E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals

Thank you for the response via e-mail and comment post at idaconcpts.com about last week’s post regarding E-mail Permission Marketing.  If you’re still interested on the free copy of the first 4 four chapters of Seth’s Godin Permission Marketing, please e-mail me at damian [at] idaconcpts [dot] com.

So, you’ve created a great product or service and you have users lining up to register online for your product  or service so they can use it.  You have provided the option to received personal, relevant, and anticipated messages; and guess what? they are choosing to do so by clicking on the checkbox!.  Excellent! You cannot believe that people are interested in you and you  send out your first e-mail…and…now what?

This week I’m going to discuss, the basics of the “now what”: the E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals.

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:

1. Define business objectives and how e-mail fits into them.
2. Identify core criteria for e-mail campaigns (what, why, how, when, and so forth).
3. Create and execute campaigns (mine your e-mail list, scrub it for do not contacts, create the right text or other type of offering, and send it to your e-mail vendor).
4. Analyze your campaigns.

Email analytics can focus on both ends of this process:  defining objectives and criteria as well as campaign analysis.

As you can see, planning is 90% of any e-mail permission marketing campaign.  You cannot expect results, if you don’t have an idea of what good results are.   The most important part is that you have to figure a return-on-investment (ROI) for obtaining 1 unit of your desired goal (e.g. one download of a software, one download of a flyer on how-to-stop smoking, one call to one 1-800 number, one view of a blog post, etct).  That’s the ultimate goal that you want to set up first before anything.  How much are you willing to spend in order to get 1 unit of your desired goal?  Once you set that goal, write in 60 font size, print it out, and hang it somwhere visible in your working space.  This will guide your overall e-mail permission marketing campaign.

However, before getting to the specifics of calculating the ROI, we need to establish the fundamental metrics.  Remember, walking before running.  In the case of an effective permission e-mail, you can only have up to 2 goals, for example:  a) click here to learn more about my great website, b) click here to download my great free mp3, c) click here to make an appointment, etc.

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.

In order to track these results, you will need the following metrics.  Kaushik suggests that you use an e-mail vendor, however I will assume that your operation is pretty small and does not exceed a couple thousand e-mails.  At that level, there are only a couple fundamental metrics that you need to worry about.

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

That’s it, nothing more, nothing else, to get started.  I believe that even with little or no experience, you should be able to calculate everything except the CTR.

I will disccus the specifics of setting up the measurement of CTR with Google Analytics on the next post.

Thank you for your time.