By Louise Dixon
The performance of e-mail campaigns is one of the easiest public relations activities to measure. But, according to Jupiter Research, a quarter of all marketing and public
relations executives either don't bother to measure their e-mail performance or are unsure what the various metrics mean. Internet Retailer reports that 18.7% of bulk e-mail
senders don't even know what their open rates are.
If you're among those not tracking performance, you're most likely diluting your results. So be sure to understand the metrics that your bulk e-mail service provides. Here's a
start on a few key metrics:
Open Rates
All major e-mail services provide open rate or read rate numbers that show just how many people bothered to click on the e-mail you sent them. The trouble begins when you
realize that not all providers calculate the rates in the same way. This can skew your performance against benchmarks for the industry or type of communication. But it's a tiny
issue compared to actually getting reasonable benchmarks for comparison.
Generally, marketers selling a product or service consider open rates higher than 24% to constitute a highly successful campaign.
As a PR professional, you'd consider that number far too low if you were e-mailing a newsletter to a company's employees. They're most likely to be highly interested in what's
going on where they work. The same would be true if you were communicating with a highly targeted audience about an issue they've said they're highly interested in - such as an
environmental or public works project close to their homes. If a person willingly subscribed to your list, as opposed to signing up only to access a white paper or to obtain a
free offer, open rates should be higher.
Open rates really start to mean something when you begin comparing the performance of e-mails sent over time to the same group. Evaluating an on-going campaign allows you to
consider other factors such as subject line length, the content, the day and time you e-mailed, and more to see what works best and what doesn't.
Bounces
A bounce occurs when an e-mail simply doesn't land where you intended it to land. There are dozens of reasons for this -- from the recipient's e-mail service being temporarily
disconnected to simply having an invalid address.
Most providers will give you bounce information that's broken down into sub-codes so you can tell whether the bounce was a temporary issue or permanent one. Temporary bounces
would include those you get when there's a bad connection, when the e-mail is filtered and when an e-mail box is full.
Bounces that are more serious include those to a bad domain (the @xyz.com portion of the e-mail address) and those to a good domain, but an unknown
user.
If your database is small and you know something about the recipients, you might simply scroll through the addresses for the bounces to see if you catch something awry. By
scrolling through the bounces of one recent e-mail campaign, we were able to fix about 10% of the hard bounces. About a dozen e-mails bounced at a company that had changed its
name and its URL. The e-mail convention was the same and by simply correcting the domain name we delivered the e-mails without deleting the records from our database.
Sending to a Friend
Allowing e-mail recipients to forward the e-mail to a friend by clicking a button and typing in the e-mail address and short message is a good way to expand your database. A
recent e-mail performance study found that most "send to a friend" buttons were hard to find or at the end of the e-mail. If you want people to forward your e-mails, provide a
prominent invitation.
Click-thru Rates
Most marketers send e-mail that contains some type of offer. To get the full details of the offer, recipients must click a link to a Web site page. It's a good way to gauge
just how many people who opened the e-mail cared enough about the contents to take the next step.
For public relations and marketing professionals, a good click-thru rate might be 2% of the e-mails sent. Without the tight connection between e-mail and a Web site, you lose
valuable information.
For news items, try using only the headline and maybe a teaser paragraph in the e-mail along with a link to read more on the Web site.
Most service providers can tell you how many total clicks your e-mail generated as well as what URLs were clicked and what files were downloaded. By telling your audience
specifically what is behind the click you'll ensure that you get valid information about the interest in your offer.
*When to Send an E-mail
There's simply no definitive answer to this question. You must ask:
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Are you sending mainly to home addresses or worksite addresses?
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Are you talking to people about an issue they associate with work or with leisure?
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Are you asking people to spend time with your e-mail?
All these issues impact your decision on when to send. E-mail services can tell you when e-mail was opened and you'll quickly see that most of the "reads" occur in the first 24
hours.
Benchmarking studies that show the days and times when most e-mails are read don't tell you much about the content of the e-mails or compare to the number of e-mails sent.
Personal testing is the only sure way to establish the best day and time to send your messages to your audiences.
Need benchmarking information? Your e-mail service can provide stats on these
metrics that are culled from the e-mails they send. For more detailed analysis
by industry, check out the MarketingSherpa's 2007 e-mail benchmarking guide.
It's available for a small fee from http://www.marketingsherpa.com.
PRN
CONTACT:
Louise Dixon is the principal of Carolina Public Relations/Marketing, Inc. She can be reached at [email protected].