As you probably know, Apple has released the iOS 15 update and this has turned the relevance of open rates upside down. As a follow-up to my colleague’s article on the impacts of the iOS 15 update and because we know that most of our clients rely on open rates, we wanted to think a little further about how to measure engagement with email communications. Here’s a quick look at what we’ve learned about other engagement metrics.
5 engagement metrics to assess the reach of your communications
1. The emailable contact rate
First, it’s important to always look at the audience you can reach via email. In other words, this measure represents the number of emailable contacts compared to the total number of contacts in your pool. This is the portion that is in contact with your communications. It can therefore be interesting to track it and monitor its evolution. Your audience must be constantly evolving and not decreasing. Indeed, a decrease in the rate of emailable contacts can represent a loss of engagement.
2. The CTR or click-through rate
Yes, there is the click-through rate which helps to make a certain evaluation of the impact of your communications on engagement. From now on, it should be calculated only on deliveries. Of course, the numbers you’ll present to management will now be much lower. Some of you will go from over 20% to less than 5%. That number, while interesting, is not the only one. It’s like looking through a small spyglass with just one eye. It is also important to look at the behavior of your contacts on your communications from different angles to properly evaluate the engagement.
3. The interest poll
You can go a step further and set up a quick poll in your newsletters with a simple question. For example, “did you find the content relevant” and display a simple answer choice.
With one click, on the image of their choice, your contacts will be able to provide you with relevant information. This information will help you improve your email strategy. Just because a customer doesn’t click on your message doesn’t mean the content isn’t relevant to them. They may have had all their answers in your newsletter.
A small, simple banner could allow you to validate this interest in your content. You could even test the most optimal positioning of it.
4. The customer journey
Another good way to evaluate the engagement towards your communications is to see if the redirections in your newsletter are effective and to follow the path of your contacts on your site. For example, the articles consulted, the pages viewed, the tracking tools, the Dialog Insight journey module, can be of great help in this regard. Indeed, it allows you to recognize known contacts to then personalize your interaction with them. It allows you to offer more relevant content and an optimal customer experience!
5. The conversion rate
Conversion is perhaps the most important data. For some, it is based on purchases, for others, it is downloads or demo requests. No matter what you want to achieve, it is possible to go further and see the contacts who take actions among those who received the email. This way, you are able to assess the direct impact of your emails on engagement with your communications and your brand, in addition to assessing the impact of your communications on sales.
The importance of a global vision to analyze engagement
Depending on your context, there are different indicators you can use to perfect your analysis of your contacts’ engagement.
The type of contact who sees your content and interacts with your communications is important to consider. Indeed, this can guide, for example, your content or segmentation strategy. You can evaluate the impact of your communications on your different customer segments.
You can also look at the percentage of unsubscribing and the concentration of clicks. This term refers to the places in your content that get the most clicks.
You’ll see that engaged customers who are loyal to your brand will have a higher engagement rate when you measure it. Now let’s make this concrete by comparing the evaluation of two types of businesses.
For example, let’s take a B2B company where we analyze engagement against newsletters promoting white papers to educate its customers. First, the analysis would look at the click-through rate, click concentration, and unsubscribing. Then, we could further the analysis by looking at which contacts clicked, which ones downloaded the white paper and which ones visited the section of the website on the topic.
Whereas in a B2C business where, for a retailer, we want to evaluate the engagement towards the weekly newsletter, we would look at the emailable contact rate, the click-through rate, as well as the concentration of clicks in relation to the different contents. Then, we could look at the profile of the contacts who clicked to see if we are engaging more new or old contacts and see in terms of loyalty. Finally, we could evaluate the conversion rate of the offers found in the newsletters
When evaluating engagement, be creative and open.
Look at different indicators to get a broader understanding of your readers’ behavior and who your readers are. This way, you’ll be able to fine-tune your content strategy and always offer relevant communications to your contacts!
Keep your contacts happy and hooked on your brand!
