The Advantages Of Email + Five Key Metrics To Track
The primary advantage of online marketing over offline marketing is instantly trackable. In an offline world it might take weeks or even months before a marketer can gather meaningful data on the success of a campaign, whereas, in email marketing, this data can be gathered (and acted on) within days, or sometimes even hours.
The Biggest Advantage Of Email Over Direct Mail
If you send out a letter to 200,000 people & only 10 of them respond, what does that say? Unless you’ve got a really high-margin product, it probably means you wasted 199,990 letters, stamps, envelopes & a whole lot of time.
But what if you could send out 200 letters, find out within a matter of hours whether anyone was going to respond, and then send out (or fix) the rest of the 200,000, knowing your money won’t be wasted?
That’s more-or-less what email allows you to do: trial, measure, evaluate & improve your campaigns in hours rather than months.
The Other Biggest Advantage of Email Over Direct Mail
The average direct mail campaign has only one conversion point: the point of response. For example, a charity campaign may be measured simply on the number of donations received. If results are lower than expected, it is a complex task for us to figure out why.
An email campaign, on the other hand, has several conversion points:
- Bounce (soft/hard)
- Email Open Rate
- Email Forward Rate
- Clickthrough
- Final Conversion
Not only can we measure here the number of Final Conversions, we can measure:
- What percentage of our emails bounced? (is our list reliable?)
- How many of our emails were received? (are we triggering spam filters? was our subject line appealing enough to open the email?)
- What percentage of our emails were forwarded? (was our offer exciting enough to spread?)
- How many email readers clicked through to our website? (did our email interest our readers enough to go further?)
- What percentage of click-throughs converted on our website? (is our web-funnel effective in converting traffic?)
Answering each of these questions gives us the opportunity to improve our next campaign (or, if this was a trial campaign, to ensure our actual roll-out is as effective as possible). Making small changes to our lists, creative & website and monitoring the effect on the above metrics can hugely improve results for very little effort.
