Let us reflect on this quote, whose origin completely escapes us, but which perfectly applies to today’s topic:
What are the real key indicators for assessing whether an emailing campaign is successful or not? And beyond that, which KPIs should be monitored depending on the nature of the campaign?
Are the emailing KPIs to consider for an acquisition campaign the same as for CRM?
Are prospects and customers not two very distinct target populations, each deserving its own evaluation system?
Will PSG finally win the Champions League this year and will you still be treated to roast chicken at your in-laws’ next Sunday?
We cannot guarantee the answer to the last question.
But we will give you seven points to help you evaluate and optimize the effectiveness of your email acquisition campaigns according to your target audience.
Contents
1. The right emailing KPIs to estimate your campaign engagement
- Open rate
- Reactivity rate
- Unsubscribe rate
2. Qualifying the quality of the traffic generated
- New users or percentage of new sessions
- Bounce rate
3. Is your campaign ROI-driven?
- Conversion rate
- ROI
1. Use the right emailing KPIs to estimate your campaign engagement
Three emailing KPIs will allow you to accurately measure the performance of your email acquisition campaign. Each has its own importance and it is essential to consider how they complement one another.
Open rate
Calculation: number of opens / volume sent
Do not expect to achieve the same open rates from acquisition campaigns as from CRM campaigns. In one case you are expected, in the other less so. A customer who has voluntarily subscribed to your newsletter will have much higher open rates than an internet user who has agreed to receive offers but is not yet very familiar with your brand.
They can vary from simple to double depending on various criteria such as the subject line, the target or the commercial period. According to our observations, based on our network of 161 publishers and more than 4,000 databases, the range generally lies between 6 percent and 12 percent across all sectors.
We can never stress enough the need to offer both a sender that inspires trust and subject lines that are appealing and truly reflect the content of your email.
If you work with a publisher, rely on them to find an effective subject line. You will benefit from their in-depth knowledge of their database and their experience with address segments. Do not forget that, given how they are compensated, it is in their interest as much as yours for your open rate to soar.
You may impose certain keywords or offer them the possibility to choose from a list of several subject lines.
If, despite these valuable tips, your open rate remains low, other factors may have worked against you:
- Landing in spam
- Was the offer well adapted to the target audience?
- Was the competition particularly strong at the time of distribution?
- Was there too much commercial pressure such as sales or Black Friday?
Reactivity rate
Calculation: number of clicks generated / number of opens
This KPI tells you whether a click was made after the email was opened.
Many players base their calculations on click-through rate, but for us “the math is wrong Kevin”. This indicator, number of clicks compared to volume sent, does not take into account the open rate or the reactivity rate. Even with a significant click rate, you cannot determine whether you had a good open rate with a low response rate or, on the contrary, a poor open rate with an excellent response rate.
Like your precociously diagnosed nephew, you like to know and understand everything and, like us, you prefer to master all emailing KPIs in order to estimate the real impact of your campaign and to be able to adjust the settings for your next send.
Once again, these reactivity rates vary greatly depending on campaign objectives, acquisition or CRM, as well as the period and the level of sales pressure.
For example, in the fashion sector, in the case of acquisition campaigns distributed by several publishers, the average reactivity rate will be between 4 percent and 6 percent outside peak periods, and more likely between 5 percent and 8 percent during sales, private sales, outlet periods and so on.
If the response rate is low, it means the campaign did not generate any clicks after the email was opened.
There are several ways to improve your future acquisition campaigns:
- A misleading subject line or one that does not reflect the true content of the email
- Poor email construction, too much text or not enough call to action
- Is the offer clearly visible and understandable?
- Has the design penalized the creative aspect?
Unsubscribe rate
Calculation: number of unsubscribes / number of emails sent
“Do not leave me.” You can try singing to keep them, but if many users clicked on the unsubscribe link during an acquisition campaign, this may indicate several issues:
- Poor targeting
- Too much commercial pressure
In the event of a high unsubscribe rate, review the situation with your publishing partners. Dataventure teams, better than anyone else, will be able to provide precise information about the reasons behind this loss of interest. Or, if you have not yet done so, turn to the experts.
2. Qualify the quality of the traffic generated
You have managed to generate a high volume of traffic to your website, but is it high quality traffic? After the click comes the time for conversion.
Tracking tools such as Google Analytics will provide essential data to assess the quality of your campaigns.
Two priority KPIs to support your analysis:
New users or percentage of new sessions
New users: number of first-time visitors
Regardless of the number of sessions, the same visitor is counted only once by Google Analytics. This data allows you to analyze your website traffic in more detail compared to previous months or years.
As part of an acquisition campaign, you can use this indicator to measure traffic quality according to the different sources used, Acquisition greater than All traffic greater than Source or Medium. This will show the strong performance of your email campaign compared with other acquisition methods.
Bounce rate
The percentage of visits with only one page view or a single interaction
This has nothing to do with a basketball score. It measures what happens when a visitor views only one page, the one on which they landed.
Unlike most email marketing KPIs, the lower the rate, the more significant the browsing activity on your site.
This can mean two things. Either your site encourages visitors to explore further, which is good news, or the user does not immediately find what they are looking for and leaves to search elsewhere.
Conversely, a rate close to 100 percent can also be interpreted in two ways. Either users left immediately because they did not find what they were looking for, or they left after immediately finding what they needed.
Bounce rate must therefore be analyzed within the context of the campaign and the website content. It is more relevant to analyze bounce rate according to page type, home page, product pages and so on, rather than relying on the overall bounce rate.
3. Is your campaign ROI-driven?
Two emailing KPIs will help you determine whether your campaign is truly performing in terms of return on investment.
Conversion rate
Calculation: number of conversions / number of clicks or leads collected
Here it is. Thanks to this indicator, you will finally know whether your website, and therefore your campaign, generated qualified visits and, above all, converted visitors.
It is up to you to decide which type of conversion you wish to measure according to your marketing objectives, direct sales, newsletter subscription, form registration and so on.
ROI
Calculation: revenue generated / budget invested
Based on the budget invested, calculate your return on investment, or CAC which is customer acquisition cost, and so on. It is possible to achieve a high conversion rate with a low ROI, and vice versa.
We also recommend not limiting the ROI observation period to the duration of the campaign. Emailing can generate sales over a longer period, sometimes up to 15 days after the end of the campaign. Be patient and do not dismiss your marketing director just yet.
This is even more relevant when the objective of the campaign is to collect addresses in order to build a database. Lead collection campaigns are not intended to generate immediate ROI. The goal is to convert leads over time, which can be estimated between six months and one year.
There are certain limits when estimating the ROI potential of your campaigns.
Several sales attribution models are available, but the authoritative one remains that of Google Analytics and many other audience and tracking tools, the last click model. Sales are attributed to the last source generated by the internet user.
A try in rugby or a goal in football is rarely the result of a single player’s action. It is often the result of collective effort. The same applies to a sale. At a time when conversion funnels are becoming increasingly complex, multi-channel and multi-device usage, it seems somewhat simplistic to attribute all the credit for a conversion to the last click.
This is why, once again, we recommend not focusing on just one or two emailing KPIs, but combining them in order to analyze as many contributing factors as possible.
An example to help you understand
Julie wants to change mobile operator. She receives your acquisition email highlighting your plan offer, which she reads directly on her smartphone. Julie is interested but decides to postpone her purchase because she does not have her RIO number to complete the change, and it is not practical on the metro as her stop is two stations away. The next day, Julie reconnects by directly typing the advertiser’s website name and completes the transaction. In this simplified version, the sale is therefore attributed to the direct source, while the acquisition email initiated the transaction.
In this example, the initial email made a decisive contribution to finalizing the purchase. It is therefore important to take into account the contributory role of the acquisition email when evaluating its impact on ROI.
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