Engagement is quite possibly the single most important e-marketing metric and one that all e-marketers should be paying attention to.
It goes further than simply measuring opens, clicks and conversions - it’s a question of building up an understanding of the relationship between these metrics. Marketers who focus purely on statistics, rather than relevancy, will struggle because each internet service provider (ISP) interprets and actions this information in a different way.
So how do you measure it?
Engagement is a soft metric, so you can’t simply go into your broadcast tool’s reporting suite and call up a graph which shows the week on week variance. But, there are some highly effective methods you can use to get a measure of how engaged (or otherwise) your audience is. Here are my top five:
1. The disaffection index
Initially this was the number of unsubscribe requests from your broadcast, as a percentage of the total click-throughs generated. The higher this percentage was, the less happy your audience was to be hearing from you. Certainly, if the disaffection index was heading north of 50%, it meant you should seriously re-think your email strategy.
While this principle continues to hold true, its no longer only about un-subscribe requests. Marketers should also be factoring in spam complaints - an easy-to-measure metric and one that most email service providers should be able to supply. A detailed understanding of the dynamics that drive complaint data will also strongly influence inbox placement.
2. Active vs inactive
Given that practically all e-marketers have access to real-time campaign reporting, it’s amazing how many cannot yet differentiate between that most elemental of list segmentations – the active population versus the inactive.
The principle is a simple one: put all the openers/clickers for a given time period (let’s say six months) into one segment (the actives), and all the non-openers/non-clickers in another segment (the in-actives). The actives, because they actually like hearing from you, are implicitly more engaged than the in-actives – sometimes by a factor of 10 to 1.
So now you can start focusing your marketing efforts on the people who are actually going to buy your products and services. And because actives are a lot less likely to complain, you are less likely to get mail blocked, which increases the base of potential responders.
3. Opens to clicks ratio
Sometimes e-marketers place so much emphasis on deliverability they forget that getting the email to the recipient’s inbox is only the first part of the battle won. In a congested inbox there is still the challenge of persuading them to open the email (‘recognition’) and to then respond to your call to action (‘relevance’).
Interestingly, this isn’t necessarily a straight line relationship. A broadcast might generate poor open-rates but reasonable click-through rates. This is important because it is the ratio between open-rates and click-through rates that represents an excellent measure of engagement.
In a recent piece of research conducted by Database Group Interactive (DbGi), this was seen to be particularly true for holders of gmail addresses. Of the top-10 major ISPs DbGi broadcasts to, gmail stands “feet and ankles” below the others in terms of average open-rates generated. However, a full 40% of those openers (admittedly off a low base) then subsequently go on to action a click-through – substantially higher than any other ISP on that same list.
This shouldn’t be surprising as a recent report by Return Path commented that “gmail continues to aggressively block commercial email” – over 20% for even legitimate commercial email senders.
However, gmail address owners over-index significantly against the “Urban Intelligence” classification using Experian’s Mosaic lifestyle profiling, described as “young, well educated, and open to new ideas and influences”. So they are potentially a highly engaged audience for email marketing purposes.
4. Website integration & behavioural data
Another powerful measure of engagement can be achieved by integrating your email broadcasts with your web tracking software. Without this, it’s a little bit like waving goodbye to a loved one when they set off on a long journey, yet having no idea whether they ever arrive safely!
Freely available tools such as Google Analytics are more than fit for purpose. By doing this, you have closed-loop reporting on how many of your website visitors are directly attributable to your e-marketing activity. And, more importantly, you know what they do next - the offers they spend most time looking at, the products they buy and how much they spend.
This is all “gold dust” intelligence which can be fed back into your marketing program to create ever-more engaged customers, using increasingly sophisticated email trigger automation to mitigate behaviour, such as shopping basket abandonment, critical lag and no second order.
5. Conversion to sale
The strongest measurement of engagement is whether the email broadcast generates a positive response to its call to action – a purchase, voucher download, etc.
Of course, the obvious question here is “what does good look like?”, and there are no hard and fast answers. Conversion rates will vary as a function of industry, product/service, list quality, relevance, marketing message, creative and timing – to name just a few!
Ultimately, e-marketers need to understand what their own conversion benchmark looks like and compare it with the conversion benchmark for their industry to gauge the levels of engagement that are represented by this most significant of email metrics – the one that actually determines whether your campaigns are ROI positive or not!
Guy Hanson
Business Development Director
Database Group Interactive