At Bats

I watched this podcast from Orita about email marketing (and other stuff - click here).

One of the speakers talked about "at bats" ... this isn't entirely what he meant, I'm converting his topic into my world, but he was essentially describing the importance of the customer "doing something".

I've told you about this previously ... I worked with a company where the email marketers were very interested in open rates and total sales. The data suggested something interesting.

• Customers who clicked-through two email campaigns per year were the customers who mattered to their email marketing program.
• Any customer who clicked-through an email campaign in the past thirty days was likely to shop via any marketing/physical channel.
• Clicks were very important (opens, not so much, conversion was good but was random while clicks were reliable). Specific clicks were even more important ... merchandise-centric clicks mattered more than promotional clicks.

A simple segmentation plan was created (something I've created variants of for the past fifteen years - your mileage will vary).

• Segment 1 = 2+ Email Click-Throughs Per Year.
• Segment 2 = Anybody With An Email Click In The Past 30 Days.
• Segment 3 = 1 Email Click In The Past Year, Not In The Past 30 Days.
• Segment 4 = All Other Email Subscribers

It shouldn't surprise you that the vast majority of attributed email sales in the future came from customers in Segment 1/2/3. 

Also of interest ... getting a customer to click once on positive content (i.e. merchandise) caused the customer to become more likely to click in the future ... compound interest. I bring this up because this aligns with the podcast commentary at the start of this post. It's the concept of getting more "at bats". Email marketing functions on "at bats" as the podcaster said or "compound interest" as I'd say. If you build a program that encourages more clicks, you have more customers in Segment 1/2/3 above. If you have more customers in Segment 1/2/3 above, you will have more sales in the future. If you have more sales in the future, you'll increase customer lifetime value, generating more profit for your business in the future.

And if you have more "bad clicks" (i.e. clicking on sale messages or free shipping), you'll find your email list is biased (in a bad way) when compared to your overall customer file.

A sadness of the modern era is the inability for all of this technology to point out compound interest in a meaningful manner. Many of you overcome this sadness and are able to grow your businesses. Good job!!