I was very happy to hear this. I have always believed that email is a great way to keep your audience informed about your brand, business, or people.
Different digital channels have differing features and advantages. Email is superb at building long term relationships.
And yet most Email Marketers only track Open & Click Rates to measure the effectiveness of a campaign that was sent a few hours or a day ago.
If you truly want to check how well your Email Marketing is doing over a longer period here are a few parameters you should consider:
What’s Long Term? Define what a long term would be for your business. Is it a quarter, half a year, over a few years?
1] Never Open & Never Clicked:
What percentage of your whole list has at least opened or clicked your emails in your long-term time frame?
This percentage should give you an idea of the audience you have never managed to communicate with via this channel. For all these people you have spent your hard fought budget on personalization, on campaign creation, creative and cost of sending email.
– Has the email gone dormant?
– Have they stopped using that email address and moved to another?
– Or perhaps they just haven’t unsubscribed yet
– Is the email is going in their spam folder?
– You’ve emailed them too much or too less
– They’re just not interested anymore.
There could be many other reasons for inactivity.
This number is very different from your bounce list. Bounce reports help you clean up your email database, remove old and incorrect email addresses. Never opened & never clicked on the other hand are customers who are not engaged with you.
How can you engage them?
– Could you activate these customers with a special promotion program?
– Could you ask for a feedback via call or email what your audience would like to see?
– Ask them to update their email?
– Use a deadline for a gift/incentive?
2] Time Spent On Site
For a B-2-B website I ran a comparison of time spent on the website by visitors from various channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, email campaigns, and paid search.
The people who came from email saw the most number of pages.
Along with time spent on site, another indication of actively engaged audience is the number of pages they view.
A reader who has given her email address to you, has opened your email, clicked on a link has invested a lot of time with you.
Email audiences are quite engaged.
However this metric needs to be compared to other channels for your business to see where your most engaged audience is coming from.
3] List Growth
How has your email list been growing year on year? Is there a number that you track? Has it grown? Dipped?
Often overlooked, this metric tells you about how large is your audience.
– Where did the email address come from? Trade show? Business request?
– Of the people who registered online for email subscription, where did they come from? Paid ads? Organic search?
– They want to hear from you, but about what?
Knowing why readers are interested in your message is to get halfway there. Perhaps you ran a campaign for a specific promotion. Will the readers be interested after the promotion period is over?
These three metrics don’t need to be measured frequently. Every quarter or half year might be good enough, however they help you see a thirty thousand view of your Email Marketing progress.
About the Author:
Geetanjali is passionate about Digital Marketing. She’s used Internet enablers for business since the dot-com boom. As a consultant, she helps companies use digital channels to improve their sales. She writes about digital marketing at various magazines and blogs at ContactArt.in