email. If image blocking is enabled (and I’ve seen that up to 50% of people have image blocking enabled), then they are not being counted in your opens. It is a best practice only to compare the open rate of a particular email to other emails you’ve sent. Comparing to the rest of the industry can be misleading.
Click-throughs can give you a bit more information on which topics are hot among your clients and prospects. Whenever looking at CTRs be sure to look at them along with the email subject line. The subject line is what grabs attention, and if you have multiple topics in your email, it is likely whichever is most closely related to the subject line will get the most clicks.
Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing are the Goals
At the end of the day, the goal of your email marketing program is to generate and nurture leads. If you are just measuring opens and click-through rates on your emails, it is tough to know if you are achieving your goals.
The measurement of your campaigns should tie back to these goals.
- # of new leads: After you send your email are you getting downloads on your website? Phone calls? Email inquiries? Do you have a mechanism to capture this activity after the email is sent? To generate more leads with your emails, set up lead capture forms for your content offerings (white papers, webinar, ebooks, etc.). Then have a follow-up strategy for those who fill out the form and download this content.
- # of qualified leads: Of the leads you generated, how many meet your qualification criteria? Are they good targets for your services? You may find that a white paper on “topic A” generates a high quantity of leads, while a white paper on “topic B” generates fewer overall leads, but those it does generate are much more qualified. If you don’t track it, you’ll never know.
- # of new clients: Can you tie your email marketing efforts directly to new clients? Taking your lead generation tracking a step further, how does your email marketing influence your ability to win new deals? Do you have different white papers and content offers for different parts of the sales cycle?
- # of comments / responses: Did anyone email you in response to a specific, thought-provoking article? Did readers post comments? Are they sharing the content on social networking sites (Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, etc.)? Of course it is much easier to promote this type of sharing and engagement if you make it easy for prospects to share your content by adding social sharing widgets to your site. Track the buzz your email and content generates.
In the ideal world your database would be hooked up to your email marketing program so you can easily capture client data and email behavior every time you send an email.
Most of us do not have this luxury. Regardless, after you send your next email pay attention not only to the opens and CTRs, but also the type of response the email generates and start tracking it.
