Email Marketing Metrics: Optimizing your Goals, Benchmarks, and Statistics
By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak
May 25, 2007
More and more companies are embracing email marketing as it provides a way for marketers to communicate important company news to their subscribers immediately and inexpensively. Plus, unlike other direct marketing initiatives, email marketing provides an easy way for marketers to track deliverability, set benchmarks, and generate reports on subscribers’ usage and response. And, because many email marketing products are now integrated with web analytics packages, such as Google Analytics, the amount of information available to marketers is greater than ever before. While this is great news for marketers, it can be somewhat confusing at first.
Currently, there is no standardization in the email marketing industry for measuring and reporting on metrics. However, in April of this year, the Email Measurement Accuracy Coalition was formed to establish consistent methodologies in calculating email marketing metrics1. This is good news for email marketers as email service providers all have their own way of tracking results.
Recently, the Email Experience Council, a member of the EMAC, conducted a study of 329 mailers and 25 email service providers and they found that companies use conflicting metrics when it comes to delivery, open, and click-through rates. It also found inconsistency in bounce data provided by ISPs, corporate domains, and other email receivers, as well as inadequate bounce management and confusion surrounding the key processes effecting deliverability. Most alarmingly, the survey also found a discrepancy in the definitions that each ESP applies to the metrics. So not only are they tracking them differently, they have a completely different view on which each metric means.
As a marketer, you depend on these numbers to determine subscriber preferences so your future campaigns are relative, informative, and delivered in the way that best suits your customers. You also depend on these numbers to determine the effectiveness of each campaign as well as your return on investment.
Listrak, an award winning provider of email marketing services, has put together the following white paper to help you learn how to set practical goals, track campaign results correctly, build effective benchmark reports, and increase your overall results using the statistics collected through each campaign.
1 Listrak will publish a white paper on the standardized metrics as soon as they are available
