Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Beyond Opens and Clicks: Using Analytics to Drive Email Engagement and Sales

By Joel BookDirector of eMarketing Strategy, ExactTarget

Not that long ago, it wasn’t all that uncommon to see email marketers glued to their office chairs, staring at their monitors and watching the numbers change before their eyes as subscribers opened and clicked an email sent just minutes earlier. Those “heady” days of using only opens and clicks to measure email effectiveness are gone.

Today, e-marketing effectiveness is measured by how many web visitors are converted to buyers, how many one-time buyers become repeat buyers, and eventually, how many of those buyers become your best customers and advocates. This process of customer acquisition, retention, and growth is the very definition of customer engagement.

Properly planned and executed, an effective customer engagement strategy increases profit by keeping customers connected to the brand longer. And the argument for customer retention is compelling. Frederick Reichheld, author of the book, The Loyalty Effect, observed that a 5 percent reduction in customer defection can boost profit by 25 percent or more depending on the customer’s tenure with the company. For example, newly acquired customers are less profitable because the cost of sale has not been fully recovered. The longer customers are retained, the greater their contribution to profit.

But effective customer engagement strategies require customer insight that reveals not only what the ...