Beware the wisdom of the minority
Latest posts | Feed | | By Mark Brownlow
In politics and society, we are rightly concerned with protecting minorities. It's a little more complicated in email marketing.Email campaigns usually produce a nice set of numbers for us to enjoy: clickthrough rates, downloads, sales generated, opens/renders recorded, etc.
We're pressed for time, so we look at those broad numbers and decide whether the topic or offer in the email was a success or not. And we let that insight guide what we put in future emails.
Which is jolly good.
But there is a trap waiting for the unwary.
We assume the responses reflect the shared opinion of the entire list. But a vocal minority can disguise the true opinions of the majority. Which leads you to make poor decisions on future email approaches.
Let's explore three examples: misleading response boosts, viral effects and feedback.
Response jumps and segmentation
Assume the average clickthrough rate for a travel email list is 4.2%. Here are CTR results for the last four emails:
Clearly, emails 2 and 4 resonated best with our audience. We should consider modelling future emails on those two success stories.
Or should we?
What if we had two types of people on our list. All 100,000 subscribers are interested in travel offers, but 20,000 subscribers are cruise fanatics (Group A) and 80,000 are not really into cruises at all (Group B).
Let's now break down our four CTRs on a group basis:
Email 2 did indeed resonate better than average across the whole list.
But email 4 is a different story. The overall CTR was above average. But while Group A loved the message (perhaps it was a super cruise offer), Group B actually produced a worse-than-average response.
The strong approval from the smaller Group A more than makes up for the bigger group's disapproval. The result is an average that makes it look like email 4 is as broadly popular as email 2.
If we continued to send cruise-related emails to the list, we'd get above average results, not realizing that we're actually sending inappropriate material to the majority of subscribers. We're missing out on a huge opportunity.
This is why segmentation is so important: defining smaller groups with shared characteristics. So you can send email that has a better chance of a higher response and a lower chance of driving away others.
The trick, of course, is identifying those segments.
The wider lesson is that if you treat a list as an amorphous mass, you can end up sending emails that produce good results, yet are actually failing to engage a significant proportion of recipients.
It's one reason why large numbers of email addresses turn inactive on an otherwise successful email list.
Viral impacts
The articles you send out via email come with a nice "share on Twitter" icon. The number of tweets mentioning the article is a good measure of how valuable and "shareworthy" that article is.
But viral success is not just measured in total mentions. You need to look at who's sharing and the pattern of sharing, too.
In this model of sharing, your content has a broad appeal within your subscriber list, with many different people tweeting about it:
In this second model, the net outcome is the same, but there's a different sharing pattern.
Most subscribers were indifferent to the article. But it caught the attention of one subscriber who fed the link into a large community of like-minded individuals.
If that community is your target audience, great. But the chances are the article in Model 1 was actually more successful for you.
It resonated with a larger number of your existing audience and reached a more diverse group of individuals on Twitter. Individuals who are more likely to include potential subscribers.
Case in point: one of the most popular articles here at Email Marketing Reports is a collection of stats on email and webmail use.
It gets a lot of blog links, delicious tags and twitter mentions. But all of them come from email users and analysts, not email marketers.
The article is very shareworthy, but it's value to me is not nearly as much as, say, the article on HTML email design resources that gets less total "viral reach", but a more targeted one.
Feedback
Despite all the talk about engagement and dialog, most email campaigns do not produce a stream of return emails with feedback and commentary on the content or offer.
In fact, unsolicited feedback (or even solicited feedback) is often so rare that when it does arrive we give it far more attention than it deserves.
That's not to say feedback is irrelevant. Quite the contrary.
The chance to engage with a reader on a personal basis is a super opportunity to learn and impress. The danger is when you give that opinion too much weight in the wider scheme of things.
If that small amount of feedback is truly representative of the wider list's opinion, then you'll see that opinion reflected in your campaign numbers. Which is why it is always important never to look at a factor in isolation.
Vocal feedback can even reflect the actual opposite of broader list opinion.
Engaging emails with a strong personality often bring the best results. Yet a strong personality also carries a higher risk of offending or annoying some people for whom that personality is inappropriate.
As I wrote many years ago:
"It's quality, not quantity, that counts. If you lose 10% of your readership by changing your newsletter, but your impact and influence on the remaining 90% has improved tremendously, then the loss is a welcome one."
Related posts: Misinterpreting email marketing statistics
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | September 03, 2009 | 2 comment(s) - add yours!
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Permalink | September 03, 2009 | 2 comment(s) - add yours!
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2 Comments:
Great post Mark. You really break it down in an easy to understand way.
Segmenting and gathering that info is time consuming but so worth it in the end.
By 
Michael, on
08 September, 2009
In order to understand your audience, you really need to segment them according to common traits.
By email marketing, on
01 December, 2009
