I love email marketing. The only thing I’d rather do would be a photographer for National Geographic, but that’s not happening. Taking photos of wild animals in foreign countries, sunsets on tropical islands, close-ups of historical artifacts in Japan or pictures of the World Cup while on the sidelines are all things I dream about. While, I don’t do it every day, I do go out and spend time taking pictures. This allows me to try different things, learn about the craft and experience different types of perspectives. See where I’m going?
As an email marketer I need to leverage this approach to my profession as well. It helps me look at everything differently and not continue doing the same thing. The definition of insanity: Doing the exact same action repetitively, expecting a different result each time. Changing things up also opens the opportunity to find out what works best for me – ensuring that I improve and produce quality pictures for my work. Otherwise there’s no value to my efforts.
How Does This Apply to Email Marketing?
Every email marketing channel is different. Perspective is needed to make each one work, not all are created equal by any means. Understanding voice, real-time email applications, design, content, lifetime value of email addresses and engagement analytics are all valuable in measuring success. In the same way using different lenses, apertures, contrasts, time-of-day and focus can be used in photography. Are you still with me?
There isn’t a metric that solely gives you a comprehensive view of the health of the email marketing program. Sure, revenue is great – profit even better, but that’s a result of many variants being successful and identified. The lens alone does not make the photo a masterpiece; it’s a multi-variant combination of efforts. Don’t believe that value can only be attained by getting your open rate elevated. Also, keep in mind; every email program is different. Variants will have fluctuating values, prioritized by goals set for the email channel.
Looking at the Entire Picture
The argument has been raised so many times regarding opens vs. clicks and what metric is more valuable. The answer: neither. They both need the other for each individually to become successful. The overall picture should be viewed by prioritizing metrics – identifying which ones apply most appropriately to the goals set in place for the email channel. Opens may be number one for a certain business due to an advertising model in their emails. Clicks are typically used for measuring ‘engagement’ within the list and mentioned for reporting success up the food chain. These both don’t matter to me unless the conversion rate on the landing page is equally as successful.
Providing value is the key to anything in business, right? Measuring value isn’t as easy as picking a single variant and gauging all the efforts in that channel by that number. Measuring multiple variants congruently exposes road blocks and bottlenecks within the campaign for optimization. Urging you to analyze your data and optimize accordingly is easier said than done, but none-the-less is a step in the right direction for building a solid email channel.
Anybody can be trained to pull reports with no insight, but a passionate marketer will align efforts, measure impact, identify areas of improvement and create reports with visibility and value into the channel for peers and higher-ups to garner actionable data from. You are the value-maker.
Viva la email.
