Video Transcript:
“So, what are really some of the key metrics to pay attention to here in order to understand how all of this is performing?
So, the key metrics are some of the things we touched on earlier, opens and clicks. And, um, I’ll comment on the opens and the clicks for a moment, because I notice that there’s some questions coming through this, uh, about that.
So, over time, uh, they… there are two issues surrounding this. One is on the open rate, and there are companies out there, in this case Apple, uh, tends to create, uh, opens that are artificial. Nothing that can be done about it. And what we advise our clients is to assume that your open rate is probably 10% lower than what you’re actually seeing, simply because there are some fake open rates. Um, that’s just the reality of the business. You’ll have that situation with any email service provider. That’s just the way it is. Uh, but using 10%, it just allows you to, uh, see what a realistic open rate is.
Other ways to find out, you know, how your segmentation and personalization is performing is results. Are you selling more? Are you getting more appointments with leads? Are you seeing more inventory being moved? Are you getting more donations? So, certainly the open and the click rate are an indication, an initial indication of the performance of the program, um, but its bottom line is dollars, right? So, is that moving the needle?
And, uh, I’ll comment here on one thing, and that is that email marketing is really a fantastic tool. It’s one of the lowest cost tools that allow you to get an ROI which is really very positive. I would say, though, that it’s important that you do email marketing the right way. And I’m just gonna tease something now that you may wanna hold onto, which is at the end of this presentation, I’ll be providing a free guide called Mastering Email Campaigns: Strategies for Captivating Design and Content to Boost Sales. Hang on a few more minutes and you can get that. But again, going back to, uh, the integration with various tools, the Shopify, WooCommerce, and so on, all those should be seeing better results with email done well, particularly with Constant Contact.
Great. And I wanna tackle Linda’s question here in just a minute. Uh, what do you mean fake open rate? I know you mentioned the Apple Mail privacy, or- or you alluded to it. Could you talk about that just a little bit more?
Yes. So, uh, Apple has a… Let me take a step back. So, every email that Constant Contact sends includes a one-pixel image. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but when that is opened and triggered, it counts as an email. Apple opens technically, not- not physically, but triggers that pixel and that creates a fake open. They’re doing that for their own security purposes, and that’s where that 10% I was mentioning earlier comes into play to know that not all your opens are true opens. Assume that the true open is about 10% lower.
And really, I suggest, you know, clicks are usually a better measure of- measure of, uh, success, but also conversions and things like that. Looking beyond just those opens can give you a better idea of how your emails are performing. So, you mentioned smaller groups to test into your segments. How big should your segments be in order to gauge the success of your efforts, and how long or how many sends should you have before you mark it as successful or not?
Smart questions. So, it’s tied to the size of your list. So, let’s say you have a list of 1,000 people. Test it with 10, maybe 20% of the list, so 100 or 200 people, and see what happens. If it’s going really well, go ahead and- and- and expand it to the whole list. If you see some doubts or the result is uncertain, run it a second time and see what happens. In other words, don’t test segmenting and personalizing with the whole list, because, you know, in marketing there are no guarantees. So, you just wanna test things with a 10 or 20% of your list, validate that it’s correct with a second test. Assuming everything works out fine, you roll it out to the whole list.
Yeah, every business, organization, and audience is different. So, of course we’ve got all of these different suggestions for you, and, you know, if something isn’t working then you might try, uh, doing something a little bit differently in order to get that result.
Exactly. One other thing I’ll add is when you’re doing these type of tests, you wanna be able to track them as well. So, if you’re selling something, you might wind up be using a specific promo code. You wanna be looking at Google Analytics and what kind of website traffic is coming right after you send those emails. So, make sure you have data supporting whether this is working or not, not just a gut feeling. Because gut feelings are not as precise as data.
Definitely. There’s data in so many places out there. So, we’re in a good place, and I know we have tons of questions coming in and I wanna make sure we have time to get to those.”
