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:

1. Bounce (soft/hard)
2. Email Open Rate
3. Email Forward Rate
4. Clickthrough
5. Final Conversion

Not only can we measure here the number of Final Conversions, we can measure:

1. What percentage of our emails bounced? (is our list reliable?)
2. How many of our emails were received? (are we triggering spam filters? was our subject line appealing enough to open the email?)
3. What percentage of our emails were forwarded? (was our offer exciting enough to spread?)
4. How many email readers clicked through to our website? (did our email interest our readers enough to go further?)
5. 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.