Email Marketing Metrics:
Looking Beyond Open and Read Rates
By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak
February 1, 2008
There has been a lot of discussion surrounding email marketing metrics, most of which has been relatively negative. The lack of standards remains a major issue to the email marketing industry as it is responsible for confusion and skewed results. Cross-industry email marketing benchmarks, which once were considered standard, are now virtually useless as the data is not collected or measured in the same way. In order to overcome this obstacle, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Email Committee defined its own metrics last year, and these same issues are currently being addressed by David Daniels from Jupiter Research and the Email Measurement Accuracy Coalition, which is driving to establish a consistent methodology for calculating email delivery rate – the metric that all other metrics are measured against. Once these standards are put in place, organizations will have a much clearer understanding of their email campaign performance. However, campaign performance doesn’t have to be measured solely on the percentage of subscribers who opened or read a message. There are other ways to determine the success of a campaign, and many of these items provide additional subscriber data that may be used to target and segment the list.
Listrak, a leading provider of email marketing solutions, has put together the following guide to email marketing metrics, including clickstream data, geo-tracking reports, visual overlays, heatmaps, and graphing tools, which will help marketers understand how recipients are using their email campaigns. After all, knowing the overall percentage of recipients who clicked on your email is important, but knowing what action they took on the landing page, and being able to identify a geographic location that has generated a higher concentration of clicks, and visually representing statistics across multiple campaigns, gives you even greater insight into your subscriber base.
