How to Measure Return on Investment for Email Marketing

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Author: Paul Crabtree

Article source: http://opt-influence.com/. Used with author's permission. How to measure return on investment for email marketing

Half of email marketing agencies taking part in the DMA email benchmarking study reported less than 40% of their clients tracking ROI. (Source: DMA Email Marketing Council)

One of the main benefits of email marketing is its measurability. It can also be its down-fall- many marketers feeling like they were drowning in simple metrics such as clicks and opens. This obsession on these performance metrics cloud more traditional key performance indicators (KPIs).

58.4% of marketers within the Adestra "Challenges facing UK email marketers" survey feel they that were unable to use the results of their campaigns in strategic decision making or for calculating return on investment (ROI). This hinders the development of their email program and feeds the common perception held by many senior management that email is a cheap channel and not a traditional, measurable direct marketing channel.

With an over-emphasis on clicks and opens, many marketers are not tracking ROI. This is mainly down to the perception that they need complicated tracking systems and solutions. Costly web analytics packages are being deployed in some cases.

Many simple methods of measuring ROI are over-looked with many believing they need web analytics solutions that provide click stream tracking. Adestra recommend you consider simple, low cost methods of proving your email campaigns are working before investing within such concepts. These can include:

Simply duplicate your marketing pages and direct all email promotion to this new page. All orders are tracked against a separate product code (e.g. BSC001b) allowing easy revenue accountability at a low investment. Effectively, your existing sales reporting tracks ROI!

Get a customer to quote a priority code when ordering. To ensure they give this code, we recommend you provide an incentive (perhaps a discount or a complimentary product). Simple to action, this method provides considerable visibility.

Using Adestra's Message Focus, you are able to drill into your data and discover if the person who ordered actually received an email communication from you. Using our contact history tool, you're able to see when they opened emails, clicked through and on what links, to provide you with the people who began the purchase process.

Conduct a survey of your buyers and ask them what communications they remember seeing before they made the decision to buy!

These simple methods of measuring ROI should be used on provisional communications before considering investing in more complicated and expensive solutions. When you are ready to invest, there are a number of options available to you, including:

More complicated email marketing solutions

By encouraging people to click through to an Adestra hosted form as the call to action, we can pre-fill fields with campaign codes. By hiding these fields from a recipient, they pass this vital marketing intelligence to you everytime they complete a form without ever knowing about it.

Many marketers invest in a web analytics program. These can be free software available off the web or in most cases paid for more programs. These programs allow you to track people as they move through your site. By using URLs which contain a source code (e.g. www.adestra.co.uk/?src=Campaign1 ) you can track which campaign people come from.

Alternatively, we can use a specific web address to bounce people from e.g. http://email.adestra.co.uk so that we know that everyone who is referred to the web site from this url is definitely from an email campaign

If we use a branded web address in your emails (e.g. http://emails.client.com) then it is possible for Adestra to lay a cookie on the recipient's machine to be read by the server which is carrying out the transaction (www.client.com). You can embed campaign codes in the cookie information automatically, and you use your own web analytics programs to measure orders from email.

Tracking and measuring your email marketing program is essential to improving and refining your marketing strategy. This measurement doesn't necessarily have to involve significant investments.

Fast, responsive and knowledgeable

Adestra Ltd are a digital marketing agency that specialise in inbound and outbound email, fax and SMS broadcast solutions. Serving the marketing and content fulfillment needs of clients in many markets including publishing, entertainment, travel and charities, Adestra are relied upon by the key players in both B2B and B2C marketplaces for bulk or highly targeted individual campaigns.

The Adestra Message Focus email service is today's best email marketing system and is the only one designed for advanced email marketers.

Adestra's product and corporate information is located at http://www.adestra.co.uk