Look Beyond Email Metrics to Measure Email Effectiveness

One strength of email as a marketing tool is its measurability. But if you measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns in a vacuum, relying exclusively on standard medium-specific metrics such as open and clickthrough rates, you could be underestimating their effectiveness.

John Janetos, vice president of business development and sales for email marketing services provider iPost, offers an example. A company found that the open rates for a particular email campaign were only so-so. By tracking social network conversations, however, the company saw that there was a lot of talk about the offer within the email. At around 9am in each time zone, social media buzz ramped up, driving recipients of the email to the company’s bricks-and-mortar stores. “If you’d just looked at the email metrics, you’d have thought it wasn’t a great-performing campaign,” Janetos says.

“The effect and performance of email is undermeasured,” he continues. “There’s a halo effect to it. How do you measure the true performance of email and connect the disparate channels to get a holistic view of all your channels?”

Not surprisingly, Janetos believes that the new InstaVista dashboards developed by iPost and analytics technology provider Anametrix, a provider of cloud-based business analytics technology, will help. InstaVista enables users to overlay data from social media listening, search engine marketing, and online advertising, among other sources, onto their email metrics.

There are, of course, low-tech, manual ways to determine the effects of email on other channels. Including a coupon with specific codes that must be printed out and brought to a store in order to obtain a discount is one method. QR codes are a modern take on that method: “All of a sudden you’ve made the physical world interactive,” Janetos notes. Embedding trackable forward-to-a-friend or share-with-your-network (SWYN) buttons in your emails is another. Regularly searching Twitter, Facebook, and Google for your brand name and particular phrases may seem labor-intensive or time-consuming, but it can give you an idea of the viral spread of your email marketing.

“What we think is exciting is that it’s not enough to do just email marketing or social marketing or interactive marketing,” Janetos says. “Brick-and-mortar is still real, direct mail is still out there. You’ve got to have a holistic view.”