The essential emailing KPI's for your acquisition campaigns

"Let's meditate on this quote, whose origin escapes us completely, but which applies perfectly to today's subject: 

🤔 What are the real key indicators for estimating whether an emailing campaign is successful or not? And beyond that, which KPI's to monitor depending on the nature of that campaign?

🤔 Are the emailing KPI's to be taken into account for an acquisition campaign the same as in CRM?

🤔 Aren't prospects and customers two very distinct target populations, each deserving their own evaluation system?

🙃 Will PSG finally win the Champions League this year and will you still be treated to roast chicken next Sunday at your in-laws'?...

We can't 100% guarantee the answer to the last question...

But we give you seven points to help you evaluate and optimize the effectiveness of your email acquisition campaigns according to your target audience!

1. Use the right emailing KPI's to estimate your campaign engagement

Three emailing KPI's will enable you to precisely measure the performance of your email acquisition campaign. Each has its own importance, and it's essential to take into account their complementarity

Opening rate

👉 Calculation: Number of openings / volume sent

Don't expect the same opening rates from acquisition campaigns as from CRM campaigns. In one case you're expected, in the other... less so! A customer who has voluntarily subscribed to your newsletter will have much higher open rates than a web user who has accepted to receive offers, but who is not yet very familiar with your brand.

They can vary by as much as a factor of two, depending on various criteria such as purpose, target or sales period. According to our observations, based on our network of 161 publishers and over 4,000 databases, the range is generally between 6% and 12%, all sectors included.

We can't stress enough the need to offer both a Sender that inspires confidence and objects that inspire desire and truly reflect the content of your email. 

If you go through a publisher, trust them to find you an effective object. You'll benefit from their in-depth knowledge of their base and their experience with address segments. And don't forget, given the way they're remunerated, they have just as much a vested interest in your opening rate as you do...

You can impose certain keywords on them, or offer them the possibility of choosing from a list of several objects.

If, despite these valuable tips, your opening rate remains low, other factors may have worked against you:

• A SPAM landing?

• Was the offer well adapted to the target?

• Was the competition particularly strong at the time of broadcast?

• Was there too much commercial pressure (sales, black Friday, etc.)?

   ...

Reactivity rate

👉 Calculation: Number of clicks generated / number of openings

This KPI lets you know if a click has been made after the email has been opened.

Many players base their calculations on click-through rates, but in our opinion, "the math is wrong Kevin! This indicator (number of clicks vs. volume sent) doesn't take into account the open rate or the reactivity rate. Even with a significant click rate, you can't tell whether you've had a good open rate with a low response rate, or a lousy 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 the emailing KPI's in order to estimate the real impact of your campaign... and to be able to adjust the sliders for your next mailings...

Once again, these reactivity rates will be very different depending on the targets of your campaigns (acquisition or CRM) or the period and 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% and 6% outside peak periods, and more likely between 5% and 8% if you're in a period of sales, private sales, outlet, etc.

If the reactivity rate is low, it's because the campaign didn't generate any clicks after the email was opened.

So there are several things you can do to improve your future acquisition campaigns:

• A misleading subject line or one that doesn't reflect the real content of the email?

• Poor email construction: too much text? not enough Call-to-Action?

• Is the offer clearly visible and understandable?

• Has design penalized creativity?

   ...

A/B testing will give you the answers to all your questions: 

➡️ A/B Email Testing: 4 ideas to boost campaign performance

Churn rate

👉 Calculation: Number of unsubscribers / number of emails sent

"Don't leave me...". You can try singing to keep them, but if a lot of users have clicked on the unsubscribe link during an acquisition campaign, it may be symptomatic of several things:

• Poor targeting?

• Too much commercial pressure?

    ...

In the event of a high churn rate, take stock with your publisher partners. They'll know better than anyone else how to give you precise information on the reasons for this loss of interest... Or, if you haven't already done so, turn to the experts at Dataventure 🤓

2. Qualify the quality of the traffic generated

You've managed to generate a lot of traffic to your site, but is it of good quality? After the click, it's time for conversion...

Tracking tools (such as Google Analytics) will provide you with vital data for assessing the quality of your campaigns.

Two priority emailing KPI's to support you :

New users (or % of new sessions)

👉 New users: number of first-time visitors

Regardless of the number of sessions, the same surfer will only be counted once by Google Analytics. This data enables you tomake a more detailed analysis of your site's traffic in relation 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 > All traffic > Source/support). In this way, you'll be able to see the excellent performance of your email campaign compared with other acquisition methods.

Example:

Bounce rate

👉 The % of visits with a single page view or interaction

Nothing to do with a basketball score! It's about measuring what happens when a visitor visits just one page - the one they landed on!

Unlike most emailing KPI's, here the lower the rate, the more important the navigation on your site.

This can mean one of two things. Either your site makes the user want to see more, which is good news, or the user doesn't immediately find what he's looking for and goes looking for it... not so good!

Conversely, a rate close to 100% can be interpreted in two ways. Either Internet users left immediately because they didn't find what they were looking for right away; or they left after having immediately found what they were looking for.

The bounce rate should therefore be used in the context of the campaign and the site's content. It is therefore more interesting to analyze the bounce rate according to the type of page (home page, product pages, etc.) rather than the overall bounce rate.

 3. Is your campaign ROÏste?

Two emailing KPI's will help you know whether or not your campaign is really performing in terms of return on investment...

Conversion rate

👉 Calculation: Number of conversions / number of clicks or leads collected

This is it! Thanks to this indicator, you'll finally know whether your site, and consequently your campaign, has generated qualified visits and, above all, converted visitors.

It's up to you to decide what type of conversion you want to estimate, according to your own marketing objectives: direct sales, newsletter subscription, form registration, etc...

Visit ROI

👉 Calculation: sales generated / budget invested

Based on the budget you've invested, calculate your return on investment (or ROI = customer acquisition cost; etc). You can achieve a high conversion rate with a low ROI , and vice versa...

We also recommend that you do not limit the observation period of ROI to that of the campaign. Emailing can generate sales over a long period of time, sometimes up to 15 days after the end of your campaign. Be patient, and don't fire your marketing manager just yet!

This is even truer when the aim of your campaign is to collect addresses in order to build up a database. Lead-gathering campaigns are not intended to be immediately ROI-effective. It's all about transforming the leads collected over time. Time that can be estimated at between six months and a year.

There are certain limits to estimating the ROÏste 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". Sales are attributed to the last source generated by the surfer.

A try in rugby or a goal in soccer is rarely the result of a single player's actions! It's often the result of a collective effort. The phenomenon is the same for a sale. At a time when conversion tunnels are becoming increasingly complex (multi-channel, multi-device use, etc.), it seems a little " simplistic " to attribute all the merits of a transformation to the last click!

That's why, once again, we recommend you don't focus on just one or two emailing KPI's, but combine them to give yourself every chance of analyzing a maximum number of pros and cons...

➡️ An example to help you understand:

Julie wants to change phone operator. She's going to receive your acquisition email highlighting your package offer, which she'll consult directly on her smartphone. Julie is interested, but decides to postpone her purchase because she doesn't have her RIO number to make the change (and it's not practical on the metro, as her stop is 2 stations away). Julie reconnects the next day by directly typing in the name of the advertiser's website and completes the transaction. In this simplistic version, the sale is therefore attributed to the direct source, while the acquisition email initiated the transaction.

In this "Juliesque" example, the initial email will have made a decisive contribution to the finalization of the purchase... It's therefore important to take into account the contributory vision of the acquisition email when considering its ROI impact.