Marketers most often view e-mail program success in terms of open and delivery rates, but that doesn’t cover other key metrics that provide insight into how well their program is doing. Marketers should on a monthly basis track so-called “barometer metrics” for trending e-mail program performance over time, according to a Jupiter Research report, “E-mail Marketing Measurement: Making Metrics Meaningful.”
Though 45% of online marketers surveyed by Jupiter say they are satisfied or very satisfied with the method of metrics determination used by their e-mail marketing vendor, no standard metric methodology is used by e-mail service providers, according to Jupiter’s report. Variation exists in how methods used by individual vendors handle issues such as bounce backs, for example, which then affects every other metric using this information in its calculations.
Report author David Daniels, research director at Jupiter, says marketers should look to metrics such as click to conversion and profit per mailing as key performance indicators in evaluating the success of any e-mailing program. Open-rate metrics should be viewed with the understanding that image rendering issues can skew these numbers. And though the metric of delivery rate is critical, marketers should look to the metrics that underlie it, such as address churn rate and bounce rate, for a complete picture of delivery rate metrics before taking any action based on them, Jupiter's report suggests.
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