As marketers, we wear many different hats that constantly pull our attention across a variety of tactics, campaigns and metrics. Then, as we cross items off our ever-growing list of deliverables and achieve success, those specific tactics drop in priority and we continue our journey of improving other marketing activities. Sometimes, we make time for determining campaign effectiveness and sometimes we are off to the next campaign or tactic before we have completed that crucial step. Email marketing for online retailers presents even more complexities. Factors such as inundated inboxes, brand loyalty, subscriber engagement, competing promotional offers, shopping cart behavior and customer lifecycles greatly impact email marketing success. Developing an encompassing, ongoing method to consistently evaluate your email marketing program will ensure you accomplish your goals. Building and monitoring your email marketing program presents you with a unique opportunity to get an inside view of the nuances and inner workings of your email marketing and how you measure up to your goals. In this whitepaper, we will review the gauges every online retailer should include in their email marketing program to assess campaign performance. Use these factors to determine how your email marketing efforts truly stack up and areas to tweak for future success.

1. W H I T E P A P E R
Define,
Benchmark,
Evaluate:
A Guide to Assessing Your
Email Marketing Performance

2. Define, Benchmark, Evaluate:
A Guide to Assessing Your
Email Marketing Performance
As marketers, we wear many different hats that constantly
pull our attention across a variety of tactics, campaigns
and metrics. Then, as we cross items off our ever-growing
list of deliverables and achieve success, those specific
tactics drop in priority and we continue our journey of
improving other marketing activities. Sometimes, we
make time for determining campaign effectiveness and
sometimes we are off to the next campaign or tactic before
we have completed that crucial step. Email marketing for
online retailers presents even more complexities. Factors
such as inundated inboxes, brand loyalty, subscriber
engagement, competing promotional offers, shopping
cart behavior and customer lifecycles greatly impact
email marketing success. Developing an encompassing,
ongoing method to consistently evaluate your email
marketing program will ensure you accomplish your goals.
Building and monitoring your email marketing program
presents you with a unique opportunity to get an inside
view of the nuances and inner workings of your email
marketing and how you measure up to your goals. In this
whitepaper, we will review the gauges every online retailer
should include in their email marketing program to assess
campaign performance. Use these factors to determine
how your email marketing efforts truly stack up and areas
to tweak for future success.
Define Your Goals
Before You Evaluate
Imagine your email marketing program is one of the
most important games of the season. Would you walk
onto the field with no game plan and hope for the best?
No! Your playbook would not only include strategies, but
also a plan for each quarter to ultimately achieve your
desired endgame – success. But what does the successful
endgame look like for your online store? Defining your
goals before attempting any sort of measurement is a key
part of determining wins and losses. Before you begin
crafting your message, call-to-action and imagery, don’t
forget to be SMART. Regardless of what you determine is
important to your online business, your goals must be:
Specific. Like the saying goes, “Mean what you say and
say what you mean.” Avoid potential confusion.
Measurable. Measuring progress is vital to
determine if you are going in the right or wrong direction.
Include quantitative and qualitative goals to keep
yourself accountable.
Achievable. Attaining complete ecommerce
dominance is not an achievable goal, so make sure your
goal is attainable.
Realistic. It doesn’t help to list all kinds of wonderful
ideas that you would like to implement but lack the
resources to actually accomplish. Don’t set goals and
plans that are beyond your scope. Set realistically
ambitious goals and plans.
Time-Bound. No deadline equals no action. Give
yourself a time limit to push for success and measure
frequently enough so that you can adjust your tactics to
meet your goals. More common goals for online retailers
include driving website traffic, direct selling, brand
awareness and repeat purchases. However, consider
these goals as well:
Increasing conversions. You can lead your
subscribers to your site, but are they making purchases?
Have a goal to turn shoppers into buyers and one-time
buyers into repeat buyers.
Building loyalty. All subscribers aren’t created
equally. Do you know your high-value buyers from the
window shoppers? Think of your high value segment both
in terms of the actual revenue they provide to you and in
terms of their influence through social networks.
Subscriber acquisition. Getting (and keeping) your
foot in the door is a must. Have an objective to increase
your opt-in list as well as enhance mindshare. You can use
a multi-channel approach with mobile & social to help you
build your email list to better grow that revenue driver.
By first defining your goals, you are better able to gauge a
campaign’s performance. In addition, you gain the ability
to fine-tune customer experiences that help in the drive
toward your specific goal.
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3. Identify Metrics to Benchmark
Once you have defined your goals, you must identify the metrics you will continuously trend to measure performance. When
deciding which metrics to track, make certain your goals and metrics are aligned. Your metrics should all work together to
determine total customer engagement and feed the one metric that matters – revenue. Check out the chart below for ideas on
how to translate your goals into measurable values.
Integrating social and mobile into your marketing program? Track the number and frequency of social and blog comments to
help measure awareness. Or, measure the response rate to specific contests or special offers to your followers, fans or
mobile users.
Verify Your Impact with Benchmarking
Benchmarking against your identified metrics allows you to both have a greater impact in your marketing programs and cut
out any ineffective activities that are distracting you from achieving your desired goals. For example, if your shopping cart
conversion rate is 15%, is that good, bad or just average? You don’t know until you have identified shopping cart conversions
as a metric and benchmarked it against existing numbers.
There are two different approaches to use when benchmarking; both of which yield useful intelligence about campaign
performance. The first type is referred to as internal benchmarking. This type benchmarks performance against prior
experience for your brand or past marketing programs. The other type, or external benchmarking, compares your metrics to
industry norms. Here is another way to think about it. The first type answers the question “Are we doing better than we used
to?” The second answers the question “Are we doing as well as we should be?” Most online retailers begin by answering the
first question because it is the information that is readily available. However, if you’re new to tracking your online performance
and don’t have a history, then now is the time to start. Industry statistics are harder to come by because it requires publicly
available data, which is potentially incomplete or over-aggregated. But, if you can find comparable statistics on your
competitive set, then you can ensure a successful comparison. Look for various marketing organizations that support your
industry to see if they offer the information you need.
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Goal Metric
Increase
Conversions
Conversion rate (% of targets performing the desired behavior,
including minimizing shopping cart abandonment)
Cost per conversion/sale
Site conversion rate
Acquisition Acquisition rate (# of new subscribers, fans, followers)
Cost per acquisition
ROI (Return on Investment)
Loyalty RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value)
Number of recommendations
Number of “Forward to a Friend”
Unsubscribe rate
Awareness Number of unique website visitors
Number of impressions
Open/Click-through rate
Time spent
Pages viewed
Search keyword impressions

4. Factors That Influence
Your Metrics
As part of your evaluation, there are specific factors that
not only impact an online retailers’ performance, but also
affect your other metrics. Get these factors right and
you significantly increase your odds for email marketing
success and the ability to drive revenue. These factors
include deliverability, relevancy and segmentation.
Ensure Deliverability
If your email never makes it to your intended recipient’s
inbox, it is virtually impossible to determine your
campaign’s effectiveness, not to mention the loss of
revenue. Although you are sending legitimate email, your
messages may not be getting to its final destination due
to a variety of reasons. So, ensuring deliverability is not a
“nice to have,” but a necessity. In order to determine your
deliverability, you should measure:
• Number of complaints
• Number of bounces (hard, soft and general)
• Number of messages delivered
• Size of the messages
Optimization of your deliverability rate includes
incorporating best practices and closely monitoring the
aforementioned metrics. Monitoring your email campaign
delivery rates, cleansing your data routinely, watching for
list fatigue, implementing a subscriber preference center
and requesting to be added to the customer’s address
book are just a few ways to safeguard your email from
getting caught in the SPAM filter. Unsure whether you’re
headed into the SPAM category? Remember, it’s okay to
have a lot of great time-sensitive promotions such as free
shipping or incentives to offer your customers. However,
keep your subscriber’s preference in mind. That means
frequency and relevancy become your two closest allies
when managing your deliverability.
In addition, it’s critical to maintain a healthy relationship
with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to which you
are sending email. Most reputable ESPs constantly
evaluate these relationships and address issues that may
negatively impact your sender rating.
Relevancy
The truth is that your customers’ tastes and styles will
continue to change over their lifecycle. For instance,
if you sell books, your loyal customers’ buying habits
could go from science fiction to weddings to babies,
depending on their life stages or demographic information.
Delivering a message that doesn’t speak to the customer
can disengage a valuable relationship. Being irrelevant
in your email marketing can result in decreased open
and click-through rates, increased unsubscribes and
decreased sales. Targeted messaging creates a one-to-
one relationship with customers, which means you “get”
them as a customer and a shopper. Understanding your
customers’ needs and preferences is crucial to delivering
relevant content in your messages. Strategies such as
trigger-based messaging allow you to be timely and
relevant based their needs and behaviors. According to
The Relevancy Group, the cost of untargeted email is
nearly four times higher than targeted mailings. Creating
a message that meets the needs of your customers
enhances your relationship as well as reinforces your trust
factor. Shift your focus from the masses to those more
likely to buy and start turning your subscribers into sales
conversions to see uplift in your overall performance.
Segmentation
Segmentation ensures that your message is delivered
at the right time, to the right person and with the right
content. Collecting valuable data about your customers
and strategically acting increases engagement and will
take your email marketing performance to the next level.
Consider segmenting your subscribers on preferences,
behaviors, RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value)
data or customer lifecycle stages. Ecommerce provides
marketers a great opportunity to gather and slice and dice
available data, so take advantage. As a result, you will see
a boost in conversions, repeat purchases and engagement
with your brand.
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5. Evaluate Your Performance
Now that you have your goals and correlated metrics in
mind, here comes the interesting part – evaluating your
performance. Begin by carefully comparing your results
with past performance to determine what is and isn’t
working. Here are two things to keep in mind during your
evaluation:
Test,Test, and Retest.
Testing is critical for email marketing success. Once
you have identified areas for improvement, use testing
to tweak offers, call-to-actions and content. With your
endgame of increased revenue in mind, take the time to
create a better brand and shopping experience for your
customers. Utilize testing methods such as:
• A/B testing. Test one campaign element against
another. It may include varying the offer, call-to-action,
look or subject line of a message.
• Multivariate testing. Test multiple changes
simultaneously in a live environment.
Optimize.
Now that you’ve determined your metrics and addressed
the deliverability and relevancy of your campaign, it is
time for optimization. Analyze your metrics and determine
where there is opportunity to increase performance and
convert low hanging fruit.
Assessing your email marketing performance is not a
one-time affair. Once you have your goals, metrics and
results in-hand, the next step is updating your strategy
and reprioritizing. Drive sales and reach the goals for your
online store by taking action on your evaluation results.
About Bronto
Bronto Software provides solutions for
retailers and other commerce-focused
companies to drive revenue through
targeted email and cross-channel
marketing. More than 1,000 organizations
worldwide, including Party City, Armani
Exchange, Timex, Samsonite and Trek
Bikes rely on Bronto’s software and services
to fuel customer engagement and sales.
Bronto won the Stevie Award for Best
Customer Service in 2009 and 2010, was
named a CODiE Award Finalist for Best
Marketing Solution in 2011 and is one of
Inc. Magazine’s top fastest growing software
companies. Bronto is headquartered in
Durham, NC with an office in London.
For more information, visit bronto.com.
For more information, visit
bronto.com or call 888-BRONTO-1.