Internet Marketing Services and Email Marketing Metrics

Along with its effectiveness, one of the great benefits of using Direct Response Email marketing is that it captures measurable metrics. There is a lot of information available to assist you in making your campaigns more profitable. Great information that can allow you to fine tune your message to get the maximum benefit.

Things like:

• The percentage of the emails that the customers actually opened
• How many of the customers actually clicked on a link within the campaign, known as the Click-Through Rate or CTR
• How many of the customers did not receive the email due to bad email addresses (changed ISP, changed email address, etc.)

It is important to understand these terms and what they mean. Once you understand them, you can make changes to your future campaigns that will make them even more profitable.

The descriptions below are more detailed and will give you a better understanding of the various metrics involved.

Open Rate - This is a percentage of the emails that were actually opened vs. the total number of emails sent. Total emails opened divided by the total emails sent will give you the Open Rate.

CTR or Click-Thru Rate - Various text and images in the ad may be formatted to provide links to other information or other webpage's. You need to know which of those links are getting clicks. That tells you what is important in the customers mind. If they were not interested they would not have clicked on the link. For example, you may find that images have a much better click through rate than text type links, or vice versa.

The CTR is a good sign of how your customers react and interact with the message you are sending.

Undelivered or Bounce Rate - This is the total number of emails that did not get delivered (bounced back) for some reason. There are quite a few reasons why this can occur. For example, the email address is no longer a valid address. Maybe the customer changed their email address or their ISP and was required to get a new email address.

Also the customers inbox could be full or they have exceeded their bandwidth quota from the ISP.

There are more advanced metrics available too. Although not relevant in many cases, they may provide you with 'nuggets of gold' for your particular business or products sold.

• Regional Metrics
  • Region/Country CTR
  • Regional Open Rate
  • CTR vs. Number of sales per Region/Country
  • Total Sales revenue generated for the campaign
  • Return on Investment for the campaign

Which metrics are most important to you?

One of the nice things about using Direct Response email marketing is that you are not forced to be a 'square peg in a round hole'.

What's important can vary depending on your stated campaign objective. Maybe you are introducing a new employee or you are announcing the opening of a new location. Although sales may increase simply from getting your name in front of the customer, most likely that was not your objective for a campaign like this.

Some metrics, like Open Rate, are generally important regardless of the type of campaign. You always want to know what percentage of your customers are actually seeing the message you send them.

When increasing sales, or introducing a new product is the objective of the campaign, you may find that the CTR and Conversion Rate are the most important. Those metrics will tell you how many of the customers actually took the action that you wanted them to take. Like clicking on a link or an image.

Once you have decided what's important to you, you can then go about working on increasing quality of those metrics.

For example, you may want to concentrate on increasing the CTR (Click-Through Rate). You know that you want every email to get opened and that you want to know how many people took the action you wanted, like clicking on an image or link. There are a few things that can dramatically affect the Open Rate and the CTR.

Without a doubt, the "Subject Line" of the email and the emails greeting have the greatest affect on the Open Rate. You must make the Subject Line interesting to the customer. Even though you are extremely interested in the subject of the email, you have to get the customer interested too. And that is accomplished with an effective Subject Line. A caution here is to not get too aggressive with the Subject Line and make your email look like spam. If the subject line looks like spam to the customer, they are going to delete it without opening it. So if you are suffering from a low Open Rate, you really need to take a look at your subject line. The subject line should be personalized and use the customers name and it should be short and to the point.

If your subject line is interesting enough to the customer to open the email, then the next most important thing is to immediately get their attention with a compelling offer within the first sentence of the first paragraph. It doesn't take "FREE" or "Huge Discount" to get the customers attention (actually that may reduce the CTR). You can also accomplish it with curiosity too. Like a "Did you know?, etc.

Always write the text with what's important to the customer in mind. You may know all the lingo and acronyms associated with your industry, but don't assume that your customers do.

Within the text of the very first paragraph you should make it obvious to the customer why it's important to them. What's the benefit to the customer? Save money? More security? Latest technology? New model?, etc.

The first paragraph should be short and remember that Free Offers and Discounts usually get the highest CTR.

Probably the place where most marketers 'miss the boat" is in the "Call For Action". You should ALWAYS include a call for action. You can do this with buttons or links or images. Some people think it is unnecessary to have the "Click Here" or the "Click Now", etc. thinking that their customers are more sophisticated than that or that it somehow cheapens the offer. Trust us on this one, you need it. Try this, for the next 24 hours pay close attention to every ad you see on TV or hear on the radio specifically listening and watching for a "Call For Action". Try to count how many times you hear or see "Call Now" "Limited Time", etc. The Call for Action is important and all of the successful companies use them. That being said you should call now and we can have you experiencing Intelligent Advertising almost immediately.

The Open Rate for your campaign can be impacted by Spam too. What we mean is that most of the ISP's have implemented their own “spam filter”. They take it upon themselves to automatically filter out messages that they consider spam. To avoid their spam filters you should limit or even eliminate certain key words that their spam filters look for. With our system, this is not a problem.

The system we use automatically 'grades' your email and gives us a "Spam index" number so we know whether you are increasing the odds of your email being considered spam. And this is done prior to you sending out the ad. Most of the time, a few simple changes can be made to get the "grade" down so the ISP filters have no problem with the ad.

From the beginning of your use of Direct Response Email Marketing, you have to make a decision on the design, structure and the colors of your emails. Then you must resist the temptation to change the look and feel of your emails. Over a period of time, the customers will come to recognize the ad as being from your company without even reading any of the test. That comfort level increases readership and helps build your company and brand recognition.

If your message is lengthy, you should include interactive links and images throughout. We know you believe your offer is so compelling that the readers will read it word for word, but statistically that simply does not happen. People scan their emails to try to quickly ascertain what's in it for them, what is their benefit in taking more time to read the email more thoroughly.

Knowing this, you should use headings, subheadings and bullets to help the customer do a quick scan and see that they should take more time and read the entire message.

People are extremely busy these days and you should know that you only have a precious few seconds to get the customers attention. Within those few seconds the customers is going to decide to continue to read, or to hit the delete key. If you have a good open rate but the CTR is low, then you are probably losing your customers within the first few seconds.

To let you see for yourself just how good this service is, we offer a free 15 day trial of our Intelligent Advertising system. To give it a try just enter the information in the above box. Once you do, you will understand why the 'big guys' all use this service.

Then, decide for yourself if your profits and sales will go up using this system. Short and sweet, no obligation and the decision is yours. Contact us today.