Some Comprehensive E-Mail Metrics
Once you get comfortable with the basic key metrics, like open and click-through rates, you are ready to go more in depth. Here are two additional metrics. Dig into them, and you will have a much more thorough sense of the success of your program.
Capture Rate: This is the number of people who come to your homepage vs. the size of your list. We recommend you set a goal that no one should ever leave your site without subscribing to one of your e-mail newsletters. This means that the number of unique visitors and the number of addresses on your list should be relatively close. (While tracking the number of sign-ups to your list is easy, tracking unique visitors is not always so simple. Check with your IT team to make sure you are getting the most accurate numbers possible.)
If these numbers are not close, you need to make sure that e-mail collection is treated as a top priority. For example, if your site averages 50,000 unique visitors per month yet your list has only 15,000 e-mail addresses, it’s time to revisit your e-mail collection strategy. Start to use opt-in forms in all visible, highly trafficked locations, make sure that signing up is easy, provide compelling reasons to sign up and create enticing calls to action.
And it should be said that this one-to-one ratio is really just a starting point. Depending on the type of site, the make-up of your audience and a host of other factors, it may be feasible to have a list that is much bigger than your monthly number of unique visitors. Ultimately, you want to identify the universe of people who could be customers for your product or service and aim for that number.
For example the NPD Consulting Group estimates that there are approximately 2.5 million engaged women in the U.S. and that 71% of them research wedding dresses online. That’s over 1.7 million women. If you sell wedding dresses online, that is your known universe of prospects.
Subscription Form Completion Rate: Ideally, you are using a mini-subscribe form throughout your site to maximize your capture of e-mail addresses on every page. However, you may also need to have an actual subscribe page for times when a mini-form isn’t possible or appropriate.
If you do have such a page, you’ll want to calculate its completion rate— The percentage of people who click on the page and then actually complete the form and submit their information. This should be close to 100%. If it’s not, there’s something wrong. Sound overly ambitious? It’s not. Think about it: Someone clicked on a link to subscribe to your newsletter, landed on the subscribe page but then didn’t hit the submit button. What made them change their mind?
The answer is obvious: The subscribe page or process turned them off. If the completion rate on your subscribe forms is low, this is the easiest and fastest metric to improve. Even a few percentage points will add up to huge gains. Keep working on the form until you achieve an average of better than 90% completes.
Matt Blumberg is the driving force behind Return Path, an e-mail performance company. Collaborating with him on this project are his colleagues, e-mail strategists Stephanie A. Miller and Tami Monahan Forman. This article was excerpted from their new book, “Sign Me Up! A Marketer’s Guide to Creating E-mail Newsletters That Build Relationships and Boost Sales (iUniverse Inc., 2005) © 2005 Return Path, Inc. All rights reserved.
