Understanding Process and Output Metrics

Today, when the entire world is thinking of restricting their budgets to the max, you surely cannot afford to spend huge bags of bucks on tracking the performance of your email campaign. In fact, this is the time to depend on relevant and accurate reporting tools to measure your email program’s performance and shield your company resources. So here, we are going to talk about 4 major strategies that you must incorporate your process to gauge its performance and the metrics that measure correctly.

Selection of inappropriate metrics can not only mislead your tracking analysis but can also let you overlook some major problems that can jeopardize the valuable contributions of the campaign in the company’s performance. Hence, it is imperative to follow a set strategy that guides you about your email campaign at each and every step.

Basically, metrics are classified into two major categories- Process and Output

Process metrics have analytical behavior and should be tracked over a period of time. These metrics define how each element of your email program is contributing to the overall success. Let us have a look at a few email process metrics and what they measure:

• Open rate: The percentage of delivered email messages opened by recipients. Tracked over time to measure subject line effectiveness, trust and brand potency.
• Bounce rate: Particularly for cleanliness of your contact lists and opt-in process. It gives the percentage of sent email showing failed delivery.
• Unsubscribes: The percentage of email messages that force recipients to click on an email link or a link to a Web unsubscribe page.
• Click-through rate: The percentage of recipients clicking on one or more links in the email.
• Delivery rate: Measure the number of emails sent excluding undeliverables. Also, measures list-building practices and ability to chase deliverability good practices. It is useful for deliverability tracking and list cleanliness.
• Spam complaints: Number of complaints regarding spam messages, sent directly by ISPs or manually through recipients.
• Referrals/forwarded messages: Number of delivered emails and the number of times recipients clicked a forward-to-a-friend link in the email. Evaluates customer interest and offer or content quality.
• List churn: Ability of combining churn factors-bounces, spam complaints and unsubscribes.

Output metrics are used to analyze the result of your campaign. These metrics let you draw a comparison between what you achieved and what you wanted to achieve.

• Total revenue generated: The total revenue that your campaign earns from the first to the last stage.
• Revenue per email delivered: Used to measure and compare different campaigns on the basis of given offers and campaign effectiveness.
• Share of wallet: Use of email to augment better distribution of customer pay out.
• Total orders per email: Calculate the number of orders cultivated through email message.
• Customer retention: Use of email to retain a good number of customers.
• Leads generated: Number of leads brought by your email campaign.
• Site registrations, contest entries, subscriptions: Evaluate interest and involvement of your customers.

Summary: Both process and output metrics are important to measure different factors in your email campaign. Hence, it is very important for you to analyze what metrics matter to you the most, according to kind of your email marketing program.