Before Christmas I had a conversation with a colleague about what we as email marketers should be talking about as an industry.  We have all banged on about process metrics (delivered, opens, clicks, etc.) for over ten years and his point is that it is time to move on.  Based on the feedback from conferences and industry events as well as the popularity of Ready Steady Email however, this is the content people want.

I come to the conclusion that the problem is not that we are still talking about the process metrics.  The problem is that we are still talking about industry best practice.  In order to know if our programs are any good we always want to compare them to something and vertical specific benchmarking data is very hard to come by, so we look to industry wide benchmarks for a point of comparison.  But does this approach distract us from looking at the actual goal of any email program; sell more stuff?

 Industry best practices are based on these benchmarks and are therefore based on an average of averages, which means that it is only by random chance that any of these best practices will end up being yours.  What industry best practices do give you is a reasonable place to kick off your email strategy.  What they will not give you is an optimised email program.  That is up to you through rigorous testing.

For example, Abercrombie & Fitch emails tend to be all one image.  Industry best practices would tell you that your email should include a balance of text and images above the fold so that when images are switched off, the reader knows what the email is about.  There is plenty of consumer data to show that many readers think the email is broken or is spam if it comes through blank.  By using a single image with images switched the best case scenario is that your readers think you have screwed up; the worst case however, is that they complain via the “This is Spam” button and negatively impact your deliverability.

If your brand is like A&F, your very image lead and your readers are very engaged then they may be willing to go through the extra step of downloading the images and not complain when the email is blank.  In other words, your best practice is to include one big image not to follow the industry best practice of balancing images and text.  The only way to find this out is through testing an all image creative versus a more traditional one and looking at the process metrics clicks, complaints, and unsubscribes.

Even better would be to look at an outcome metric like the purchase conversion rate or average transaction size, which gets us back to the crux of that pre-Christmas discussion. Why is it that we still rely on those pesky process metrics?  After twelve years of advancement in the email marketing space, we have not moved on from focussing on the classic opens, clicks, etc.

The most common answer when I ask clients why they do not track the outcomes back to the email is that tracking has not been set-up, the systems can’t handle it, or some other way of saying the information is not available.  If we were all being honest the answer should probably be that outcome metrics are not available because we have never gotten around to integrating them into the email program.

The only way to move the industry forward is to get away from these process metrics and start to look at outcome metrics.  The cost of email is such that there is no disincentive to a batch and blast strategy.  At the same time, while process metrics are useful to identify which tactics are working, clicks and opens do not have any value in their own right.  In order to get the accountants to understand the upside of developing your own best practices is to demonstrate the lift in the outcome metrics.