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Evaluating E-Mail Marketing Effectiveness (Or Not): eMarketer

The majority of US marketers don’t track e-mail campaign effectiveness. For those measuring results, staple metrics such as click-through rates remain popular while branding is seldom studied.

30 July 2002. By David Hallerman -- Without both the tools and the initiative to measure a direct-response e-mail campaign’s results, all the acquisition, retention and conversion in the world is much like a three-legged horse galloping—moving forward but stumbling at the same time. How effective was the campaign? How much did it cost? How much did you make?

These questions are basic to much of marketing both online and offline. And yet 50% of marketers don’t know the effect of personalization on their e-mail campaigns, according to e-Dialog. Of those that do know, 45% find better results.

Furthermore, 51.8% of US marketers say they are not able to report any e-mail campaign performance metrics. That’s scary. IMT Strategies writes how those “findings indicate that marketers [are] not taking advantage of a wide range of measurement tools that provide detailed tracking and measurement for e-mail campaigns within hours of execution.”

Only 34% of US direct marketers measure the effectiveness of interactive media, according to DMA’s data. How two-thirds of marketers can hope to use this media successfully without measuring the aftermath is a tough nut.

Those who do measure results appear classically minded. That is, they use the oldest interactive marketing metric around, the click-through rate (CTR). According to a recent survey from e-Dialog, 64% of respondents currently evaluate e-mail campaigns by total CTRs. That metric is followed closely by unsubscribe rates. However, that “no” from consumers may not directly reflect an e-mail campaign’s effectiveness, per se, since simply being burned out from too many e-mails is one key reason people unsubscribe.

Furthermore, counting total click-throughs may mislead. In reality, marketers calculate two types of clicks: gross and unique. That is, gross clicks-throughs measure the total clicks, even if a dozen clicks came from the same person. Unique click-throughs offer a lesser—although more accurate—rate, since they calculate only how many individuals clicked, even if each person clicked multiple times.

This distinction is one to keep in mind not only for e-Dialog’s statistics, but for any click-through rates. And even the absence of click-throughs is not automatically a problem; just because an e-mail reader fails to click, that doesn’t necessarily speak to the effectiveness of the meassage. According to DoubleClick, nearly one-fifth of US residents who purchased online in 2001 did not click on a marketing e-mail.

Still, some kind of measurement must be better than none, and yet as the first charts above indicated, more than half of marketers either don’t know or don’t measure the results of their e-mail or online campaigns. Until that, the transformation promised by interactive marketing will remain more potential than reality.

By gathering the latest research and news from over 1,000 sources, eMarketer has established itself as the world's leading provider of internet and e-business statistics. eMarketer's Web site is at www.emarketer.com