The Next  Four

Unsubscribe Rate

Your unsubscription rate is the percent of subscribers who were sent the blast who click on the bottom of the message to opt-out, since they no longer feel the Newsletter or Campaign is for them.

You want this to be > 1% on average. Less than 1 percent is ideal. This depends on many factors however, such as how big your subscriber lists are, what field you are in, how often you send out blasts, etc….

If you notice spikes in unsubs, try to figure out why and isolate the reason. Perhaps your Campaign wasn’t optimized for mobile phone, which a vast majority of recipients are opening the Email from.

Paying attention to customer rention & loyalty may be important in your business, especially if you are in a field where long-time clients are the norm like small business, B2B, or if you offer a service that is repeatable, e.g. restaurant business.

Device Type

It’s pretty important that your ESP can give you the anatlycs for which device which recipient opened the email. This is because with the proliferation of devices types in the mobile world and accessing our ecommerce sites, responsive design and making the Newsletter look good on all interfaces is a very important consideration.

Some of us in the field like to refer to this as Mobilegeddon, in which RD (responsive design) has never been more important. Let’s remind ourselves that emails are for starters viewed 53% of emails opened on mobile devices.

If you are sending a blast to baby boomers who are on tablet, but your Newsletter template was designed for PC viewing, you may have a problem! With baby boomers retiring and adopting mobile phones and tablets, we can expect these trends towards mobile devices to continue. Also waiting on whether the market of smart watches and other wearable devices takes off.

Device type is also of course, related to time of day (TOD). If I sent my blast in the morning, when people are commuting to work, they will likely receive the mail first on their mobile or wearable device. Just as, a lot of late night views will be tablet for people already in bed, but not yet asleep.

If your ESP can give you some data on device type, it can be really helpful.

Sharing 

This related to the use of sharing on social media to different social media channels. It could also be the “email to a friend” feature in many ESPs. These metrics are important to evaluate how “viral” your content is and how much social bandwith it has across different channels. If you are retail and have products that are hyper-visual, you will certainly want to enable social sharing to Pininterst, Instagram, Youtube, etc…

Tracking social shares and Email forwards, is important to evaluate the reach and public appeal of your brand & image, as well as specific products. Promotional campaigns that link idea of gamification with social media and encourage user-generated content (UGC) is a good idea here to boost social sharing.

If social media isn’t integrated with your Email marketing, you are missing out on a signifcant sources of social authority and “free” advertisment. For millenials who grew up on social media, what their peer network says and this virtual word of mouth, can have a significant impact on some of their consumer decisions. To get your brand “trending” can produce very positive sales and ROI.

Post-Click

This refers to all behavoiral activity that occurs on a website, landing page, microsite and on your ecommerce store from a link in an email. Did the subscriber follow the link to your youtube video? Did they go to your landing page of products and click on several products? All this should be tracked and placed in your Big data so that when your database gets a machine learning automation marketing platform (MLMAP) all this data on each consumer and viewer will be there as part of their browsing, web and social media history.

Naturally, the more information you track the better. Did they download your app, did they particiapte in your free coupon 1 day offer and visit your store? Have they visited your ecommerce store multiple times, etc… Even if you don’t know what to do with your big data now, a day will come when it will all be put to good use and help you generate higher sales.

Post-click analytics require tracking cookies, code to be inserted on the destination website to use cookied stored on the recipient’s computer to track web behavior. If your ESP can handle google analytics integration is can facilitate this.

We shall continue this topic in a future blog post. What analytics do you use that you find helpful in your E-Camaigns?