Bronto Blog

Bronto recently gave the old blog a facelift. One of the new features we added was a left navigation bar that included an “Ask the Expert” section (look to your left). Over the past two months, we’ve received many inquiries. Occasionally, we’ll pick one of the questions and dedicate a short blog post to answer it. Today is one such occasion.

An excerpt from a recent “Ask the Expert” question:

“How does this rate compare with that of my peers?”

The short answer is, “It depends.” When I provide clients with this answer, I pause, count to 3 in my head, and wait for their reply. It usually goes something like this: “Yeah, but…I mean…what are the averages?”

So, why does it depend?
Let’s say that your organization sends out 3 distinct campaigns per month (promotional, informational, educational). Would you expect the metrics to be the same for the 3 communications? What if they were targeted to 3 diverse demographic groups? Each message has a different goal, with different expectations; therefore, it’s unreasonable to assume that the metrics will be the same.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bronto is including a few new metrics on the Message Tracking Reports page. Let’s take a few minutes to go over what they mean and how they can help improve your marketing.

Clicks/Opens helps marketers more easily and accurately understand the performance of the email body. This specific statistic tells you the percentage of those who opened your message to also click a link. It’s important to look at click stats in this way, because if you compare click rates between two messages having different open rates, you are comparing apples to oranges.

Let’s look at an example: two messages, A and B, both sent to 1,000 customers. Message A has an open rate of 55% and a click rate of 30%; message B has a 40% open rate and a 25% click rate. At first glance it’s clear message A had a better click through rate, and, in fact, more people did click through. Viewed in its entirety, message A was more effective at driving people to your site.

However, if you want to analyze the effectiveness of your copy and creative (the body of your message), we have to look a little deeper. We want to know what percentage of people who actually saw the message body also clicked. This is what clicks/opens shows us. In this example the clicks/opens rate for A is 55% and for B it’s actually 63%. Comparing the two messages, we can see that Message B actually had a more compelling body. It may have been a better call to action or a better offer, but we know the message body performed better.

Looking at the Converted / Clicks metric, you’ll find a similar story. Again we are trying to get a better
understanding of how one individual aspect of this process has performed. The Converted/Clicks metric tells us how good our flow is from the landing page to the point of conversion - comparing multiple emails will help weed out bad landing pages. Looking at your Converted/Clicks metric across emails, in conjunction with web analytics data, can help you to improve the process you have in place for converting contacts.

With this information in hand you are now equipped to better analyze and improve your email marketing efforts. Enjoy!

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto