Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

Given that E-mail Permission Marketing: it works!, at idaconcpts, we’ve discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign.

After you’ve learned how to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics, you will need some email marketing benchmarks by industry to be able to properly evaluate the performance of your campaigns.

On July 2009,  eMarketer provided a list of e-mail marketing open and click-through rates worldwide by industry and list size.  Here’s an important update to these e-mail stats via Mailchimp.

Continue reading “Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry”

4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing

On early December 2009, a marketing intern at a Fortune 500 contacted me via LinkedIn and asked me how to get started on e-mail marketing. While responding to his message, I realized that it would be a good idea to share it with the readers of idaconcpts.

The first step is to get acquainted with the tenets of permission marketing and how to apply them to create permission-based e-mail marketing campaigns.

Continue reading “4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing”

Are you deceived by your email campaigns?

Measuring the success of your permission e-mail campaigns is often oversimplified.  Marketing managers are often happy to see rising open rates and click-through rates. (If you have no idea on how to measure the click-through rates of your e-mail campaigns, here’s an easy tutorial using Google Analytics). The problem of being content with just measuring open rates and click-through rates from our e-mail campaigns is that we are victims of the brochure mentality.

What’s the problem with the brochure mentality?

The brochure mentality is the mindset that tells us that as long people get our brochure, open it and browse it for a while; somehow they will get “aware of our brand” or that they will “eventually act on it”. Notice that how exactly the readers of a brochure become aware of the brand or act on it is not really defined, it is just left to, yes you got that right, pure chance.

I am sure that newsletter services and talented newsletter writers will challenge the above statement. But think about it for just a second. When discussing with a graphic designer or an e-mail newsletter, how often do you discuss about the actual objective of your e-mail campaign defined in one sentence and whose success can be tracked with one simple measure?

I am not talking about how many people click on your “read more” link or how many people open your “Labor Day Blowout Sale!” e-mail. I am talking about how many people actually end handing you cash in exchange for the product or service that you offer.

Let’s take a look at what Avinash Kaushik has to say on this (Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, p. 220):

Before you start your analytics, it is important to understand, at least at a high level, that there several important steps to the process of executing e-mail campaigns:

  • Define business objectives and how e-mail fits into them.

I just quoted the first step out of 4 to emphasize the importance of this concept.  If you’re a frozen yogurt shop, are you in the business of selling frozen yogurt or are you in the business of making people open e-mails? If you’re a humane society that protects animal rights, are you working hard towards increasing the number of people adopting stray dogs or are you working hard that people click on a YouTube video of a sad dog looking for a home?

Before jumping into e-mail (and social media, for that matter) campaigns, you’ve got to have a clear idea of what objectives you want out of it. A clear one sentence objective that can be tracked with one measure.

Here are some great real life examples that I have encountered during my online marketing practice:

  • Bake shop: Sell my daily excess inventory of red velvet cupcakes, about 14, before they spoil.
  • Online coupon service: Generate 5 paying customers during a week.

Not so fast, monkey!

There are several e-mail newsletter services that work great (e.g. MailChimp), but before you sign up for any of them,  do your homework. Even though some offer free trials, hold off signing up for them until you have figured out your one sentence objective whose success can be tracked with one measure.

Helpful Links:

E-mail Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates Worldwide

Welcome back!

Back in March 2009, we reviewed how to measure the click-through rate (CTR) of your e-mail permission marketing campaign with Google Analytics, so I believe it would be very useful to now provide you a benchmark to compare your collected CTRs. For Internet startups, these will be critical benchmarks.

Earlier this July 2009, eMarketer just released a list of e-mail marketing open rates worldwide, by industry and list size for the second half of 2008.

But before I show you these e-mail marketing open rates, let’s review some e-mail permission marketing fundamentals that you must gather:

  1. Number of e-mails sent
  2. Number of opened e-mails
  3. Number of bounced e-mails
  4. Number of unsubscriptions ( You MUST provide this option! Remember that we are doing e-mail permission marketing. No permission = no e-mail.)

With these metrics you will determine:

  1. Delivery rate = (number of e-mails sent – number of e-mails bounced) / number of e-mails sent
  2. Unsubscribe rate = number of unsubscriptions / number of e-mails delivered
  3. Open rate = number of opened e-mails / number of emails delivered
  4. Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

Once you have your open rate and CTR, now you can compare them to these benchmarks provided by eMarketer:

E-Mail Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates - eMarketer

 

E-Mail Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates - eMarketer

How well do you rank against these open and click-through rates?

A Guide to Permission Marketing

For more info, check out:
  1. E-mail Permission Marketing: It Works!
  2. E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals
  3. How to Measure the CTR of Your E-Mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics

A Guide to Permission Marketing





How to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics

On the last post, we discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign.  Why? Because E-mail Permission Marketing: it works! As promised, I will talk in this post about “How to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics“.

The funnel strategy of your permission e-mail is that people:

  1. Actually receive your permission e-mail.
  2. Open your permission e-mail.
  3. Click on the link you want them to click.

How do you measure that?

Simple, you need to use the Google Analytics URL Builder to effectively and efficiently “tag” your link.

Here’s what the Google Analytics URL Builder looks like:

tool_-url-builder-analytics-help

Let’s take for example eMarketer.  This company sends daily e-mail updates to people who have a) visited their website, b) are interested in sampling their market data for free before signing up for it (and of course paying for it!), c) have signed up to read the free updates, and d) have provided the company permission to send them daily updates via e-mail.  I cannot be more specific about the importance of asking them for permission.

Here’s how they do it:

internet-marketing-free-newsletter-emarketer-daily-articles-charts-e-business-emarketer

Notice that there’s no checkbox for the newsletter itself because it is very explicit that the person viewing for the page is signing up for the newsletter.  However, notice that there is one checkbox for people who don’t mind receiving news about webinars, event announcements, whitepaper offers, best practices guides, and research briefs.

eMarketer sends The eMarketer Daily: The First Place  to Look as a daily e-mail newsletter.  Here’s how it look like:

emarketer-daily-207-messages-1

As you can see, there are plenty of links on this eMarketer newsletter but for simplicity I will focus on the boxed link in the picture above.  Let’s imagine that the URL of this link is http://emarketer.com/latestadclickcount.

Here’s how we set up the target URL with the Google Analytics URL Builder:

tool_-url-builder-analytics-help-1

Let’s review the fields:

  1. Campaign Source: Input newsletter because we are talking about an e-mail permission mareketing campaign.  I indicate that this is the newsletter #25.  Is not mandatory to number them, but I would suggest to do so.  It’s important to segment your referrals so you can see what e-mail newsletters are more effective.
  2. Campaign Medium: It’s e-mail.
  3. Campaign Term: In this case, we are paying for keywords.
  4. Campaign Content: Another source to further segment your e-mail campaigns.  However, in this simple case it is not necessary.
  5. Campaign Name: I am assuming that this campaign is part of the “CTR products” campaign because the ad talks about CTRs of online banner ads in Europe.  eMarketer could be interested in tracking the number of people who click on this article to measure the interest on white papers that discuss CTR optimization techniques, CTR softwares, CTR reports, etc.

The resulting link is http://emarketer.com/latestadclickcount?utm_source=newsletter25&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CTR%2Bproducts.  eMarketer would use this link as the link on its newsletter.

That’s it! Now eMarketer would have to just wait for the reaction of its The eMarketer Daily recipients.

Once people start clicking on the target link, Google Analytics will start measuring the clicks.

Here’s a sample referrals report:

traffic-sources-overview-google-analytics

Google Analytics will report the clicks on the link coming from “Other” sources.  The “Other” category will lump all clicks on links optimized with the Google Analytics URL Builder, so that’s why it’s important that you make smart use of the different fields that this tool offers you.

Here’s a teaser for the medium and advanced users of Google Analytics: Once you start using the Google Analytics URL Builder, you can created Advanced Segments to do all kinds of fun segmentation of your data.

traffic-sources-overview-google-analytics-1

So, once you find the total number of clicks on your target URL, you can calculate the CTR of your e-mail permission marketing campaign.

Remember: 

Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

I hope that you enjoyed this post. If you have any questions, please leave a comment for this post and I will reply to you within 24 hours.

Thank you for your time!

Disclaimer: I don’t work for eMarketer. I don’t receive any fees or payment for talking about them. I just really like their product.

: )