How long should emails be?

May 31, 2012 By 1 Comment

Turkey dinner

Here’s a wildly popular question: How long should emails be?

Every other Internet marketing “expert” is saying that emails should be getting shorter, shorter, shorter, with anecdotes like “People don’t read any more”. (interestingly, these experts rarely, if ever, provide any data to back up their blanket statements) The reality is a little more complex and highly dependent on what you’re sending. Let’s rephrase the popular question in the form of food. How long should meals be?

Sometimes you want a snack. Sometimes you want to sit down for a meal. Occasionally, you’ll want to have a lengthy dining experience (dinner and a show!). “How long should meals be?” is something of a pointless question without understanding the context in which it’s being asked. How long do you have to eat? A fast food meal might be just the thing if the local chain is next to the office and you have 20 minutes between conference calls.

Here’s a better question: how good is the food?

You are unlikely to sit down for a meal if what’s being served is flavorless gruel. Most people would rather skip that meal than eat bad food.

Your email marketing is no different. If you’re serving the digital equivalent of flavorless gruel to your subscribers, don’t be surprised if they pass on it repeatedly (especially when there are other emails in their inboxes that might have more to offer). You can make your flavorless email a five course meal of misery or a bite-sized portion, and no one will want it.

On the other hand, think about how you approach what you know is going to be a great meal. You might dress up a bit, invite someone special along, set aside some money to afford it, buy some special ingredients if you’re making it yourself – all of these little rituals are part and parcel of going out for a great dinner at a favorite restaurant or cooking it at home. You know the meal is going to be great, and so you set aside time, energy, and resources for it.

If your email marketing is truly great – if you’re serving five-star value – then people will set aside time for you. They will set aside space in their brains and space in their inbox to read what you have to offer, because they know it’s great, in the same way they set aside time for a great meal.

The answer to the question of how long emails should be is less relevant than the answer to how great your email is. Make your email as great as your favorite dining experience, and people will make room for you in their schedules.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Content Marketing

6 ways to make your email marketing more human

May 30, 2012 By 1 Comment

WhatCounts Email Summit 2011

One of the cardinal rules of social media is “be human”, which is general advice suggesting that companies interact with their customers using a human voice and personality, rather than a faceless, monolithic voice of an organization.

Isn’t it amazing that the same advice is rarely, if ever, suggested in the much more deeply personal medium of email? Isn’t it the truth that most of the email in your inbox right now is so highly impersonal, so valueless that you delete most of it without even reading it?

Let’s transform that advice to email marketing now: be human. After all, an email is generally a reasonably private thing, and more importantly feels like a private things, whereas a Facebook wall is inherently with more than one person at a time, and Tweets seem to be on display to the entire world.

What does be human mean in the context of your email marketing? How do we translate a working strategy in social media to email marketing? Here are 6 ideas to consider:

1. Decide what you want your company’s brand to inspire in terms of feeling. When people hear from you and the problems you solve, what feelings should they inspire? Mitch Joel loves to cite the Harley Davidson brand, which lets a 43 year old accountant get dressed up in black leather and ride through a town and have everyone be afraid of him. The WhatCounts brand, if we’re doing our jobs right, should provide a sense of eagerness, eager to learn, eager to try out new things, eager to find and grow your email marketing ROI.

2. Speak with a dedicated, focused voice. Your newsletter may have multiple authors working on the content, but put a voice behind it, something that has a particular tone and tenor that matches your company’s brand. If you’ve decided to be professional, then photos of your staff in your newsletter pitch-drunk at the latest company gathering might not fit. If you’ve decided to be casual, then having starched collars and three-piece suit photos wouldn’t fit either. Your voice, your imagery, everything, should reflect what you’ve chosen to be.

3. Pick a persona and use it. This can be an actual member of your staff, or it can be a fictional construct. If you choose the latter, clearly define its personality and how it will behave. This persona should be who your emails are from, and should be a consistent presence in email, on the website, and in social media.

4. Be consistent in your content. People love predictable and routine. If you look at the WhatCounts GameChanger newsletter, we have the same general, predictable layout each week, which lets longtime readers skip over the parts they may not be interested in. For example, we have a jobs section each week. If you’re not looking for a job, you know it’s safe to skip over. Equally important, publish regularly and predictably. We humans are creatures of deep habit. Whenever I’m speaking publicly, one of my questions I ask the audience is when Seinfeld was on. 15 years later, people still remember, because it was valuable content published at a predictable time.

5. Add value and give first. Unless you go to a lot of Tupperware parties, generally speaking, your friends and colleagues don’t try to sell you something all the time. You shouldn’t either. Chances are, your actual friends look to do nice things for you first and unsolicited. Treat your subscribers as well as your friends, and offer value first in your email.

6. When you do sell, pitch personally. Instead of having the generic press release or standard sell in an email, look at using your persona’s social capital to make a personal pitch every now and again. Avoid the usual canned pitches and try a personal approach – see if you get better results!

These 6 ideas are just the start of transforming your email marketing program from just another ineffective advertising medium into a true communications channel that delivers value to both you and your subscribers. Try it today!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Content Marketing

How to remove people from your list in bulk

May 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Ever have an inbox that’s full of responses to your email marketing program that’s a mix of “out of the office” along with “no longer at this address” messages? Have you dreaded having to wade through that massive pile of messages?

We certainly do. Every week, we send out our weekly newsletter called the GameChanger, and every week, we get a thousand or more automated responses from people out on various types of leave to people who have simply left their jobs and moved onto other companies. Processing this used to take hours upon hours of manual labor, so much so that it was profoundly unproductive.

This week, we’re going to change all of that for you. You’ll need a few things in order to make this process relatively painless. First, you’ll want to download the free Mozilla Thunderbird email application. You’ll also want a robust text editor like Crimson Edit (PC), UltraEdit (PC), BBEdit (Mac), or TextWrangler (Mac).

Start by downloading all of the automatic responses to your newsletter into a mailbox inside of Thunderbird. You’ll want to create a separate folder for auto-responses indicating that the mailbox is no longer available. Here’s an easy set of phrases you can search for in Thunderbird’s search function that will let you mass drag-and-drop messages into the right folder.

Temporarily Not Available phrases and words

On vacation
On holiday
Traveling
At a conference
Attending

Definitely Not Getting Your Mail phrases and words

No longer with
No longer at
No longer employed
Moved on
Last day
Left the company

It’s safe to discard the temporarily out of office messages. Chances are, the person will be back soon-ish. For the people who are permanently gone, there’s no point in sending them mail any more.

Let’s assume you’ve rapidly categorized all the messages from your recent mailing as either worth unsubscribing or not, and you’ve got all the unsubscribes in one folder. Right click on that folder inside Thunderbird and find it on your computer:

Thunderbird

Now open the file in your text editor. This will be one great big long text file:

Unsub

What you’ll want to do is with your high-powered text editor, extract all of the lines in the file that begin with From: as those will be the from addresses notifying you that the subscriber is no longer available:

Unsub — Copied Lines

Congratulations. With a little extra cleaning up of the text, you’ve now got a perfect unsubscribe list that you can use to remove people whose addresses are no longer being read. This will help improve your deliverability (by no longer sending to non-working addresses) as well as improve your open rates and other basic email marketing metrics.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Delivery

WhatCounts and Windsor Circle offer Magento integration

May 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

five dollars

Windsor Circle and WhatCounts are pleased to announce a new WhatCounts Extension on Magento Connect. The WhatCounts Extension, powered by Windsor Circle, enables merchants and online retailers using Magento’s eCommerce platform to automatically export and analyze their customers’ purchase history and other data, and instantly build highly targeted segments in their WhatCounts email marketing account.

“This extension is great news for our clients,” says WhatCounts CEO Allen Nance. “The growing number of online retailers who use WhatCounts will be able to leverage the rich data they have in Magento to deploy powerful and effective email marketing campaigns through WhatCounts”.

“Our aim is to provide better segmentation, instantly, to retailers through powerful automation of eCommerce data analysis,” says Windsor Circle CEO Matt Williamson. “Case study after case study has proven that this can drive enormous revenue for merchants. Our data from two dozen clients and millions of transactions and email sends over the past year have revealed that the Lifetime Value of a repeat buyer is 4.8X higher than a one-time buyer. Email marketing can be even more effective when leveraging customer segmentation to increase repeat buying.”

With Windsor Circle connecting Magento to WhatCounts, you can easily and automatically gather and analyze customer purchase history data to create targeted customer segments in your email platform. Magento merchants can now send the Right Emails, at the Right Time, to the Right Customers based on automated business intelligence.

Magento to WhatCounts integration gives you the ability to segment customers according to products purchased – including brand, category and price – or based on purchase behavior: how often, how much and when. This instant access to customer information is proven to generate increased revenue and save you time.

Magento to WhatCounts integration creates product recommendations unique for each customer. Our software will set up fields in WhatCounts containing individual product details, including product name, description, image, pricing, etc… and enable you to send highly targeted, unique recommendations to customers based on multiple factors.

Magento to WhatCounts integration provides customer and business intelligence, and enables you to leverage the data you have in Magento and automatically build and update targeted customer segments in WhatCounts. You can then deploy powerful and effective email marketing campaigns such as:

  • “Replenishment” campaigns that target consumable products like dog food or lotion
  • “Win-back” campaigns to latent customers who purchased in the past, but not recently
  • Create an automated “Welcome Series” for a first time buyer
  • Reward “Best Customers” with insider specials
  • Cross-sell accessories to expensive products
  • Deploy brand-based campaigns for popular items
  • Targeted coupon and discount offers that reach the right customers with the right offer
  • Uncovering and tailoring campaigns to wealthy customers who live in high-income zip codes
  • Marketing expensive products and upgrades to your “Biggest Spenders”
  • Smart “Related Item” product recommendation campaigns to cross-sell complimentary products
  • Geo-targeted email based on proximity to a store location to boost in-store traffic
  • Create repeat customers and loyalty from one time purchasers
18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, eCommerce, Latest News

What’s a good growth-attrition ratio for an email list?

May 24, 2012 By 2 Comments

Garden in the Woods

We were asked this question recently: What’s a good growth-attrition ratio for an email list?

The short answer? Anything above zero – your list should ideally always be net growing. That said, the more complex answer is that it’s dependent on the cyclicality of your business.

For example, once upon a time, I used to market student loans. Obviously, there’s a relatively narrow demographic of people who need student loans. Thus, every June, we’d see a significant portion (20-25%) of our list unsubscribe – they were done with college and no longer wanted or needed information about student loans. Our mailing list no longer served them (in their eyes). Conversely, every summer around July or August, we’d see a massive influx of new subscribers as students entering college got their first tuition bills, wondered how they’d pay that obscene amount, and subscribe to every student loan resource they could find.

The better question is – is your email list growing in proportion to your other digital properties?

Does your list growth reflect growth in your website traffic? If not, your email list (which is presumably important to you, or you wouldn’t be reading this blog) may not be prominent enough.

Is your email list growing in proportion to your social media audience? If not, you might want to remind your social audience that you have a list and what kind of value they can expect to receive from it.

Pick whatever other digital channels you use frequently and compare your email list growth to them. If they’re not growing together, you need to make sure that you’re cross-promoting effectively. The converse is also true – if you’ve got a robust, growing email list and other channels that are important to you are not growing, make sure to give them some added prominence in your email marketing.

And of course, I’d be remiss if we didn’t lead by example. If you’re not subscribed to the WhatCounts weekly newsletter filled with tips like these, then click here to subscribe today!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Metrics

18 Ways to Integrate Social+Email Webinar Available!

May 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

SpeakingDid you miss our 18 Ways to Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing webinar yesterday? Not to worry! We’ve got it available as an immediate download in MP3 and PDF format so that you can learn 18 (actually 20 in the webinar) ways to integrate social media marketing and email marketing together for maximum impact. Download it now for free, and you’ll also get the accompanying eBook for free, too!

18 Ways to Integrate Social and Email Webinar

18 Ways book coverWant to get the most out of social media and email marketing? Stop using them separately, and start putting them together to maximize your investment in both! In this 30 minute webinar, join veteran email marketer and social media practitioner Christopher S. Penn as he shares 18 ways, ideas, and strategies for you to integrate social media and email marketing together. Learn how to set up your Facebook Page to build your subscriber list, learn what the social email content loop is, build your social+email ROI, and much more! As a bonus, you'll also receive access to download the accompanying eBook for free.
Filed Under: Webinars, WhatCounts Events

Advanced email marketing: time-based content

May 22, 2012 By 6 Comments

In a recent newsletter, email marketing author and former WhatCounts colleague DJ Waldow recommended looking at time-sensitive content, or how to adjust your content for timeliness. For example, let’s say you had a coupon you were sending out that had an expiration date. Wouldn’t it be cool if the coupon could change based on how close the expiration date was, or had a call to action to get a different coupon once the expiration date passed?

It’s quite possible to accomplish this, but you’ll need some serious technical help. We’re going to share with you the exact method of how to do this, but we’re warning you in advance: this is something your technology department and a solid developer will need you to help with. Your average marketer is not going to be able to do this. If this post gets confusing, that’s okay – hand it to your developers.

First and foremost, you’ll need to create the images you want to use for your coupon-style offer. These should be in an industry standard format, such as a JPEG. We’ve made 3 example coupons for a sale, one that’s a few days out, one that’s the day before the sale, and one for when the sale has expired, and uploaded them to our web server with the names coupon1.jpg, coupon3.jpg, and coupon4.jpg. (there was a coupon2.jpg but it was pointless)

Next, you’ll need to create a “virtual” image file that can be referenced as a regular JPG file for your email campaign. Using your web server’s redirection functions, you’ll create a URL you’ll use for your coupon and map it to a PHP file. For example, here’s what we’d set up using an htaccess file in the Apache web server:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} coupon.jpg [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) /couponexample/index.php

This effectively says, any time someone’s looking for http://www.whatcounts.com/couponexample/coupon.jpg, send them instead to the PHP script.

Finally, you’ll need to write a script that checks for the correct date and time and then streams the correct image file. If you’re using the PHP scripting language, here’s an example of what this code might look like.

$today=date(“Y-m-d”);

header(‘Content-Type: image/jpeg’);

if($today <= "2012-04-29"){
$img=imagecreatefromjpeg("./coupon1.jpg");
}
elseif($today == "2012-04-30"){
$img=imagecreatefromjpeg("./coupon3.jpg");
}
else{
$img=imagecreatefromjpeg("./coupon4.jpg");
}

imagejpeg($img);
imagedestroy($img);

What you’ve effectively done here is set up a PHP file that checks what date it is, then picks one of 3 coupons to display based on the date. However, it’s the same URL no matter what. In the example above, that coupon is located at http://www.whatcounts.com/couponexample/coupon.jpg

You’d then take this coupon URL and put it in your email newsletter or email campaign like any other image.

No matter when your subscriber opens the email, they’ll see the correct coupon. In the example above, if they opened the email before April 29, they’d see:

Coupon examples

If they opened the email on April 30th, they’d see:

Coupon examples

And if they opened the email on or after May 1, they’d see:

Coupon examples

Here’s what’s powerful about this:

It doesn’t matter when you sent the email! The coupon showing will always be correct, no matter whether the original message was sent a week, a month, or a year before, or whether the subscriber opens the email the day you sent it or 5 years later. It will always be correct.

Is this right for every email? Of course not. It’s a lengthy and complex set up process, but if you have a special campaign or offer that you want to distribute, this is the way to do it in a seamless, powerful fashion that’s always right, no matter what.

If you’d like to implement this but don’t have developers or technical staff who can, please feel free to contact the WhatCounts team and our Strategic Services department will be able to offer this as a premium service to you.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Development, Strategy

How to Engage Existing Customers Using Pinterest

May 21, 2012 By 4 Comments

Images are effective and powerful, occasionally even more powerful than words. Pinterest allows companies to use images to engage existing customers and create a community around products and brands. Here are a few ways your company can engage existing customers using Pinterest.

Contests are the perfect opportunity to get customers to engage with your brand on Pinterest. Contests can range from creating the “Best Board” or “Best Pin” to earning the most repins or like’s. Customers could post photos of the best outfits they put together or of the most creative craft project built from using your products. Contests are a great way to engage and see customers using your products in the real world, as well as how customers are using your products.

With Pinterest’s commenting ability, it’s a great place to conduct market research or test new product launches. The more customers feel that you value their input and that their ideas are put into practice, the easier it will be to retain a business relationship with them in the future.

Customers love attention and a great way to use Pinterest is to create boards that focus on them. It is an excellent way to listen to the customer and show them that you’re listening. For customers who have already purchased your products and are enjoying it, Pinterest is a way for you to learn about their experiences and encourage them to share it with others.

Collect pictures of customers using your products and pin them to the appropriate board, or ask your customer’s to pin their pictures to your boards. This way, customers can further relate to products, and brands have a way to thank their supporters by integrating them into their companies. For example, a clothing company can pin a photo of a shopper in one of its outfits, and writes the description of the products the shopper is wearing in the caption.

You could also create boards focusing on ways to use your various products, where customers can post their own images in relation to your business. Customers will feel special that the brand recognizes their involvement and creativity, and feel as though they are part of a real community.

Another fabulous way to engage existing customer using Pinterest, is to help consumers become emotionally connected to your brand by pinning content that reveals more about your brand personality than just your product line. You can create boards that show your company working in the community, the brand’s mission, employees at the company picnic or holiday parties and other things happening behind the scenes at the company. This will humanize your brand and create interest in the company as a whole. It will allow your customers to see you as a great company to do business with.

Whether you are pinning regular pictures, outlines of new products, blog posts or snapshots of your designs, try to keep your images engaging and interesting to share at all times. Pinterest provides an amazing array of ways where you can truly listen and engage with your customers.

Madison Murphy
Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

Filed Under: Best Practices, Latest News, Social media, Strategy

Email marketing metrics 101: Deliverability

May 18, 2012 By 3 Comments

During one of our recent webinars, more than a few people expressed surprise about how email marketing metrics are calculated, so it’s a good time to step back and review. Today we’ll close out the series with some deliverability metrics.

WhatCounts, Inc.: Campaign Details

You would think that deliverability would be the most concrete metrics with the least amount of room for interpretation. After all, the email either got there or it didn’t, right? As with all things, there’s some fudge factor. In the world of deliverability, there are a set of basic metrics that we work with all the time. Bounce rates, delivery rates, bulk rates. Let’s imagine a fictional character, Wally the Postman, as he goes on his rounds.

Bounce Rates

An email bounces if you send it to an address and the server hosting that email account rejects it. There are two general kinds of bounces: soft and hard.

WhatCounts, Inc.: Campaign Details

A soft bounce is an address that is temporarily unable to receive email. Some of the basic reasons for soft bounces include:

  • Mailbox is full/over quota
  • Server is down or not responding
  • On vacation

In our fictional character’s world, Wally the Postman arrives at your mailbox to put some mail in it and he can’t stuff another piece in.

Most email service providers will continue attempting to deliver the message for a period of time after receiving a notification of a soft bounce from the destination email server.

A hard bounce is an address that is permanently unable to receive email. Some of the basic reasons for hard bounces include:

  • Mailbox does not exist/bad email address
  • Malformed email address (contains bad characters, like $$cpenn@whatcounts#.com

Wally the Postman goes to deliver the mail and your house is gone. How strange.

Most email service providers will not retry a hard bounce and should automatically unsubscribe that email address from the sender’s mailing list.

Delivery Rates

The standard convention among email service providers when reporting delivery rates is to let you know how many emails successfully left the server. Delivery rate does not mean how many people actually received the email. In technology terms, when an email is sent by anyone, the sending server and the receiving server exchange greetings and hand off messages. If the receiving server acknowledges that the message was accepted, then the sending server considers that message to be delivered. This is true even if the message bounces – it’s still counted as a successful connection from server to server.

Note that this does not mean the subscriber actually received the message! The closest analogy is handing a stamped letter to Wally the Postman. Once you hand it off, you have no idea what’s going to happen, but you have successfully transferred responsibility for the delivery of that message to Wally. He might lose it. He might light it on fire. He might give it to another postman who hates your last name and shreds it maliciously. But for your purposes, you have successfully delivered it.

So how do you know that the subscriber actually received the message? You don’t, not until they open it and that behavior is reported.

Bulk Rates

The final set of metrics deals with everyone’s favorite topic: spam. These revolve around complaints, global opt-outs, and unsubscribes.

WhatCounts, Inc.: Campaign Details

Unsubscribes typically mean that someone has unsubscribed from the list they were on. They don’t want to receive that particular channel of email communication. This is, believe it or not, not necessarily a bad thing. Letting people unsubscribe obviously and easily prevents the next two metrics.

Global opt-outs typically mean that someone doesn’t want to hear from you in any capacity whatsoever any more. They want to get away from you and forbid you to email them for any reason. This is generally a worse thing, because it means one of two scenarios has happened:

1. You’ve put the wrong unsubscribe link in your message and are telling people to stop talking to you completely or

2. You made the subscriber angry enough that they’ve forbidden you to contact them.

Neither is a wonderful scenario, so track your global opt-outs carefully. (WhatCounts Professional Edition users, this is known as realm opt-outs)

Finally, complaints are the very worst of the worst in bulk rate metrics. These are the number of times someone has hit the Report as Spam button in their inbox on your message. It’s like you telling Wally the Postman to not even bother delivering anything from a company, just toss it away.

When someone reports you for spamming, it damages your reputation and causes less of your email to be delivered to all recipients from that domain. For example, if enough people with Hotmail addresses report you as spam, pretty soon your messages stop getting to as many Hotmail subscribers. Eventually, Hotmail may just outright block you and you won’t be able to send to anyone with a Hotmail address.

Conclusion

I hope this wrap-up summarizes the world of deliverability for you. There are dozens of different ways to handle how to reduce or increase the individual rates of each metric, but that’s a whole other series.

This also concludes our email marketing metrics 101 series. Did you find it helpful? Are there metrics that we didn’t cover? Let us know!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Delivery, Metrics

Email marketing metrics 101: Conversion rate

May 10, 2012 By 3 Comments

During one of our recent webinars, more than a few people expressed surprise about how email marketing metrics are calculated, so it’s a good time to step back and review. Today we’re looking at email conversion rate.

Email conversion rate is probably both the most valuable and difficult metric to even get a hold of, much less be able to manage well. The primary reason that it’s so hard to get a hold of is that many email service providers don’t offer tracking capability for conversion or have any way to capture email’s impact on conversion.

There’s a valid reason for this: most email conversion tracking done today is last-touch attribution only, which paints a woefully incomplete picture of email marketing’s total impact on your digital marketing efforts. Email marketing can do far more than just sell things to people in unfocused blasts. As a marketing tool, it can drive and focus attention to activities which lead to conversion two, three, or more steps downstream from the actual email.

Luckily, regardless of which email service provider you use, you have access to a powerful, more inclusive conversion tracking tool: Google Analytics.

First, you’ll need to establish what a conversion is. What action or actions on your site generate value, and what is that value worth? For example, if you’re building your list, what is the value of an email subscriber to you? If you’re selling stuff, what’s the median* value of a shopping cart? Once you know what activity on your website generates value, you can assign that as a goal with a goal value in Google Analytics. More details on how to set that up are located here.

Second, you’ll want to make sure that your email service provider supports Google Analytics. If they don’t, you will have to manually tag all of the links in your email using the Google Analytics URL builder. WhatCounts customers should contact their account managers to have it enabled in their respective platforms. (both Publicaster and Professional editions have GA support built in)

Third, fire up Google Analytics after a send and scroll down to the Conversions section:

Visitors Overview - Google Analytics

You’ll find your way to the Assisted Conversions section. From here, click on the Other menu and create a new channel grouping:

Assisted Conversions - Google Analytics

Inside the setup screen that follows, create a filter for Source with a RegExp that matches the following text: Publicaster|WhatCountsEmail (obviously, if you’re not a WhatCounts customer, you’ll have to substitute your own email service provider’s tracking codes in this box instead)

Assisted Conversions - Google Analytics

You’ve now got a custom grouping that shows you the total conversion impact of your email marketing:

Assisted Conversions - Google Analytics

Here we can see our email marketing program’s effects on all of our digital marketing efforts. Our email marketing closed 186 conversions in its last interaction, meaning someone went straight from the email to the activity of value. We also see that email added an additional 112 conversions where the subscriber did not immediately convert but did eventually, for an extra 40% impact on our business. Ask yourself this: if you’re doing last-touch only conversion tracking, how much more impact is your email marketing program having that you’re not aware of?

There’s one more area of conversion tracking that we need to address. To interpret total conversion tracking properly, you need to add together the last touch and assisted conversions together and track them over time. One important calculation to make is the ratio of assisted to last touch conversions, as shown here over the last 8 issues of our newsletter:

Untitled spreadsheet

Tracking this ratio will let you know if your content is more action-focused (more last touch than assist) or more value-focused (more assist than last touch). Neither is better than the other as long as total conversions continues to increase. In the example above, there’s an interesting inverse relationship between last touch conversions and total conversions – the more action-focused the newsletter is, the better it converts overall. Thus, we can use this insight to alter the content of the newsletter to offer more action opportunities (while still providing value), but if we lean too much in value-focused content’s direction without providing as much action-focused content, our overall email marketing program’s performance suffers.

If you’d like help setting this sort of detailed analysis up, please feel free to contact our Strategic Service department.

Conversion tracking might seem to be the last word in email marketing metrics, but it’s not. Tomorrow, to conclude this series, we’ll look at the variety of deliverability metrics and what they mean.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

*Technical side note: for any set of statistics where you have an asymmetrical distribution, use median values rather than average values. It gives you a better picture of where the middle actually is.

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