I recently had the opportunity to speak with David Klein about email marketing and measurement. David is the Vice President, Marketing Planning and Program Development at Aeroplan. He'll be speaking at the upcoming eMetrics conference in Toronto.
One Degree: Email marketers often obsess about click-through rates. What does Aeroplan consider its top email marketing metric(s)?
Well, we focus on basic email metrics (opens, click-throughs) for each campaign. BUT it's important to remember that each campaign is a snapshot in time and click-throughs only provide a one-dimensional view of a member. Ultimately, we look at engagement of the member in a multi-dimensional way. Metrics like the recency of a member's last open, the recency of their last click. Recency is a very important metric given the frequency of communication email offers.
We also look at groupings of offers within a single email to see which offers get click-throughs. And, we'll look at all of this in relation to segment objectives and performance. Ultimately, it's a balance between supporting the needs of individual campaigns and maintaining overall member program engagement.
Aside from our own metrics, we also recognize that there are lots of emails in a member's inbox. It's a cluttered world and we want to make sure we can stand out in that clutter.
OD: Aeroplan has a number of partners that you promote in your emails – how involved are those partners in measuring success? Do they take an active role?
We get our partners involved in the very early planning stage and try to develop an annual plan with them. They bring their own business objectives or needs; we bring an understanding of what our members expect and what offers elicit the responses our partners require. Ultimately, the measure of success varies by partner – depending on their objectives.
The efficiency of the email channel tends to drive up the frequency of communications. So there is a balancing act of frequency vs fatigue. We must ensure that we balance the program’s need to communicate with members’ receptivity – for the long term benefit of both our partners and our members.
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