How are our Customers Measuring Email Campaigns?
January 29th, 2008 | Carolyn GrunwaldI’m sure you have heard a difference in opinion about whether an email marketing campaign was a success or not. Funny enough, there may be good reason why these opinions vary. I stumbled on a blog article about measuring response rates on email campaigns. There seems to be a lack of standards when it comes to the way we are measuring email metrics. Also, it seems that many people don’t understand how to measure the email campaign nor are they consistent. Here is a recent study by JupiterResearch/e-Rewards, Inc. which showed that Marketers were not consistent with the measurement used to gage success.
The stats show that many marketers are confused about email metrics and what standards to use. The conscience is that email marketing is not going away; so I guess we need some industry standards as guidelines so we as marketers can speak the same language.
January 31st, 2008 at 5:33 pm
To me email marketing stats are somewhat easy to measure. Its all about clicks,conversions and then revenue associated or influenced by email. The only way you can really tell if your email was compelling is if people clicked on your call to action. The only way to tell that your call to action was compelling is if they converted to an inquiry/lead. If you have enough sophistication built in, you can then track that lead and see if there was any revenue associated with it. Lastly, I loosely look at forward rates.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Carolyn,
I think part of the reason why there are so many ways to measure “success”, or lack thereof, when e-mail marketing is because small businesses are extremely fragmented, both in how they identify themselves… and how they define their overall online marketing objectives.
The fact that roughly 1/2 responded “None of the Above” probably matches up pretty well with those percentage of companies who have no idea whatsoever what they’re doing with measuring any of their online marketing metrics and ROI, let alone the more specific subset of that for e-mail marketing.
But at a more basic level, this assumes that most marketers are direct response-oriented and even care about ROI and results.
Or the most basic question, is touch-feely branding-style marketing really a plan or a cop-out for small businesses?!?
Joshua Feinberg, author/editorial director
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