Web Analytics KPIs for Everyone – (Part 1) Email Campaign KPIs
All KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs. Though it is important for the business to measure all metrics but it is not necessary to everyone to monitor or report these metrics on a day to day basis. Rather, a set of Web Analytics KPI’s that would allow you to act and help you optimize the function you handle would adequately good. Pls. note that no one person requires to look and analyze one hundred metrics at any time : ) KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) should be relevent, controllable, actionable, simple and credible. I am trying to list-down various Web Analytics KPIs for each function of ebusiness whether you handle SEO, SEM, Usability or a subfunction of any of these.
In large corporations, the top management would be more interested in market shares than how a particular program would be doing. In small and mid-sized companies, the top mangement would also be interested on ROI’s of a specific online investment that was made. The program teams that run various ebusiness functions for the business would be more interested in how their programs are doing and more detail to the grain. These are the people who would go back and optimize to increase the ROI and customer satisfaction on the website. These are the people who just don’t need numbers but actions that they can take based on the numbers. Keeping them in view, I am attempting to list down varioius web analytics KPI’s by each function and the most likely action that one can take from them.
Email Marketing: For an email marketer the ultimate goal is to increase the engagement with the emails resulting the positive returns from list. There are various elements that would need to be looked at individually and compare with other metrics to optimize the complete email marketing program and/or a specific email marketing campaign. The below email marketing metrics would act as kpis for each step in the email campaign process.
| Email List Effectiveness | Bounce Rate, Unsubscriptions Rate |
Though the Email Lists are built thru the permission based subscriptions, there is some percent of the people would always unsubscribe to the list. People generally unsubscribe when they think the content or offers provided in the email is not relevant to them or not effective. Another reason why people unsubscribe is, too frequent mailing, again this is to be balanced with how exciting offers/content you provide that is relevent to the user.
Unsubscription rate would be studied along with the email open-rate, click-thru rate for a historical period. The higher-percent unsubscription would be casued when list relevence and email offer relevence doesn’t match. Unsubscription rate would tell the marketer how relevent is the list.
Bounce Rate: Bounce Rate would tell the quality of the list. There are two kinds of bounce rates that are generally measured.
1. Soft-Bounces, are resulted from no response from receiver’s ISP or the receivers mail-box is full. These email-ids can be re-utilized later some-point of time as the problems are temporary here.
2. Hard-Bounces, are resulted from a non-existent email id. This is a permanent problem, marketer can not send an email to this list. It is important to the marketer that he tracks the Hard-bounces and remove them from the list that reduces the cost being paid to email vendor.
| Email Subject Line Effectiveness | Open Rate |
The effectiveness of subject-line depends on many factors and they get saturated more quickly. It is kind of funny to say that the subject lines gets saturated? Marketers always try to entice the receiver with creative subject lines to persuade users to open the email. Earlier, name in the email used to have higher open rate, then it was moved to keeping “RE:” as the reply in the subject line, then, if you observe the current one that has “hi <first name>, where are you?”. Over a period of time people would know that these kind of subject lines are associated with mass-mailings which would gradually reduce the effectiveness of these subject lines.
Email Marketers should know the open rate and associate it with the email subject line effectiveness. But, the most important point here is… it is not higher open rate is the success but we would need to compare with the final campaign goals such as conversion rate or ROI. For example, assume, with 80% open rate a marketer has 4% conversion rate but with 55% open rate a marketer has 8% conversion rate. Which subject line would you recommend?
The best practice is to test varioius subject lines with sample lists before sending to the complete list.
| Content and Offer Effectiveness | Click-thru Rate |
We can not convert the user into a lead or sale in the email itself in a normal ecommerce context. We want list users to visit the site and explore the products on the site. The content and offers we provide in the email should be relevent and enticing for the users to visit the site.
The Email Content Effectiveness depends on the relevency of the content to the email list. Here, we are measuring effectiveness by looking at peoples interest in the content and offers provided in the email. This is tracked using click-thru rate.
Email Content Effectiveness can also be measured by segmenting the email list and content links in the email copy which tells which section in the email copy is more effective.
| Landing Page Effectiveness | Committed Visits (my non-patented metric) |
Landing Page Effectiveness has the utmost importance as the others. The conversion generally doesn’t happen on the landing page itself as most landing pages are the gateway pages which drives the visitors to other parts of the site.
Marketers measures number of people exiting the landing page immediately after they land at the campaign landing page from an email campaign. The more people commiting their visit by clicking the intended links towards the conversion the better the landing page.
The important point here is to keep the scent in consistent with the email copy.
| Email Campaign Effectiveness | ROI, Customer Satisfaction |
Email Campaign Effectiveness is measured thru ROI. However, it has to be compared with other metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score and other Email Marketing Metrics.
For Example, assume you had 300% ROI with 20% open rate, 15% click-thru rate…can you say the campaign is effective? do you see the missing gap…? Need to go back to Email List Effectiveness, Email Subject Line Effectiveness.
Web Analytis KPIs – (Part II): SEO KPIs
| Email List Effectiveness | Bounce Rate, Unsubscriptions Rate |
Though the Email Lists are built thru the permission based subscriptions, there is some percent of the people would always unsubscribe to the list. People generally unsubscribe when they think the content or offers provided in the email is not relevant to them or not effective. Another reason why people unsubscribe is, too frequent mailing, again this is to be balanced with how exciting offers/content you provide that is relevent to the user.
Unsubscription rate would be studied along with the email open-rate, click-thru rate for a historical period. The higher-percent unsubscription would be casued when list relevence and email offer relevence doesn’t match. Unsubscription rate would tell the marketer how relevent is the list.
Bounce Rate: Bounce Rate would tell the quality of the list. There are two kinds of bounce rates that are generally measured.
1. Soft-Bounces, are resulted from no response from receiver’s ISP or the receivers mail-box is full. These email-ids can be re-utilized later some-point of time as the problems are temporary here.
2. Hard-Bounces, are resulted from a non-existent email id. This is a permanent problem, marketer can not send an email to this list. It is important to the marketer that he tracks the Hard-bounces and remove them from the list that reduces the cost being paid to email vendor.
| Email Subject Line Effectiveness | Open Rate |
The effectiveness of subject-line depends on many factors and they get saturated more quickly. It is kind of funny to say that the subject lines gets saturated? Marketers always try to entice the receiver with creative subject lines to persuade users to open the email. Earlier, name in the email used to have higher open rate, then it was moved to keeping “RE:” as the reply in the subject line, then, if you observe the current one that has “hi <first name>, where are you?”. Over a period of time people would know that these kind of subject lines are associated with mass-mailings which would gradually reduce the effectiveness of these subject lines.
Email Marketers should know the open rate and associate it with the email subject line effectiveness. But, the most important point here is… it is not higher open rate is the success but we would need to compare with the final campaign goals such as conversion rate or ROI. For example, assume, with 80% open rate a marketer has 4% conversion rate but with 55% open rate a marketer has 8% conversion rate. Which subject line would you recommend?
The best practice is to test varioius subject lines with sample lists before sending to the complete list.
| Content and Offer Effectiveness | Click-thru Rate |
We can not convert the user into a lead or sale in the email itself in a normal ecommerce context. We want list users to visit the site and explore the products on the site. The content and offers we provide in the email should be relevent and enticing for the users to visit the site.
The Email Content Effectiveness depends on the relevency of the content to the email list. Here, we are measuring effectiveness by looking at peoples interest in the content and offers provided in the email. This is tracked using click-thru rate.
Email Content Effectiveness can also be measured by segmenting the email list and content links in the email copy which tells which section in the email copy is more effective.
| Landing Page Effectiveness | Committed Visits (my non-patented metric : ) |
Landing Page Effectiveness has the utmost importance as the others. The conversion generally doesn’t happen on the landing page itself as most landing pages are the gateway pages which drives the visitors to other parts of the site.
Marketers measures number of people exiting the landing page immediately after they land at the campaign landing page from an email campaign. The more people commiting their visit by clicking the intended links towards the conversion the better the landing page.
The important point here is to keep the scent in consistent with the email copy.
| Email Campaign Effectiveness | ROI, Customer Satisfaction |
Email Campaign Effectiveness is measured thru ROI. However, it has to be compared with other metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score and other Email Marketing Metrics.
For Example, assume you had 300% ROI with 20% open rate, 15% click-thru rate…can you say the campaign is effective? do you see the missing gap…? Need to go back to Email List Effectiveness, Email Subject Line Effectiveness.
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March 2nd, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Very well written post, loved it. Keep more of them coming!