Monday, June 22, 2015

CMOs: Three Major Roadblocks to Insights

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Data is the raw material for developing insights. If the complete data is not available to insights team then you can’t expect the insights to be very valuable. Insights teams will make the best out of what they have available but you will get far better insights if you spend little time with them to understand what they need and help them with these for major roadblocks.
  1. Data Sources and Collection – Insights team has identified the data sources required for them to provide great insights, the data is all there either available internally or externally. The big challenges comes when the data teams actually start to figure out how the data will be collected. For internal data sources the organizational barriers are the biggest ones that prevent one team for getting access to the data that other team owns. Your team will need your help in navigating those barriers and help the free flow of the data. If external data sources are on their list then your help will be needed to provide appropriate funding and legal clearance needed to get those data pieces.
  2. Data Storage – Storage per GB/TB is cheap and will continue to be cheaper but with that the amount of data will continue to go up (see the graph below) All in all, you will end up either spending a lot of money or will need to clear out the data repository to keep cost in check. Clearing the data means data gaps will emerge causing the gaps in Insights. For example, if all your data team can store is six months’ worth of data then you will be missing out on yearly trends, If all they can store for 1 year then you will be missing out on multi-year trends etc. Your team will need your support in ensuring that you have appropriate budgets approved to ensure that your team can store the required amount for their analysis.
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  1. Data Access – Having all the data collected and stored is half the battle, other half is making sure that the data is accessible by the insights team. Majority of the time the data will be stored in the cloud, Hadoop etc but is not easily available to the analysts who will need it for their analysis. In order to make any sense of the data, the insights team needs to have easy access to the data, not just in little chunks but to the whole set. You analysts might not be well versed with database technologies to make proper connection. They need an easy way to either connect their analysis tool e.g. Tableau, Excel etc. to the data sources so they can pull the required data to conduct analysis. They will need your help in pushing the other teams to make data accessible to them.
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Monday, June 01, 2015

4 KPIs for Measuring Email List Growth

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Email list growth is the foundation of email marketing program. Unless you keep care in protecting and growing that list you will end up non functional email marketing program. Recently, I wrote a post on 23 Metrics for Email Marketing Metrics that you should know about, in this post I am taking 3 metrics from that list and adding one more to call out the 4 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the email list growth.  Here are the four KPIs:
  1. Email Complaint Rate/Spam Complaint Rate – SPAM complaints can kill your marketing program. This KPIs allows you to see if SPAM complains are becoming an issues, you goal should be to minimize this KPI. Spam complaint rate is measures as the percentage of your email recipients who marked your emails as Spam. Looking at this number campaign by campaign and then aggregated over month will show you if you are annoying your subscribers to a point where they consider your email as spam. This number is readily available in most of the ESP.
  2. Subscribe Rate – This KPI measure the effectiveness of your marketing/content in driving new email subscribers.  Your goal should be to increase this KPI. Subscribe rate is expressed as a percentage and is calculated as New Subscribers divided by visitors who are not already in your list. Most of the Web Analytics tools will provide you this number by tracking the completion of emails subscription page as a goal/conversion. These tools use the total goal conversions divided by total visitors on the site during the specified period to calculate the conversion rate (Subscribe Rate). The default conversion rate calculation by web analytics tool will also count anybody who has already subscribed to your list thus inflating the denominator. In most cases the default calculation will suffice but if you do want to get accurate numbers then you will have to setup your web analytics tool to not count people who are already subscribed.
  3. Unsubscribe Rate – Is the percentage of your emails recipients (subscribers) who chose to unsubscribe from your future mailings. Unsubscribe Rate is calculated as number of unsubscribes divided by email delivered and is expressed as a percentage. It measures the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy and the quality/relevance of your email marketing. If this number continues to rise, you have a problem that should be immediately fixed. The fixes range from adjusting the email frequency to increasing the relevance of the message.
  4. List Growth Rate – This is ultimately the one metric that everything else boils down to. If you have to only show one metric on your dashboard or optimize for one metrics then use this one as it is calculated using the other three that I have listed above.  This KPI measures how fast your email list is growing, it is the net results of new subscribers minus the unsubscribes (including hard bounces) and email/spam complaints. It is calculated as, Growth (new subscribers ) – Loss(unsubscribes + email complaints) divided by total list size of your email list. Your email marketing program depends on List Growth so watch this number closely and take actions to actively grow your email list.
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Here are few more email marketing posts that you will like:
  1. 23 Email Marketing Metrics That You Should Know
    This post lists all the email marketing metrics that you will ever need.
  2. One costly email mistake that you can easily fix
    Growing email list is a hard job. All you Growth hacking goes down the drain when you make a simple mistakes that costs you subscribers that you just gained. This posts you one such mistake and how to fix it.
  3. Email Personalization Not Working? Read This
    This posts explains why the email personalization might not work. The bottom line is that you have update your personalization criteria over time and test it.
  4. 3 Techniques for Expanding your Email Reach
    Email marketers are facing a tough time with growing emails remaining unopened and unsubscribes. Acquiring new subscribers using old techniques is expensive. In this post I have listed 3 techniques that you can use to spread the word of your emails/newsletters beyond the email list that you are sending the emails to.
  5. Are You Depleting Your Email List?
    Email marketers, in order to maximize short term conversions, often bombard irrelevant emails in subscribers inbox However this short term mentality results in erosion of long term viability of their email marketing, due to increase in unsubscribes causing depletion of email lists.
  6. 15 Things to Test in your Email Campaign
    This post talks about 15 things you can test today.
  7. Targeting Cart Abandonment by Email
    Targeting Cart Abandonment is a great way to drive conversions however, use incentives/offers cautiously.
  8. Conversion Tip: Making the Most of the Email Confirmation Thank you Page
    Use your Confirmation page effectively, this posts shows an example of a good page and a not so good page.
  9. Number One Email Marketing Mistake
    Number one mistake marketers make with email marketing is to send “Irrelevant” messages to their customers. Find out why this strategy has a far-reaching impact on your email marketing program.
  10. 7 Ways to Create Relevancy in Emails
    7 tried and tested ways of creating relevancy in emails are described in this post.
  11. Relevancy Matters in Email Marketing
    This post shows an example of an email that missed the opportunity to convert.

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