When I talk with email marketers, there are two questions that I love to ask:
1. What's the goal of this email campaign?
2. How do you measure success?

You might be surprised how seldom the answers to these two questions line up.

The first answer is often fairly focused:

• "We want to drive purchases on our website."
• "We want sales prospects to download a white paper or attend a webinar."
• "We want to increase ad impressions on our website."

The second answer is almost invariably shackled by perceived technology limitations:

"We look at email open and click-through rates."

But how much are opens and clicks worth? What is their impact on your organization's bottom line? They’re helpful to troubleshoot specific steps toward conversion, but they're not necessarily indicative of overall email marketing campaign success. So what else is there?

What metrics are available to you?

The main reason email marketers only look at open and click-through rates (CTRs) is because those are the metrics readily available within most email marketing applications. The post-click data is collected by a Web analytics application, such as Google Analytics, Omniture, or the built-in Web analytics of Lyris HQ. If Web analytics are handled by someone else in your organization, your first step will be to get direct access to it.

Just as your customers experience a seamless message as they click through from the email campaign in their inbox and onto your website, your goal is to combine your email and Web analytics data in the same way. We refer to this combined or connected data as “marketing analytics”.

The next step is identifying which of your Web visitors clicked through from the email campaign. This usually involves adding some type of tracking parameters to the links in your email message. Your Web analytics provider should have further instructions. Thankfully, Lyris HQ takes care of this for you with a robust analytics solution at your fingertips and real-time conversion and revenue data right alongside your open and click rates. (You can also use the Lyris HQ tracking parameters to create Advanced Segments in Google Analytics)  

What are your goals?

With connected marketing analytics data you have insight into the entire visitor experience, from inbox to conversion. Now you can choose the best metric(s) to align with your goal(s). Here are some common examples:

• Revenue - In an ecommerce situation, revenue is the ultimate metric. This enables you to get to your true bottom line.


• Conversion Rate - Conversion rate is also helpful in an ecommerce setting, especially when comparing campaigns of differing reach.


• Other Goals - In absence of an online purchase, it can be helpful to designate certain other activities on your website as goals. Examples might include white paper downloads, webinar registrations or contact forms. With Lyris HQ, these can be tracked as conversions in your email reports just as if they were purchases.


• Length of Visit - For sites with ad revenue, tracking the number of pages visited can be representative of your bottom line. This can also be a helpful indicator for informational and branding communications where direct action by the visitor isn’t expected.

You might find that there is more than one key metric for your various email campaigns. For e-newsletters you might even apply different metrics to specific links within the content. This is extremely difficult with most tools, but Lyris HQ automatically shows the revenue and conversion rate for each link.

How can you use the data?

I can’t overstate the value of revenue or conversions in seeing the true value of your email campaigns – or any marketing channel for that matter. The ability to attribute revenue to each email message (and even to each link) can powerfully drive budgetary, strategic and tactical decisions:

• KPIs & trending - Measuring against your goals enables you to track performance over time, and to drive informed budget decisions.


• Benchmark & compare - I’m often asked whether a specific conversion rate is considered to be good. The answer is to ignore everyone else’s data and focus on continuously improving your own results.


• A/B split testing - Most A/B split testing is automated, using the open or click-through rate to automatically determine the winner. But case studies have shown that messages with lower open rates or CTRs can sometimes drive more conversions or revenue. It would be ideal to make A/B split decisions based on conversions or revenue, but with most tools you’ll have to wait overnight for results. Once again, lucky Lyris HQ users are able to see conversion and revenue data for their email campaigns in real time. (Just be sure to give visitors enough time to finish their purchases before you jump to conclusions!)

It's time for marketers to move away from siloed analytics - email opens and CTRs versus Web analytics - to holistic marketing analytics. By combining campaign data with Web analytics data email marketers can measure the success of campaigns from opens, to clicks, to Web traffic, to conversions, to revenues generated. When you can identify the highest converting campaigns in real-time, it empowers you to make informed decisions about the most effective marketing tactics and to re-market wisely and quickly - ultimately optimizing your return on marketing investment.

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About the Author

Dan Miller is professional services and sales engineering manager at Lyris. He helps companies adopt data driven marketing techniques to improve their ROI.

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