MARKETING
7 key email metrics to track beyond opens and clicks
How many email metrics do you and your email marketing team track to measure how your email program is performing?
The top five metrics marketers use to measure success — opens, clicks, unsubscribe, click to open and bounces — are all activity-based, the 2021 State of Email Analytics report from Litmus revealed.
Those metrics all have their uses, mainly as trend indicators. And the open rate, which was already an unreliable success metric, has become even more so since Apple launched its Mail Privacy Protection feature in 2021.
Several lesser-known metrics will shed more light on whether your email program is thriving, surviving or ready for resuscitation. Depending on your ESP and its built-in reporting, you can track these right in your dashboard.
The others will require some calculating and integration with other databases in your organization, or a third-party reporting tool can be very useful. But the extra effort will be worth your time and energy because you’ll understand better what’s going on.
1. Conversion rate
Depending on your ESP, this campaign-level metric might be reported in your dashboard. But even if you can view it there, take some time to calculate it on your own.
Why you should track it
When reviewing your metrics holistically, this metric will help you calculate your per-email-campaign success. You can use it to compare the success rates of email campaigns that target different-priced items.
How to calculate it
Take the number of conversions and divide it by the number of emails delivered (Note: Not the total number of emails sent).
Let’s say you sent 105 emails, and 100 were delivered. If 50 subscribers click on your website, and 25 of them convert, that works out to a 25% conversion rate.
What to know
How you calculate conversion rate matters. Remember that Google Analytics uses landing page sessions to calculate conversions. Email marketers need to isolate email-related activity to find the actual conversion rate, which involves a larger number of metrics before customers get to the campaign’s landing page on your website.
If we were to calculate the conversion rate based on sessions, it would be 50%. That might look more impressive, but it doesn’t track back to your email. It’s the same number of conversions, just spread out over a much smaller field of possibilities.
Conversion is just one facet of the total email journey. If you focus only on website activity, you’re excluding engagement on other parts of the customer journey in which email plays a part. It could also lead you to optimize incorrectly or negate the impact of your email messages.
This reporting tool below showcases the different results for conversions, depending upon which calculation you use.
2. Value of an email address
This represents the monetary value of each email address in your database based on revenue from email. It is a business metric, not a campaign-level measurement.
Why you should track it
Unlike other metrics in this list, the value of an email address can help you make strategic and business decisions as well as campaign-level planning.
How to calculate it
Multiply the life of an address by annual email revenue and divide by the average list size in a year. For example, if the average life on your list is 3 years, your annual revenue from email is $700,000, and your annual list size is 95,000, the equation would look like this: 3 X $700,000 /95000 = $22
What to know
This metric illustrates why it’s so important to grow your email database. Here are two insights you can draw from this:
Reliable success metric
For example, suppose you want to increase frequency to increase revenue from email but are concerned that you could end up increasing unsubscribes or spam complaints from disgruntled subscribers.
While unsubs and spam complaints are one factor to consider, higher frequency can convert more subscribers to purchase, which in turn would increase revenue. Tracking email address value can reveal whether your subscribers respond with revenue or revolt.
Evaluate acquisition expenses
Knowing your email address value can guide your decisions on how much to spend on subscriber acquisition. The higher value, the more you can justify spending to attract higher-quality subscribers. If you don’t know your subscriber value, you could end up wasting your acquisition budget.
One note: This formula is more effective for B2C email marketing, especially retail and ecommerce. For B2B brands, the classic lead-nurturing process can make the value harder to determine.
3. Customer behavior beyond campaigns
This long-tail metric involves tracking campaign-level metrics beyond the immediate campaign time period. It helps you account for every bit of revenue from email and benefits your program in the long run.
Why you should track it
Because we usually have to move on so quickly to the next campaign, many marketers simply close out each campaign with a static report without going back a week or longer later. That’s a mistake because you likely will see some activity. If you keep tracking campaigns until you see no more activity, you could go months before you stop seeing conversions.
How to track it
Check your campaign activity regularly until you see no more activity. Automate this process through your reporting dashboard if you can, or send a manual reminder.
What to know
Most campaign reporting ends way too soon. But we know that customers often retain and act on emails days or weeks after you have moved on to a new campaign. That’s the long tail of email in action. Customers don’t always stop clicking after the campaign ends.
Email’s “nudge effect” explains this long-tail characteristic. Subscribers aren’t always in the market when your email campaigns arrive. If they’re engaged with your brand, they might keep your email in the inbox until they’re ready. Seeing your email can be enough to spur them to click and convert.
Up to 19% of consumers will save the email for later to take advantage of a discount, special offer or sale, DMA UK’s 2021 Consumer Email Tracking found. Although that number has been receding in recent years, it still points to a measurable source of revenue from email.
If you stop tracking activity too soon, you could be under-attributing revenue from email. One of my clients found it was under-recording email revenue by 128% when it expanded its reporting period from 4 days to 3 months.
Remember, the more revenue you can attribute to your email campaigns, the more budget you can request and justify to support your program.
4. ROI
Return on investment proves the channel’s value and financial success of your email program. It can help you gain more budget and resources. and helps you to gain more budget and resources.
Why you should track it
Email marketers historically are overworked and under-resourced. Part of it is our fault. We don’t provide detailed reporting, including many of the metrics I present here, and we don’t sing our own praises often enough. But ROI is one of email’s greatest advantages, so we need to measure it, report it and make sure financial decision-makers in our company know about it.
How to calculate it
Subtract campaign costs from total campaign revenue. Divide by costs and multiply by 100.
What to know
You probably are familiar with the general benchmark ROI numbers, which range from $28 for every $1 spent to $44 or more. While those numbers are nice to know, it’s more important that you know your own ROI.
This metric is one your C-suite executives are likely to understand. You can use it to build business cases for additional spending that can bring in more revenue, increase engagement or have a similar positive effect on your goals and objectives.
You do run the risk that your executives will be so happy with ROI as it is that they won’t see the value in increasing spending. That’s when you can use ROI to reveal missed opportunities that need budget funding to deliver.
5. Open-reach, click-reach and conversion-reach
These engagement metrics measure how well you engage your audience between campaigns.
Why you should track it
These metrics measure how many unique subscribers have opened, clicked or converted on your email campaigns at least once in a certain period. They are invaluable for measuring the overall engagement of your email program.
How to calculate it
Choose your activity (opens, clicks or conversions) and measure how many unique subscribers opened (for open-reach) or clicked (for click-reach) at least one email per month, quarter or year. For conversion-reach, you calculate how many unique subscribers converted in the chosen period.
What to know
By using this metric, you can identify the total reach of your campaigns for that quarter. For these engagement metrics to be truly useful, they must correlate to conversions and revenue, such that increasing open-reach also increases revenue.
Each of these metrics has value (even the open rate) when you use them to track trends — whether they’re increasing or decreasing. Adding reach to the equation gives you more information than you would get from each of these activity-based metrics by themselves.
A few minutes with a calculator — or, ideally, good data visualizations displayed right in your email marketing platform’s dashboard (a girl can wish!) — can pinpoint your strengths, highlight your weaknesses and help you map out new ways to message your customers more effectively.
6. Customer lifetime value (CLTV)
This business metric helps you focus on customer retention and customer experience (CX).
Why you should track it
This number is helpful as both a benchmark metric — is it trending up, down or stable, and how does it compare to lifetime values of other marketing channels? — and as an absolute number that represents the value a typical customer represents.
How to calculate it
Calculate your average customer’s yearly spend and multiply it by the average number of years your customers are active. You also can calculate it based on different life stages or segments, such as the average customer compared with loyal customers.
What to know
CLTV is a long-term business metric that represents value beyond a single campaign’s average order value or revenue per email. After all, customers don’t — or shouldn’t — buy just once from your brand.
While you can track it over time to learn whether customers are spending more or less with your brand, its greater value is as the foundation for building business cases showing email’s contribution to company revenue or to support a request for additional funding for acquisition, automations that can make your email messages more effective and drive more sales, and so on.
7. List growth
This metric measures whether and how your list has grown in a set period.
Why you should track it
Perhaps you look at your total list number when you get ready to send a promotional campaign. You can see it right there in your dashboard: “Sending campaign to 500,000 recipients.”
Or you look at how many people received your message. But how long has it been since you analyzed whether your list is growing or shrinking?
How to calculate it
Count both the number of opt-ins in a month, quarter or year and the number of addresses removed because of unsubscribes, spam complaints, bounces and inactivity.
For example, if you start Month A with a list of 100,000 addresses, and start Month B with a list of 110,000, you might assume your list grew 10%, or by 10,000 addresses. But if you removed 5,000 addresses for the reasons I listed previously, your list actually grew by 15,000 addresses or 15.8%.
What to know
In my experience, most people either don’t measure list growth or look at only the total list size occasionally. But you need to measure your exact growth so you can understand how well your acquisition efforts are working or whether you’re losing more subscribers than you take in. You’ll also understand better how much churn your list goes through in a year, which is important to know if you need to hit a list-growth goal.
Suppose, for example, you need to increase your list by 20% for the year. If you have a list of 100,000 addresses, you might think you need to add 20,000 new email addresses. But you’ll need more than that if you lose 5% of your list every month to churn. The chart below shows how churn affects list acquisition.
Knowing how list growth fluctuates month to month will help you better understand how changes in decisions like frequency (how often you send messages) and cadence (the intervals between messages) affect frequency. The bottom line can obscure the finer details of both churn and acquisition.
Go beyond your ESP’s dashboard
Although many ESPs now offer more detailed metrics, most still focus on email activity like opens, clicks and unsubscribes. A separate robust reporting tool that integrates across databases enables you to slice up your data in more relevant ways and understand what’s really happening with your program. You can use this information to identify where you need to improve or where advanced services can help you drive more revenue.
Reporting tools like these give you another advantage — immediate access to your data. You might work with a terrific analytics team, but you probably have to compete with other marketing channels or departments for their time and attention.
Customized reports can be a long time coming, and you probably don’t have the luxury of time to wait, especially with holiday marketing campaigns or annual goals and strategy to create.
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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
MARKETING
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MARKETING
Being position-less secures a marketer’s position for a lifetime
On March 20, 2024, the Position-less Marketer was introduced on MarTech.org and my keynote address at Optimove’s user conference.
Since that initial announcement, we have introduced the term “Position-less Marketer” to hundreds of leading marketing executives and learned that readers and the audience interpreted it in several ways. This article will document a few of those interpretations and clarify what “position-less” means regarding marketing prowess.
As a reminder, data analytics and AI, integrated marketing platforms, automation and more make the Position-less Marketer possible. Plus, new generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Canna-GPT, Github, Copilot and DALL-E offer human access to powerful new capabilities that generate computer code, images, songs and videos, respectively, with human guidance.
Position-less Marketer does not mean a marketer without a role; quite the opposite
Speaking with a senior-level marketer at a global retailer, their first interpretation may be a marketer without a role/position. This was a first-glance definition from more than 60% of the marketers who first heard the term. But on hearing the story and relating it to “be position-less” in other professions, including music and sports, most understood it as a multidimensional marketer — or, as we noted, realizing your multipotentiality.
One executive said, phrasing position-less in a way that clarified it for me was “unlocking your multidimensionality.” She said, “I like this phrase immensely.” In reality, the word we used was “multipotentiality,” and the fact that she landed on multidimensionality is correct. As we noted, you can do more than one thing.
The other 40% of marketing executives did think of the “Position-less Marketer” as a marketing professional who is not confined or defined by traditional marketing roles or boundaries. In that sense, they are not focused only on branding or digital marketing; instead, they are versatile and agile enough to adjust to the new conditions created by the tools that new technology has to offer. As a result, the Position-less Marketer should be comfortable working across channels, platforms and strategies, integrating different approaches to achieve marketing goals effectively.
Navigating the spectrum: Balancing specialization and Position-less Marketing
Some of the most in-depth feedback came from data analytic experts from consulting firms and Chief Marketing Officers who took a more holistic view.
Most discussions of the “Position-less Marketer” concept began with a nuanced perspective on the dichotomy between entrepreneurial companies and large enterprises.
They noted that entrepreneurial companies are agile and innovative, but lack scalability and efficiency. Conversely, large enterprises excel at execution but struggle with innovation due to rigid processes.
Drawing parallels, many related this to marketing functionality, with specialists excelling in their domain, but needing a more holistic perspective and Position-less Marketers having a broader understanding but needing deep expertise.
Some argued that neither extreme is ideal and emphasized the importance of balancing specialization and generalization based on the company’s growth stage and competitive landscape.
They highlight the need for leaders to protect processes while fostering innovation, citing Steve Jobs’ approach of creating separate teams to drive innovation within Apple. They stress the significance of breaking down silos and encouraging collaboration across functions, even if it means challenging existing paradigms.
Ultimately, these experts recommended adopting a Position-less Marketing approach as a competitive advantage in today’s landscape, where tight specialization is common. They suggest that by connecting dots across different functions, companies can offer unique value to customers. However, they caution against viewing generalization as an absolute solution, emphasizing the importance of context and competitive positioning.
These marketing leaders advocate for a balanced marketing approach that leverages specialization and generalization to drive innovation and competitive advantage while acknowledging the need to adapt strategies based on industry dynamics and competitive positioning.
Be position-less, but not too position-less — realize your multipotentiality
This supports what was noted in the March 20th article: to be position-less, but not too position-less. When we realize our multipotentiality and multidimensionality, we excel as humans. AI becomes an augmentation.
But just because you can individually execute on all cylinders in marketing and perform data analytics, writing, graphics and more from your desktop does not mean you should.
Learn when being position-less is best for the organization and when it isn’t. Just because you can write copy with ChatGPT does not mean you will write with the same skill and finesse as a professional copywriter. So be position-less, but not too position-less.
Position-less vs. being pigeonholed
At the same time, if you are a manager, do not pigeonhole people. Let them spread their wings using today’s latest AI tools for human augmentation.
For managers, finding the right balance between guiding marketing pros to be position-less and, at other times, holding their position as specialists and bringing in specialists from different marketing disciplines will take a lot of work. We are at the beginning of this new era. However, working toward the right balance is a step forward in a new world where humans and AI work hand-in-hand to optimize marketing teams.
We are at a pivot point for the marketing profession. Those who can be position-less and managers who can optimize teams with flawless position-less execution will secure their position for a lifetime.
MARKETING
Profit More, Work Less: 4 Steps to Niching Down For Your Agency
Ever wonder what the most successful agencies did differently than everyone else?
Was it luck, skill, hard work, the industry they chose, or something else?
Through my consulting work at Revenue Boost, I’ve worked with and taught over 400+ agencies how to scale their business.
From this, I’ve seen consistent patterns & traits in the ones who grow effortlessly…
Versus the ones who stay stuck for years – no matter how hard they work.
One key difference in approach stuck out to me.
I’ll illustrate what this one difference was with a story.
Once upon a time…
Two marketers graduated from business school with big plans to start their own agency.
Ready to conquer the world, they started cold calling, cold emailing, and doing everything under the sun to get clients.
And although they had the SAME levels of work ethic and talent…
One of them now has an 8-figure agency.
The other one of them is still freelancing odd jobs, barely making ends meet.
What did the successful one do differently?
He took a big risk and started turning down clients and projects.
Instead of offering everything to everyone, like most agency owners…
And being a jack of all trades but a master of none…
He decided only to serve Plumbers and be the best dang’ plumbing marketer on the planet.
With a goal to make their pipeline fuller than a broken toilet pipe.
He mastered the art of niching down and realized it would be easier to be the biggest fish in a small pond.
And you should too – and in this article, you’ll learn exactly how to define your own niche.
Now it may seem scary to turn down clients…and it may feel like you’re limiting yourself by focusing on only one client-type.
But it’s exactly the opposite. You’re actually limiting yourself by being everything for everybody.
Niching Down Can Help 2x-3x Your Revenues
One of my clients Lauren ran a digital agency offering everything under the sun.
Social media, paid ads, web dev, SEO, and she offered it to clients from many different industries.
Because of this, her agency stayed stuck at $25,000 a month and she couldn’t break through.
On top of that, she and her team worked so much harder than they had to and operations were messy.
Every client needed different things, required customization, and nothing was standardized.
We sat together to audit all her past clients, and we found that Medical practices were her best clients.
They were easy to sell, stayed the longest, and gave her the least amount of headaches and complaints.
So, she changed her entire business model to ONLY service this industry.
Then, she developed a standardized offer for that industry, rather than customizing everything.
One offer, to one target market. Afterwards, she started cold emailing businesses in her niche with her new offer.
The Results?
She 2X’d her revenues and grew to $52,000 in monthly revenue in not even four months time.
All from making one simple shift. One decision that can make everything easier, and you can do the same.
See, most agency owners and marketers start out with one or two clients, and then they get referred new clients from various industries.
Before they know it, they’re marketing everything for everyone and have NO idea who their ideal client is.
The Problem with Running a Business This Way Is That It Becomes Impossible to Scale.
Every single new client requires a ton of research, thought, and brainpower.
Because each new client has different needs, it leads to having no standardized processes and systems.
Which keeps the founder stuck in the business and unable to hire a team.
The other problem that arises is acquisition.
There are hundreds of thousands of agencies on the planet, and it’s really hard to stand out.
UNLESS you specialize.
When you specialize in a niche – let’s say, SEO for plumbers…
Then you aren’t competing with every other agency on the planet. You don’t look and sound just like them anymore.
Now, you’ve created your own tiny pond in which you can be a big fish.
There are way fewer agencies that specialize in plumbers or SEO, let alone both. So, you’ve eliminated the competition with one decision.
If a plumber was looking at two agencies – one that was a general digital agency and one that specializes in helping plumbers…
They almost always choose the agency that specializes in their industry and has testimonials from people just like them.
Not to mention, it’s easier to market when you have a clear niche in mind.
You know who you’re writing your content for…
You know who to send emails and social media DMs too…
You know exactly who to target in your ads….
You know what podcasts you should get booked on
And so on and so on.
Plus, you can charge whatever prices you want. Because you aren’t compared to the hundreds of thousands of agencies out there – you have a unique offer now.
Committing to one niche makes marketing easier, it makes selling easier, and it makes scaling easier.
You only have to be good at doing 1 thing for 1 person, and you can build systems and processes around it. This way, you can hire a team to take it over and be able to work less.
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Now how do you do it? What if you don’t know who your ideal client is?
Step 1: Audit Your Current + Past Client List.
Write down every single client you’ve ever served, and group them by niche. Industry, location, size and so on.
Once you group them together, one niche might stick out for you already as your favorite type of client.
If it doesn’t, use my 7-Point checklist and rank each niche on a 1-5 scale.
These 7 criteria points are what makes a great niche.
#1 – Total Addressable Market:
How many businesses are in this market? Is it large enough to support your bigger goals? Is the market shrinking or growing? Make sure the niche is big enough for you and that it’s not declining.
#2 – Purchasing Power
Is this market (or at least a segment of it) able to afford what you want to charge?
Think back to if you’ve received a lot of pricing objections when you’ve sold to these people in the past.
#3 – Lifetime Value
How long did these clients stay? Were they one-and-done projects or did they stay with me for eternity?
The bigger the life-time value, the more money and time you can spend to acquire a client.
If the niche typically churns in a few months or only works with you for quick, one-off projects…
Then you’ll have to spend so much energy on sales and marketing to keep the business alive.
#4 – Strong Need & Pain
Does this market have an important problem to solve, one that they have to fix? Or, is what you sell just a “nice to have”?
If the latter, it’s going to be very hard to get clients.
If they can’t live without your solution, then getting clients will be a breeze.
#5 – Desire to Solve that Pain
It’s one thing for a market to have a problem, but they must also have a desire to solve that problem.
Even if they have the need that you fulfill, that’s not enough – they also have to care about fulfilling that need.
#6 – Easy to Reach
Is the market fairly easy to find online? Can you reach them via most advertising platforms and social channels? Are their groups and communities online?
If you’re targeting businesses that are hard to reach online, you’re creating one extra barrier to your success.
Step 2: Choose 1 Niche After Ranking Each of Your Past Clients.
Tally up all the rankings and pick the 1 with the highest score.
Don’t worry about making the wrong decision.
Consider this an experiment.
You aren’t married to your new niche, you can always change back in a few months if it doesn’t work out.
Step 3: Create a Pre-Packaged Offer for Your New Niche
The whole point of niching down is to create more focus and simplicity in your business
Part of this is about WHO you sell, part of this is about WHAT you sell them.
Start out by choosing 1 problem to solve for them, and 1 solution to that problem.
List out what the deliverables will be and what you want to charge.
Keep it simple! You can build upon this later.
Step 4: Test the Waters and Go Land 5 New Clients.
Before you make any drastic changes to your business, such as letting go of clients, changing your branding and website…
Test the waters first, and verify if this new niche is the direction you want to go.
Go land another 5 clients or so, and that’ll be enough to identify if these are really our ideal clients or not.
You might think they are at first but you’ll know for sure once you serve more of them.
Wrapping Up…
You know now the problems of being a jack-of-all-trades with no clear focus.
Every new client is a ton of work and requires customization…
And getting new clients is difficult because there’s nothing that stands out about your agency. You’ll look and sound like everyone else.
This means when you do niche down, and sell 1 offer to 1 target market…
Your workload will decrease. Each new client will be easier to serve than the previous one.
You’ll become world-class at helping your clients from all the focused repetition
You’ll quickly develop a reputation and become a big fish in a small pond.
In every way, it’ll become easier to grow, scale, attract, and retain clients.
Plus, you’ll have more fun and the business will be simpler & easier to run.
And with this knowledge…
You’ve learned the 5 simple steps to niching down.
So…
Time to get to work!
Put this into practice and watch it transform your business.
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