Results and expenditure of email marketing campaigns are often not directly related. One of the reasons is that companies often only focus on coverage and image. However, efficient email marketing requires – as every other marketing discipline – planning and control. Targets must be set and operationalised in measurable values. Email marketing offers a large number of benchmarks for this purpose. These email marketing KPI (key performance indicators) are key figures, which help to analyse the success of individual measures. However, in practice, a sensible analysis and interpretation of the results is often lacking. No wonder that the target-led reporting of email campaigns is among the top 6 email marketing tasks according to a retail study carried out by artegic AG. A British study by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) even states that approximately 34 % of companies are not able to measure the return on investment (ROI) of their marketing campaign.
Online CRM consulting and technology provider artegic AG has published a free checklist of “The 25 Most Important Performance Figures in Email Marketing”. It is meant to help marketers with choosing the most important performance figures in email marketing and show how these figure can be determined in order to take further measures.
Comprehensive Measurability Is the Strength of Email Marketing
“The comprehensive measurability is a major strength email marketing has to offer. Each recipient response can be measured and, provided there is the appropriate consent, it can even be assigned to individual users. Strategic opt-in management and performance figure analysis enable a sustainable communication with the customer or prospective customer and offer the potential for expansion of the market, improvement or optimisation of services. However, in addition to measurable responses, other performance figures also play a role: Quality indicators, which specify the activity and loyalty of a customer or monetary values to determine the financial success and cost”, states Stefan Mies Marketing Consultant at artegic AG.
Transferring Email Marketing to a Hierarchical Target System
Company targets are usually defined by means of a hierarchically divided system. Operationalising the corporate goals requires specific dimensions and values. These are primarily monetary target values, e.g. profit, turnover, costs or ROI. The superior corporate goals define the targets of each hierarchy level for the communication mix and for the individual tools, including email marketing. Judging the success or efficiency of a measure based on an individual performance figure without taking into account the overall view, may lead to the wrong decisions. When the knowledge about interdependencies and the significance of KPIs is incorporated, you can develop a controlling cockpit for email marketing communication from this.
Constructing a High-quality Contact BaseCreating a high-quality mailing list is one of the most important tasks in email marketing. A high-quality contact base stands out through strong recipient loyalty and high activation. In order to display these, we need new performance figures, such as retention rate or segment engagement quotient. These “new” performance figures are only two of many KPIs available to determine success in email marketing. The development of the industry continually generates new questions, which result in new performance indicators. For example, the mobile rate as a performance figure to determine mobile activity of your recipient group. This can be an indicator to determine whether it is worth investing in a mobile (responsive) email design.