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Stats have no relevance without the context of history.
Some years ago I had a client whose email marketing efforts were generating fantastic results. They went out once a week to a very loyal readership. Then someone read an article about relevant content and decided to publish five different newsletters EVERY WEEK, allowing people to opt-out of various versions when they chose. What happened? Open rates dropped from 68% to 34%.
Unfortunately, the client’s marketing team was completely unaware. They had a fairly low unsubscribe rate from new the five-issues-a-week program and the “industry average” open rate at the time was a 34%. Eager to demonstrate their successes, the team was focused on the positive bytes of information. Open rates were at or just above industry standards and unsubscribe rates were low. Without the perspective of history, these were very positive and promising results.
I uncovered the bad news during a program-wide emarketing audit for the VP of Advertising. Their response graph looked like a ski-hill. What was really going on was that customers, overwhelmed by the volume of email they were receiving, had stopped reading. Had open rates continued to decline, the program would likely have ended up cancelled due to “lack of customer interest”!
Fortunately, we were able to revise the program to reduce the total number of email messages flooding customer inboxes weekly, which stabilized open rates just slightly above industry standards and generated a slight improvement in clickthrough rates. We were also able to establish sales tracking data that allowed us to relate online sales activity to email subscriber status. And I re-learned a valuable lesson.
Where you are today means nothing without the context of where you were yesterday. And you can’t intelligently plan where you’ll be tomorrow, unless you know where you are right now. Even in the world of web analytics.
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