Email marketing metrics: what can we learn from the latest survey?

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 14, 2007

You might have seen the results of the survey (press release | report) carried out by EmailStatCenter.com, who gathered email marketers' views on metrics and other challenges.

Let's see what we can learn from some of the highlights...

Respondents ranked clickthrough rate as the most important metric worth measuring.

Now, this is the point where hardened direct marketers laugh about clicks being ranked higher than revenue or ROI.

But it's worth remembering that not all emails have a sale as the prime objective. But just about every marketing email would like recipients to click on a link. Hence the ubiquity of the measurement.

Public discussions of metrics and benchmarks tend to ignore the importance of brand and relationship-building newsletters, for example, where measuring success is more art than science.

(Loren McDonald recently invited us to be more expansive in our choice of success measures to follow; read his article on balanced scorecards.)

Deliverability metrics were ranked next after CTR, whereby we might ask how people are actually measuring deliverability. Perhaps a good question for next year's survey?

Many (most?) email marketing services and software report delivery success as the number of emails sent minus the number that bounced.

We know this calculation overestimates the real number of delivered emails (see point 1 in this article for why.) Which explains the growing popularity of independent delivery monitor tools.

Curiously, revenue was ranked lower than ROI, even though you need the former to measure the latter...

In other results, there was general dissatisfaction with the quality of industry benchmarks. This relates to the lack of standards in how different benchmark sources calculate particular metrics.

There is a strong school of thought which says industry benchmarks are a waste of space and marketers should focus on using their own historical results to draw insight and inspiration from.

That's good advice, but surveys like this show that people still want benchmarks.

Your own results can tell you if you're improving. And give clues to how to make further improvements. But they can't tell you if your program as a whole is doing badly compared to your competition.

You can argue about its value all you like, but people still feel a need for reassurance that they really are doing a good job (or not.)

I'm not sure what the solution is there.

Interestingly, marketers said list development and growth was their biggest challenge . Perhaps the solution to that problem is to focus less on getting new subscribers and more on getting more value out of your current ones. Lose our fear of smaller lists.

The survey was the first of an annual series, so it should be interesting to see how the views and perceptions of email marketers change over time.

More on statistics | Tags: email marketing, email marketing metrics, email marketing statistics

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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