Email marketing: Is your grade an “A” or an “F”? Do you even know?

If you rely on email as part of your marketing mix, what are you doing to make sure it’s accomplishing its objective?

A recent study by Marketing Sherpa revealed that only third of the 2,700 organizations surveyed, had a method for quantifying the ROI from their email marketing programs. Of those that are in B-to-B, just 34% have a way to measure ROI. You already know that there are plenty of organizations who are more than willing to sell you an email solution (just check your own inbox!). But perhaps the real challenge is determining what to measure and how to measure it without making that kind of investment.

Start by taking a minute to reflect on your own email campaigns and ask yourself three questions:
1. What do I want my target to do after they receive my email?
2. How will I determine if my target did what I wanted?
3. Based on knowing the answers to 1 and 2, what will I do differently in my next email campaign?

The first question may have sounded obvious, but if my personal experience with clients is any gauge, I’ve received multiple answers. The RIGHT answer, however, is “to open the email.” As silly as that sounds, this is the first metric you need to test, measure, refine and test again.

There are literally hundreds of articles written about how to get email opened, so I’ll just cut to the chase.

Getting your email opened depends on 4 things: Your target audience, the “From” line, the “Subject” line and the mood of your recipient. While you can only control 3 out of 4, you can make a difference in open rates just by spending a little more time on carefully managing and testing the first three variables.

Too often I see target audiences lumped together (existing customers with cold prospects with lost customers, for example). And, if you have an unsophisticated email system, you’ll never be able to understand how one group performed against the other – your results will be “an open rate of X%” which is not useful at all. Your email marketing message SHOULD be different to these 3 audiences and your subject line MIGHT be different to each of them, so you should NOT be blasting them as one group anyway. Next is your “From” line. While the name of your company is often important, sometimes it’s not the best (or only) way to peak interest.

If, for example, you’ve created a segmented marketing campaign that uses a spokesperson as your “expert,” the email could come from that individual or a combination of the spokesperson’s name and your brand name. If your brand is a sub-brand of a larger (and better known) brand, you might try leveraging that brand name – especially with cold prospects that may have never had heard of your brand before.

The “Subject” line is probably the most tested variable. After reading dozens of articles and research papers on this topic, and from my own experience, I’ve concluded that Subject lines are best when:

* They are 35 characters (including spaces) or LESS
* They are benefit-focused
* They are structured such that the benefit is part of the first set of characters and not the last

Character length is important because most in-boxes are set to truncate the length of the “Subject” line length. In Outlook, the most popular business software, it’s at 35 characters. And I’m embarrassed to report that some of the worst offenders are publishers of marketing content!

Here’s a recent Subject Line from Marketing Sherpa (I personally love their content, but this 88 character subject line is NOT a best practice…

Reader Favorites: Email marketing ROI, personalized URLs, and powerful marketing messages

In most Outlook in-boxes (set at 35 characters), email recipients would see this:

 Reader Favorites: Email marketing RO

Or how about this 66-character Subject Line from LinkedIn? (Aside from the grammatical challenges of this statement):

Top news today: What Recruiters Look at on Your Resume in 6 Seconds

Again, here’s what most folks will see: Top news today:

What Recruiters Loo

There are lots of ways to design your emails for higher readership and more click thru’s, but if you can’t get your email communications opened in the first place, the rest, as they say, is irrelevant. And while we’re on the topic of email measurement, I’d like to challenge the way the “experts” recommend you measure click thru rates.

Most industry pundits suggest the formula is: Clicks/# of emails sent = click thru rate. I’d suggest it should be: Clicks/#of emails opened = click thru rate

After all, you can’t click thru an email if you haven’t opened it. And wouldn’t it make more sense to hear a statistic that says “15% open rate, 65% click thru” instead of “15% open rate, 9.75% click thru”?? Done my way, you instantly comprehend that more than half the people that opened the email clicked through (and that’s a good thing!).

To get to a simplified ROI, you determine your cost of the email (all-in for creative, blasting, etc.) and divide it by the number of people who opened the email. That represents the cost of getting eyeballs on your message. Divide that same cost by the number of people who clicked on a link (don’t include those who clicked to “opt out” or view your privacy statement!), and you have the cost to stimulate interest in your product or service.

If there’s a direct link to a product that your target would most likely buy “on the spot,” then you can take the gross revenue earned, subtract the cost of the campaign, and get to a final Return on Investment.

Even without a final sale, if you can measure open and click thru rates, and understand how to use them as a baseline for improvement, you’ll be joining the ranks of B-to-B marketers who know how to quantify the ROI from their email programs. And that gets an “A” in my book.

Is there an ECHO in Here?

Industry awards should and can matter. Here’s why…

As a marketing agency, we enter our work into awards shows when we believe that our agency (and our people) deserve outside recognition for our accomplishments. Whether it’s for one particularly creative idea, a brilliant marketing strategy, or the performance of a marketing campaign, we all like it when others acknowledge our brilliance and hand over that coveted trophy.

After we win, we bask in the press coverage, emails from colleagues and friends, and the satisfaction of knowing “We won!” And, let’s not forget bragging rights.

Agencies and clients alike line their bookshelves with hardware, and more than one winner I’ve known has been seen polishing the trophy when they think no one is looking.

As a Creative Director, I get invited to enter our work into lots of industry awards shows — and we do choose to enter many of them. From the Addy Awards (sponsored by the American Advertising Federation) to the Davey Awards (Honoring creative excellence from smaller agencies and companies worldwide), our agency enters 6 or 7 different shows a year. But there’s only one award that we truly covet… and I mean really, really covet.

And that’s the ECHO Award, from the Direct Marketing Association.

The ECHO represents what, in my mind, is what marketing is all about: 30% brilliant strategy, 30% breakthrough creative, 30% superlative results, and 10% of that little thing we call “Mojo.”

The ECHO judging process is rigorous. There are 3 rounds and in each round, a minimum of 3 judges review the entry. At each round of judging, the scores for the entry are tabulated and only those with the highest scores make it through to the next round. After the 3rd round, entries with the highest scores are awarded Gold, then Silver, then Bronze Awards. And then, from among the Gold winners, the ECHO Board of Governors determines the “best of the best” by reviewing and awarding the Diamond ECHO and USPS Gold Mailbox Award.

Since these are International Awards, judging takes place around the globe, and by experienced marketers who have “been there” and “done that” across a host of industries. So when an entry stands out as a winner, you know there’s very something special about it.

I’ve been an ECHO Judge and I can promise that it’s a well thought-out process that leverages the talents of many of the best marketing minds in the industry. I started as a 1st round judge over 15 years ago, and slowly worked my way up the food chain.

I’m proud to say I now serve on the Echo Board of Governors and delight in the meeting where we evaluate all of the about-to-be-awarded Gold winners to determine the Diamond and USPS Gold Mailbox ECHO awards. The debate is lively and I’m always fascinated how entries are evaluated by others during this judging process. I can promise you that no stone is left unturned as entries are dissected and analyzed to identify the “best of the best.”

In October, when ECHO winners are announced at the annual conference of the DMA, I’m always thrilled if our work is part of the winner’s circle. Because I know that means that those long strategic planning sessions, rounds and rounds of creative revisions, and the time-consuming process of setting up and tracking results — all spent to help a client drive their business forward — has now been recognized as exceptional work by our industry and our peers.

The 2012 ECHO Call For Entries is now open. If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll consider submitting your work. The awards show will be held in Las Vegas this year and,as we all know, there’s nothing like leaving Vegas a winner.