When e-zines first came out, chief marketing officers looked at e-mail newsletter reports and were excited about using open rates and clickthroughs to measure their success and justify the investment.
Today, CMOs are demanding more from metrics they use every day. Open rates and clickthroughs are only part of the equation. They need to know if the e-zine is contributing to actual sales. And it would help if they could see if and how customers are interacting with the content.
My advice? Think like a magazine publisher and put the reader first. Here’s my three-part plan for achieving true e-zine success:
1. Profile subscribers to understand their interests.
2. Make sure the activity reports you get are utilized by both marketers and salespeople.
3. Use the reports to define the content.
But let’s answer the big question: How do you push sales with an e-mail newsletter? There are several ways.
Driving Sales
Auto dealers are sending layered newsletters serving different levels of reader interest. Content is based on an individual’s profile—i.e., where the person is located and what kind of car he or she has looked at.
Some articles include pictures of a car—for example, a piece about going on safari might be accompanied by a photo of a Jeep. A reader who clicks on that image gets more in-depth material on the vehicle.
That brings us to the next level: Getting the person to take a test drive. If the reader links through to do this by clicking on a “schedule my test drive” button, the dealer knows he has a hot prospect on his hands.
But you’ve got to get the information to your dealers or sales staff, and the best way is through pushed reports. In essence, the salesperson receives a message stating, “Joe Smith read Article X. You should pick up the phone right now and continue offline the conversation they started with you online.”
Case in point: A technology vendor selling a security product publishes an e-zine article on the latest security threats. The salesperson, alerted that the customer has read the article, picks up the phone and suggests a solution that addresses the problem described in the editorial.
Do you just call up and say, “I saw you clicked on this?” Of course not. Salesmen have to be trained to do this with finesse.
Pushed reports usually arrive 24 hours after a communication is sent. At that point, the salesperson can call up and say, “How’s it going? I was thinking of something you might be interested in.”
Top Layer Networks, which provides solutions for guarding corporate networks against cyber attacks, has generated sales leads and fostered customer relationships using that approach. Each newsletter sent by the firm contains articles and case histories. The firm also does occasional surveys.
Embedded links put the decision to cross the divide between information and marketing content in the reader’s hands. The newsletter now goes to 30,000 customers, prospects and partners, and each issue produces 200 to 400 solid leads.
Above all, e-mail triggers should not be answered with another e-mail, and especially not by auto responders. Why? Because you don’t want to saturate your customer’s inbox with e-mail. A better choice might be a phone call, a letter or a white paper.
In the end, your clickthrough rates will go down if you don’t think through how much and how often you send e-mails.
Metrics
But that brings us to metrics. Which ones should you use to measure e-zine success?
There’s only one: Unique clicks. You can use it to drive both tactical and strategic decisions. On the tactical level, the unique click shows what a customer is interested in, and helps you provide the salesperson with the lead. On the strategic side, it helps you make sure the content is relevant. You may not care who the person was, but you want to know what was read.
But unique clicks should be measured as a percentage of total clicks. If I’ve had 100 unique clicks and 1,000 total clicks, that means people were engaged with my e-mail 10 times. They’re not only reading the newsletter, they’re getting into it. Of course, this requires that you have a microsite beyond the first click.
What do you do if your unique clicks go down?
The first chore is to analyze the broadcast’s timing. Your readers may know they’re going to get your newsletter every Monday between 3 and 5 p.m. If you miss that window, you might find your metrics going down.
The next thing to check is the editorial. It’s here that things often go wrong. For example, one issue of your e-zine might focus entirely on security issues—a big topic. The next one may be all about routers—not so big a topic. If your clickthroughs go down, it’s a signal that you didn’t offer readers relevant content. (To determine this, of course, you need a subscription management system that can handle multiple content categories.)
Another telling metric is the opt-out rate, because it also measures reader engagement. Some of our auto dealers have 1% opt-out rates, whereas industry standards are 9% or 10% a month.
That 1% allows you to keep almost 90% of your database over the course of a year. But 10%? You’re going to have make up quite a few names.
How do you determine why people opted out? You can’t ask them because they told you not to e-mail them anymore, but their history may contain some clues. For starters, you might see they’ve clicked or opened a communication in the last 30 or 60 days. If they did open it, look at what they read. Did they read anything after the initial article? If not, that piece may have disappointed them.
Transaction data also is crucial. If people make purchases and then opt out, it may be that they were in a buying cycle but have now moved on. In a direct selling situation, the salesperson may want to call these unsubscribers and re-engage with them.
Open rates? They’re interesting, but hardly powerful. For one thing, many people are counted as opens if they hit Outlook’s preview pane. That doesn’t mean they’ve read your newsletter.
Another way of measuring reader interest is to simply ask. My firm includes surveys in all its newsletters. We ask: “Did you like this article, and would you like to see more like it?”
But you can do this in a softer way—by profiling individuals by their interests. If 10 people read an article, profile them based on that and focus on those interests in future issues.
Engaging the Reader But enough about metrics. Here are some tips on how to boost reader interest.
First, don’t waste too much time on subject lines. When people ask me about them I have a stock answer: “Forget about the subject line.” Throw in a few key words that are relevant to what you’re going to talk about. What’s most important is to make it from someone they know.
An e-mail should come from Jeff Mesnik at IMN, not just IMN. And it should say, “Dear Joe, from Jeff.” Joe knows me, so he’s more likely to read what I send.
Another tip on how to avoid hard-sell content: Feel free to add a bit of whimsy.
Some marketers even use comic strips and then run a sidebar next to the strip that offers information about a product.
Hey, do all that and I might even subscribe to your e-zine myself.
Jeffrey (Jeff) Mesnik is Co-Founder and Vice President of Business Development for IMN (iMakeNews, Inc.), in Waltham, MA. IMN is a leading e-communications service provider. The firm’s 1,300+ clients include Shell Oil, Wachovia, CitiStreet, and ING. Please contact Jeff at 1-866-964-NEWS or [email protected], or visit www.imninc.com.
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