Gaining Customer Attention is Step 1

Continuing on the theme of last month’s post “Every Campaign Gain is a Win”, let’s discuss incremental gains. While measuring incremental revenue and profits is the bottom line, measuring incremental email opens and click through rate (CTR) is indicative of how well each wave of the campaign is performing.

Just looking at email metrics, a recent campaign showed a lift of 8% in Opens among existing customers. What does that mean? It means that 8% of the total universe of customers mailed in this wave engaged and opened the email although they had not done so in the prior wave. Additionally, we saw a 2% incremental lift in CTR (click through rate.)

Even before we measure revenue and profit we know that we have impacted customer Attention! And really, that’s half the battle. Back in the day, we spoke of the number of advertising impressions (number of times you’d see the same ad) needed to incent consumer trial. That number was 9. In my experience not much has changed to minimize the effectiveness of contact frequency, i.e., communication wave. Frequency is one of the key variables that can be leveraged in a campaign strategy to create incremental gain.

Which is not to say that emails to customers should be too frequent. There is an optimal number which you will have to find, but no one contests that upping email frequency drives revenue and profit. Check out the cool frequency diagram from the Mark Brownlow post, “Email Frequency: can you increase it safely?”