Live from Miami: E-mail Marketers Moving to Real-Time Tracking and Reporting
While many marketers continue to determine success rates solely by clickstream or “eyeball” data–tracked by offer, list segment and campaign type–others have moved to real-time tracking and reporting, Regina Brady, vice president of strategies and partnerships for FloNetwork said yesterday during a presentation titled “Advanced E-Mail Marketing: Tips, Techniques and Capabilities.”
In addition, these marketers are turning to desktop campaign deployment, database management and integration and flexible delivery options such as time of day and multiple e-mail formats.
According to Brady, marketers are now capturing and tracking bounces, invalid addresses, pass-along rates and transactional data on a list-by-list and even name-by-name basis.
From there, marketers are generating segments of lists to market to customers more effectively, she added. For example, narrow-casting, based on the newly captured definable criteria, allows marketers to target by RFM or geography. Other new technologies allow marketers to compose variations of the same e-mail message to reach different market segments.
She offered a case study of a client that wanted to raise awareness for a conference and position that conference as different from others in its field. The client employed a rich media format-graphics enhanced with motion and stereo sound–with pass-along tracking capability. The result was an 85% click-through rate and a 16.5% pass-along rate.
In addition she offered the following statistics:
* Marketers captured a 3.5% click-through rate when e-mailing to a rented e-mail file vs. 10% when targeting the house e-mail file.
* Purchase rates were 2% for the rental file vs. 2.5% for the house file (3.9% for direct mail to the house file).
* Cost per sale was $286 for the rental file compared to $2 for the house file ($18 for direct mail).
* Companies that outsourced received a 64% response rate compared to 36% for those that did not.
* Companies that outsourced received a 10% click-through vs. 9% for those that did not.
* A 6% purchase rate was obtained by those that outsourced vs. 1.4% for those that did not.
During the same session John Lawlor, president of Boca Raton-based EmailChannel.com said that e-mail marketing is now a business sector.
As a testament to that Lawlor said that last year 15 companies in the e-mail sector went public with a total net worth of $17 billion.
He said that a downside to the huge boom in e-mail marketing is that consumers are starting to feel inundated with e-mail, reflected by the fact that response rates are dropping. He said that 20% of e-mail received is commercial, split evenly between spam and permission-based transmissions and that 240 billion messages will be e-mailed by 2003.
