I have heard it said that the biggest problem with email marketing is the fact that everything can be measured. It probably seems counter intuitive. Yet it was the same with desktop publishing when all of a sudden a multitude of typefaces and fonts were available and publishers seemed to want to use them all at once. Sometimes more can be too much.
Email marketing software can give us big data analytics, enough to show a multitude of indicators: what we do well and, conversely, what we do poorly. We can’t react to them all. We have what appears, at first sight, an impossible decision to make; which results to ignore and which to use to base our plans on. The bad news that the most important KPIs have probably changed since Covid-19 is balanced by the fact the basis on how to decide which to focus on is exactly the same.
We are in email marketing to make money. Profit minus costs, ROI in words, is a simplistic definition and it is tempting just to look at balance sheets, but there is more to it than that. Our greatest assets are our marketing lists and if we are not exploiting them to the full we are losing potential profit no matter what the annual spreadsheets say.
It’s hardly controversial to suggest that the size of our email marketing lists is no way to judge their value. The fact that the average subscriber is worth £n to us does not mean it’s a simple matter of working out whether the money we invest in obtaining more subscribers is well spent. We need to identify and keep those subscribers who provide us with the most profit. We want the ones who complete and are high-value.
We have available all necessary information, such as the average order value for a certain set period as well as the average customer retention time. Once we’ve worked that out we can make other decisions. For instance, is it worthwhile investing in a loyalty program by offering reduced price products to customers who, the data suggests, might need a little boost in order to stop them unsubscribing?
The subscribers who have remained profitable on our email marketing list during the lockdown are the ones we need to exploit to their fullest. This does not mean pumping out more offers to them in the hope that they will complete, but using them for other purposes as well, such as providing an incentive for them to share our content with their friends and colleagues, many of whom might well come within the same split email marketing list. A simple ‘refer a friend’ programme might well be the best option.
With suitable incentives, we will have someone working for us who is obviously pleased with our offers and general performance, otherwise they would not have stayed with us. Any offer referred by them will obviously come fully endorsed. In other words, one of the most significant KPIs we should be monitoring is how our email marketing campaigns are shared. It’s more important now than ever.
