If you're an email marketer, you've probably learned one hard truth: Your executive management doesn't care about email as much as you do.

These C-Suite executives are more concerned about the issues that affect the company bottom line, such as revenue, customer retention, profit margins, return on budget investment, costs to deliver products and support customers, customer acquisition costs, lead flow and more.

Your email program either does or can affect these critical aspects, but you have to use the most relevant metrics to tell that story. Think outside the box of familiar metrics such as open and click rates. Work with other departments to find ways to measure how email contributes to their areas.

So your last campaign drew a company-best open rate? Yawn. Only you care. Tell management instead that since incorporating FAQs and product tips in your email program, you've reduced the number of calls to customer support by 15 percent. Now you've got their attention.

You don't have to abandon your other metric approaches, because you need them to understand how your program is performing and where you can make improvements. But many marketers spend most of their time benchmarking their email performance instead of using metrics to measure how their email program affects management's key concerns.

Email Performance and Company Goals

Email metrics fall into two general categories: "process" metrics that measure your email program's performance currently and over time, and "output" metrics, which measure how your email program contributes to your company's strategic marketing and business goals.

You employ both kinds of metrics in four basic measurement approaches:

• Analyze performance of a single message or campaign and diagnose problems.


• Gain insights into customer/subscriber behavior that can help you deliver more relevant messages.


• Benchmark your program against your peers or your own past performance.


• Measure your email program's performance against specific marketing or company goals.

(See my latest Email Insider column, "Are You Using the Right Metrics?" for a complete explanation.)

Most of these uses of metrics measure email processes, such as deliverability rate, open or click rate, or list churn. Unfortunately, this seems to be where most email marketers focus their measurement efforts.

Instead, spend more time measuring your email program against company goals. When you can show how email helps solve some of your company's most pressing concerns, you speak the language your executives understand. Your reward is increased management mindshare and resources.

For further information on key email metrics, download the new Silverpop white paper, "Beyond Opens and Clicks: 5 Email Metrics to Boost Results and Prove Your Worth."

Posted by Loren McDonald at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marketers who can reach their email subscribers when they're actively in their inboxes will gain a competitive advantage. Quite simply, having your message at the top of the inbox makes it much more likely to be seen and acted on.

However, finding that "magic moment" has been a major challenge for email marketers.

It's impractical, given your list demographics, time variables and mindshare, which I discuss in my recent Email Insider column. The key is being able to use recipient time-of-day open and click data.

Send Time Optimization Calculates Ideal Email Delivery Time

Silverpop recently unveiled Send Time Optimization (STO), which automatically calculates the optimal time to send to each recipient, based on a recipient's past mailing behavior. Your message is then distributed at the ideal day and time without requiring multiple segments or scheduled mailings.

Send Time Optimization (STO) analyzes when individual recipients interact with your messages over a rolling period of time and calculates the ideal email delivery time for each recipient on your list, no matter the time zone.

Clients See Measurable Lift

A number of Silverpop clients who have been using Send Time Optimization have reported phenomenal results. Across a sample of just a few clients, we've seen these results:

• 20 percent to 46 percent increase in open rates
• 30 percent to 50 percent increase in click rates
• 52 percent to 75 percent increase in total revenue
• 40 percent increase in net revenue (Encyclopedia Britannica)
• 30 percent increase in total number of orders per campaign
• 35 percent to 47 percent increase in value per order

These numbers are exciting, and not just because of improved performance. Like trigger and drip campaigns, Send Time Optimization leverages the power of marketing automation. In this era of tightening budgets, reduced resources and overflowing inboxes, email marketers need all the advantages they can muster.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rich media, like Flash and video, is immensely popular in Web-based communications. If a picture is worth a thousand words, isn't animation worth, well, something significantly larger? Rich media--usually defined as a combination of graphics, audio, video and animation--can be a great way to pique interest and deliver content in a limited amount of screen real estate. And for email marketers working with precious "above the fold" space to get a recipient action, that's a good thing.

We get a lot of questions about whether to include rich media in email messages. And while my knee-jerk response is an emphatic "no," there are a lot of ways to include different content in your emails without including it in your emails. Confused? Let me explain.

As you may know, there are a lot of different rules about designing for email as opposed to the Web. Every inbox provider renders a little bit differently, so it's best to make sure you render consistently for as much of your audience as you can. This is one of the biggest challenges with pushing the envelope with different media types.

Now back to my point: You can include this media without including it, and have the same effect and layout. Creative use of screenshots makes a great stand-in substitute. Having an alternate image that makes the recipient "click to play" in a new window serves two purposes. First, you've incented a recipient action--congratulations! Second, you're closer to driving a conversion, because the recipient is already on your landing page or Web site.

Use rich media wisely, and you can be enhancing your return on your next email campaign.

Posted by Julia Patterson at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)