Marketers’ passion for numbers, whether they show results, stats, benchmarks or whatever else, is relentless. Just look at how popular listicles are or your most shared social posts; I bet you’ll find some sort of digits in there. Yet when it comes to analysing data and looking at the numbers that matter commercially, it’s alarming to see most marketers don’t put much effort beyond the first superficial few.
In a recent study published by Econsultancy and Adestra, in-house and agency marketers were asked what metrics they use to measure the success of the channel that delivers the most ROI, i.e. email. For both types of respondents click-through rate was the most common metric, chosen by 91% of in-house and 87% of agency marketers. The fact that this is more important than the open rate is good news, it shows a focus on quality and relevant content rather than just reach of the message.
Worryingly though, crucial email specific metrics are much further down the list. Only 37% of in-house marketers consider delivery rate a measure of success, followed by 23% for earnings per email and 8% for inbox placement. And while agency respondents score slightly higher in each of those categories, the improvement is only marginal. How can marketers rate their email performance accurately if they don’t know how much money they are making off the back of it? Or, perhaps even more importantly, how can they judge the potential of their subscriber database if they are not considering key indicators of database health – e.g. bounce rates, deliverability, list growth -as measures of success?
With data legislation become stricter worldwide, alongside the inescapable GDPR for European countries, I think (and hope) that email list health will become a higher priority for email marketers. While this was the first year this metrics-related question was asked, it will be interesting to see what the 2018 Email Industry Census reports and if the pattern will shift at all.
When asked to rate the performance of their email campaigns, most in-house and agency had incredibly similar results: both groups chose ‘good’ (47%) as a majority, followed closely by an average (37%) rating.
In light of the metrics question above, one cannot help but wonder – how can marketers judge the performance of their campaigns accurately if more than half of them don’t go past the three most popular metrics?
As email marketing has flourished as a channel in recent years, becoming the centre of the marketing technology landscape, one can’t even blame it on the capability of the tech anymore. This goes back to the four key components of First-Person Marketing: automation, personalisation, integration and optimisation. We live in an era where consumers are not surprised or overwhelmed by messages relevant to them as an individual, they have come to expect and demand them. Sure, the opportunity to plan and create personalised and/or automated campaigns seems far more exciting than going through data in attempt to make sense of it and find ways to optimise it. But if you can’t prove to the management team that the exciting, shiny stuff is working and having a direct impact on the business, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to spend more time on it.
You can find the full report here.
By Suzy Carter-Kent, customer success manager at Adestra
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