Undercounting Email Marketing Performance

When I'm asked to analyze email marketing performance, it's common for the email marketing professional to share opens / clicks / conversions. Good stuff, no doubt! You can tell how much companies care about email marketing based on how good of a job the email analyst does explaining what is happening. Most of the email analysts I've met are darn good at their job!

In fact, most of you are darn good at doing your job. You are most certainly not Lemonheads!

Exceptional email marketers do three things that set them apart from everybody else.

1. They are brilliant communicators / evangelists.
2. They frequently execute holdout tests and consequently they know more about the value of their channel than anybody else knows.
3. They measure "unconverted visits" and know the value of a visit.

(3) above is a classic example of "not" undercounting email marketing performance. Nearly everybody else undercounts email marketing performance.

What do I mean by "undercounting email marketing performance"?

• When a customer visits your website and does not purchase something, the very act that the customer visited your website has "value", and that value is undercounted.
• In other words, when a customer visits and does not buy something, the customer now has a "visit recency" of zero months, meaning the customer is significantly more likely to purchase in the next thirty days than is a comparable customer who did not visit the website.

All of you understand the importance of old-school "RFM" segmentation ... customers who bought from you 0-3 months ago are more valuable in the future than are customers who bought from you 22-24 months ago.

The same concept holds for "visit recency". Visits in the past thirty days have significant value to your business. You want people visiting your website ... often!

I have many clients who do a fabulous job of keeping customers coming back to the website to shop ... some are really good at this by using email marketing to advertise "product scarcity" ... if you don't buy "product x" it will be sold out soon is an example of leveraging product scarcity to get the customer to your website.

Anyway, as you go from being very good at measuring email marketing campaigns to being brilliant at measuring them, you'll stop undercounting email marketing performance by measuring future sales caused by each incremental website visit caused by email marketing.