Everyone who has ever done email marketing has found themselves “click watching.”
I define click watching as logging into your email system every five minutes to see how your most recent marketing email is doing in real time.
Watching the open percentage and click through rate (CTR) move up can be both rewarding and incredibly frustrating at the same time. But, at the end of the day, have you ever really thought about just how useful these two metrics are?
When I am evaluating an email program, my goal is to look beyond the individual email performance metrics and actually evaluate the overall effectiveness based on contact scoring.
The agencies we work with use a marketing automation program that allows them to track prospects’ website activity beyond email, which provides more actionable intelligence on who they should contact and when.
An intelligent scoring system gives points to a contact when they:
- Open an email
- Click a call-to-action (CTA)
- Fill out a form
- Visit the website
- Go to a landing page tied to larger goal measurements
- Have certain characteristics (ie, CMO)
Your system should also include a lead decay mechanism so that everything leads do is time sensitive. If someone visits your site 10 times in January, they should not still have that same score in June if they haven’t come back again. High scores mean they are high-activity users right now!
When evaluating a campaign, rather than simply looking at what the total open and click rates were for emails, take the time to evaluate how many prospects have increased their scores over a predetermined number.
We work with agencies to define a number (in this example 50), and then we set a specific goal – for instance, to have over 25 prospects scored over 50 points in a given month. This allows us to focus on driving web activity and increasing users’ exposure to our different content areas.
Obviously clicks and opens play a big part in a prospect’s score, but they just don’t tell the whole story. Using an intelligent scoring system allows you to prioritize which prospects truly deserve your attention.
Tags: marketing tips