While triggering an email is obviously a critical part of marketing automation, there’s so much more that lies beneath the surface. It’s about building sequences that truly engage, as well as meeting the of-the-moment needs and interests of today’s consumers for optimum cadence.
The trouble is, marketing departments have leant on legacy email metrics to measure the success of their campaigns for far too long – and moving away from vanity metrics such as clicks and opens is proving to be a challenge for some.
What’s important to remember, is not every recipient opening your email is truly engaged in your messaging. From accidentally clicking on your content or diving in and out to mark the comms as ‘read’, to sending it on a one-way trip to the ‘delete’ folder without so much as a ‘download’ button clicked, there are a whole host of reasons why a contact might appear to be interested – even when they’re not.
But by becoming more sophisticated in how they evaluate their campaigns, and tapping into email metrics that offer deeper substance – such as link tracking, identification of visitors, and eCommerce performance reporting – marketers can change how they approach digital comms for the better.
How Marketing Automation Helps Measure Email metrics
Let’s imagine you’re using Force 24’s Journey Builder for the first time, and you’ve crafted a simple journey that triggers an email to invite recipients to an upcoming webinar.
Once the initial email is sent, we delay the process for three days. This gives our recipients the chance to engage in our digital content – whether that’s actually signing up for the event or merely showing an interest by clicking through to read more.
After the three-day delay, it’s time to make a decision on next-step comms. It’s important to remember that the commercial objective wasn’t to generate email opens, but to boost registrations – so it’s important to follow up with anyone who didn't do so. At this stage, ending the journey just because someone opened or clicked the email would be counter intuitive.
That’s not to say we should discount them altogether, though. By tapping into vanity email metrics in some capacity, we can create a picture of who should be included in the second email sequence.
For example, if 20% of the audience didn’t engage with the content whatsoever, marketers can risk damaging their sender reputation with their mail servers if they focus on changing this statistic. Instead, it’s about driving commercial outcomes and targeting those who demonstrate willing to engage.
Bot Engagement Is A Growing Struggle When It Comes to Email Metrics
If you’re limiting the success of your email marketing campaign to mere open and click information, you’re already setting yourself up for failure for the simple fact that bots factor into these statistics.
All Apple iPhones since the iOS15 release, for example, forge opens and clicks – meaning users who receive your digital comms will automatically register as ‘engaged’ without having actually seen it at all. This update was called mail privacy protection (MPP), and was designed to hide the authentic actions of users by pretending every email is always opened.
The reality is, if you were basing your follow-up messaging on these email metrics, you’d be excluding these users altogether. And when you consider that 60% of all email sent is potentially accessible from an Apple iPhone, there’s no better reason to broaden your horizons when it comes to email metrics and measuring the success of your digital campaigns.
