Have you taken the challenge of orchestrating a hyper-personalized email campaign, like a year in review recap email? Congrats! Right now you may be feeling excited, anxious, inspired, and the weight of the task at hand on your shoulders.
Before you get too far down the path of execution, however, I urge you to think about what success from this type of campaign might look like, as I bet you’ll find that it is a little different from what you’re used to. In this post, I want to share some creative ways to determine success, evaluate recipient engagement, and communicate your successes internally.
As I shared in part one of this series, hyper-personalized campaigns are different than the promotional, educational, newsletter, or operational emails that email marketers know inside and out.
They are likely to encourage different behaviors within the email itself, like reading more content in their inbox rather the clicking through to external resources.
Since they’re developed for existing customers, they are likely to have multiple objectives, including:
Reducing churn
Increasing product usage
Promoting adoption of new features
Encouraging recipient re-engagement
Producing referrals and new signups from a campaign gone viral
For most brands, however, success means delivering on your promise to provide unique value that only you can give to those customers.
Once you’ve identified the metrics you ultimately want to influence, you can begin the fun work (in my opinion, at least) of deciding what your primary measures will be, and how you’ll track them. For a hyper-personalized campaign, I recommend evaluating:
Delivery and engagement metrics - There are your standard, familiar, unintimidating delivered, opened, and click metrics that you already understand so deeply. They’re as important as ever to indicate how well your message is resonating and how clean your list is.
*Pro tip: Create a segment in Marketing Campaigns of the recipients who opened and/or clicked on this email. By evaluating how their behavior changes after that point (by making a repeat purchase or generating more activity in your app, for example), you’ll understand what kind of monetary influence this campaign had.
Email read rate - Some third-party tools like Email on Acid or Litmus allow you to see the recipient’s time in the email, cluing you into the percentage of people who actually read the email as opposed to opening and quickly deleting. In the case of our campaign, Your Year in Email, we found that 34% more recipients actually read this campaign than other emails from us of a similar length!
* Pro tip: These services can also show you how many times your email was forwarded and actually printed out (yes, on paper).
Email replies - While I’m a firm believer in always reading and responding to customer replies it is extra valuable in these cases. You may receive questions about how their data was calculated or how they can improve their results, and even positive comments about how useful they found this intel.
Other customer testimonials - Whether they come from social media (don’t forget to add a hashtag into the mix!), online comments, or reports to the front line employees at your organization, collecting and analyzing these comments from your recipients is an excellent way to help determine if what you sent was valuable.
In addition to the post-campaign reporting above, I recommend conducting a retrospective to see how the unique process worked for you and other internal stakeholders and how you can get more efficient for future personalized campaigns.
You’ve likely put more time, effort, and creativity into a campaign like this than many others so make sure you give the same relative effort to really understanding where you were most successful and where you should channel more energy the next time around.
By building a holistic view of the customer actions your campaign influenced, big and small, you’ll be able to paint a picture to the leaders in your organization of why you should take fun risks like building personalized year-in-review campaigns in the future. Beyond that, these qualitative and quantitative data-points can serve as an excellent illustration of the value YOU, their creative and experienced email marketer bring to the table.
They are likely to encourage different behaviors within the email itself, like reading more content in their inbox rather the clicking through to external resources.
