In our webinar on Riding the Ecommerce Wave, we shared some key tactics and research plus  some practical tactics and strategies to improve ROI on campaigns. Some of these include: embedding social links, free shipping, limited time offers and store locators. As we look forward to joining 10,000 visitors at Internet Retailer in San Diego this week, it’s a great time to share some insight we’ve learned from engaging with our retail customers.

How do you measure value in your email campaigns?

The Curriculum of the Message

Most retailers pay really close attention to the revenue they generate from each and every email they send. This is, of course, hugely important, but if that's where you stop, it leaves you trapped into only thinking about each message individually.
Increasingly, working with our customers in this market, we are seeing terrific results over time by thinking about how to lift the overall engagement levels of the program as a whole. We do this using an engagement score, which tracks how many of the people on your list have clicked on any email in the past three months. This works for a number of reasons because it:

• Forces you to really focus on the relevance your email program as a whole has for the people who are receiving it
• Recognizes that not everyone wants to buy the same things, so different people will respond to different offers
• Bulletproofs your deliverability to the inbox - and in particular the PRIORITY INBOX - that protects you against the increasing emphasis the inbox guardians (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL etc....) place on engagement in deciding how to route your emails to their servers
• Helps you spot when individual subscribers are losing interest in what you're sending them - so that you can take steps to re-engage with them

Overall, this helps you really reinforce the value of your overall program by helping you think about the bigger value of that program over time, rather than simply thinking email by email.

Preference Center Gets You on the Right Track

A quick example I’ll share is with our customer Matches. We now have eleven different email programs in a particular week outgoing, and only one of them a broadcast email to the whole list. Other campaigns are tightly focused and targeted through segmented audiences based on preference center data, behavioral observation by tracking website viewing activity and purchase information. With this level engagement and measuring the metrics of the engagement we’ve seen them improve their traction to closer to 80% or more. Against a retail bennchmark score in the 20-30% range, that's huge.

Typically, a customer who participates in your preference center will be twice as likely to open, twice as likely to click, twice as likely to buy... and when they do spend, they will spend more. With better data, you can construct segmentation that works to drive the sale. Observe, measure and adjust.

Make What You Spend Work Harder

Look at your overall budget and cost on your digital marketing efforts. What portion of your total revenue comes from email today? By initiating some of the practices mentioned here, you should be able to boost that up to 30% and in turn, lower transactional cost for other programs.

It’s important to understand the source of your revenue. Developing engagement metrics that matter improve your overall ROI. Make what you invest in work harder for you and become more focused on the true value of your email marketing program- engagement that drives revenue.

Team Lyris will be at Internet Retailer (#IRCE2011) this week in San Diego, stop by and see us at booth #809 and find out more about how we can help you develop engagement metrics.

Watch the Webinar: Riding the eCommerce Wave- Techniques for Maximizing Retail Email   

About the Author

Michael Weston (@sandlines) is GM and Senior VP of Europe, Middle East and Africa.