The rise of marketing analytics has brought on a new wave of expectations for marketers to understand statistics in order to make data-driven decisions for their organization. If you’ve been in the business long enough, you’ve heard (and maybe rolled your eyes at in some cases) stakeholders or thought leaders insisting on letting data guide the decision-making processes for sales and marketing, A/B Testing, ROI, and even new coined terms about the entire approach like ‘Revenue Marketing’. At the end of the day, open rates, clicks are not the currencies we can pay the bills with, but they are indicators of how we’re moving our prospects, leads, and previous customers down our desired funnels on the way to revenue.
Data is important. But any statistician or good businessman/woman will tell you that contextualizing data is even more important. Marketing is not an exact science, and there are biases and variables (also known as our prospects and leads 🙂) that influence data. If we operate without understanding where these variables and biases are hiding, we can be led astray, chasing metrics that may lead to nowhere or, worse, to long term issues.
For this post, we’ll focus on those metrics centered around email. In a previous post, we covered the importance of making sure you understand how metrics are calculated and reported. But still, it’s important to know where the blind spots in these metrics are, and how to properly contextualize them into your overall marketing strategies.
Open Rate
Open rate is certainly the most talked about email marketing metric – for good reason. Getting eyeballs on your content is obviously important for driving purchases, or taking the next step in your marketing funnel. Open rates are also the canary in the coal mine of monitoring your overall email deliverability and list hygiene.
Email marketers are most often held accountable for high open rates, and if the consequences of low open rates become felt by those writing emails, subject lines begin to drift away from what they were intended to be – the subject of the email.
Everyone hates clickbait. We’ve all seen it, we’re tired of it, and frustrated that our precious time in the day is wasted or worse, we’re tricked into absorbing content we wouldn’t have otherwise or that is overly misleading.
But too often, we see email marketers move into clickbait territory with subject lines in order to increase their open rates. While there’s nothing wrong with a subject line that draws curiosity to your content, there is a line to cross when your subject line becomes completely unrelated or even works against your actual content. At this point, while you may see upticks in your open rates, you’re likely to see a drop on click through rate, and worse, turn those contacts who feel tricked into opening your emails from neutral participants into detractors of your content and brand.
If you need strategies to improve your email open rates consider the following things to look into instead of venturing too far into clickbait:
List Hygiene – Do a thorough cleaning of your lists. How many subscribers have received 5+ emails from you in the last 90 days and haven’t opened any of them? It may be time to implement a sunsetting policy to keep your list limited to the people who aren’t already fatigued from your content.
Deeper Segmentation – Take a look at the demographics or behaviors that separate your email openers from the non-openers. Is there a segment of the group that may need unique or different messaging altogether? Consider splitting up your contacts into separate lists or segments with a different strategy.
Content Strategy – Engagement fatigue comes when your subscribers begin to see little value in opening your emails. Put yourself in their shoes and ask “what’s in this for me if I read this email other than being advertised to?”
Click Through Rate
Driving more clicks through emails is typically a good thing – and unlike open rate, it’s a bit more difficult to get drawn into clickbait by the nature of wanting to drive people to an offer or nurture content on your site.
One thing to be keenly aware of with clicks, particularly for B2B businesses, is the effect that antivirus software has on email marketing metrics. In many cases, the way that they verify links as not spam or viruses actually triggers a link click, and sometimes even a page visit.
With that, it’s worth paying attention to who is clicking all of your emails and what their engagement looks like down to the detailed level. Seeing a click of every link within a minute timestamp of receiving the email? This is a telltale sign of inflated clicks due to antivirus. In some cases we’ve seen it be so bad that it’s worth building in active filtering of segments to counteract this and/or aggregating your CTR based on unique contacts clicking, not total clicks.
Much as is the case with improving real CTR – be sure to keep your lists clean, your contacts segmented, and most importantly, actually give them relevant and succinct calls to action, especially if you’re nurturing existing leads. Don’t necessarily push the hard sale to the brand new prospect, and give an existing subscriber a reason to re-engage with you down the road.
List Growth
List/subscriber growth is another metric that marketers typically look to grow to scale up their email marketing success. A bigger audience means more potential to reach more people with your message. But the import thing to be aware of is that not all lists and contacts are created equal. If you’ve ever bought lists you may have learned that the hard way.
List growth is a good metric to track, as long as you’re following those new subscribers and making sure you’re getting value out of them. Otherwise, they’re just dead weight hurting your deliverability and driving costs up. Giveaways and even referral programs are notorious for this unless set up the proper way, even then it’s wise to keep a close watch on the new contacts from these groups and treat them with a bit more scrutiny..
For clients with big pushes in overall growth and lead generation, we often set up and track segments based on the lead source, not only for revenue purposes, but also for tracking the engagement by those segments. As you grow your lists, make sure you’re actually tracking the value of these new cohorts.
Revenue Generated (per email/per campaign)
Revenue is obviously critical – it’s the lifeblood of every business. Email is a great way to drive revenue, not only in facilitating the transition from Lead to Customer in the sales funnel, but also to drive recurring revenue from existing customers.
The problem lies when the revenue driving strategy of email loses the perspective of empathy for the recipient. How many of us would watch TV if there were ads every 30 seconds? Would you read this blog if it were nothing but “Hey – hire us!” on every line? The fact of the matter is that when email changes from a reason to communicate value to your subscriber (who has given you the opportunity to take up space in their inbox) to instead being effectively another display advertisement, you’ll start to see your engagement plummet. Note: we’ve more written about what happens if you look to maximize revenue generated from email without setting proper expectations in Klaviyo here.
When we do deliverability audits and consultations for our clients, 9 out of 10 cases of poor deliverability are not due to some email configuration issue. Instead, they’re typically due to the decreasing engagement of email subscribers which is more often than not driven by revenue focused sales emails that hammer subscribers over the head to the point of disengagement.
Being too focused on driving revenue directly from email also tends to devolve the expressed value proposition of your product or service. For lead nurturing, that often means jumping far too quickly into making the hard sell, and for product based businesses, that turns into the perpetual sale, which can devalue your brand and pricing model quickly.
Every one of the metrics we’ve listed is worth paying attention to and optimizing. But it’s important to avoid tunnel vision and ignore biases and the dangers of what happens if you focus too specifically on driving one of these metrics without taking a 40,000 foot view of how email is working in your overall marketing strategy and funnel. Because if you chase one of these too far, you may end up needing to give us a call to help.
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