Email Marketing Rules

As more marketers embark on their personal journeys to become data-driven marketers, most are finding the road to be a rocky one. The central problem they’re encountering is a surprising one: It’s that their data doesn’t always lead them to the best decision.

Why is that? Sometimes the wrong lesson is being taken from the data. Other times it’s the data that’s one level deeper in the data pool that they should be using. And sometimes the data is being used to power one action plan when it should be used to power several.

Ultimately, it’s because it’s not really data that we’re after in the first place—it’s insights. In this blog post, Clink Kaiser, Head of Analytic & Strategic Services at Oracle Marketing Consulting, shares four examples of how to be an insight-driven marketer.

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog

Brands are increasingly recognizing metrics like email opens, web traffic, and social media likes for what they are—surface metrics that churn wildly and are directionally noisy. While it’s still important to track those high-level metrics, optimizing for them often doesn’t translate into deeper engagement. Indeed, sometimes maximizing those metrics leads marketers to adopt clickbaity headlines and other tactics that erode customer trust and lead to fatigue, audience loss, and poor performance.

To get better aligned with both their customers and long-term business goals, more marketers are adopting a range of advanced analytics and performance metrics. Let’s talk about some of the ones that our experts at Oracle Marketing Consulting most frequently use with our clients, including:

1. Velocity
2. Average weekly frequency
3. Click reach
4. Revenue per subscriber
5. Lifetime value
6. Acquisition cost per subscriber
7. Return on investment

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog

If you truly want to know the impact your digital marketing campaigns are having, then compare the actions of people who get them to the actions of people who wanted to get them but didn’t. That’s the logic behind universal control groups, which is a measurement approach where you exclude a small portion of your audience from campaigns to get a baseline for measuring their impact over time.

By withholding campaigns from people who would normally receive them, brands are able to control for level of interest and intent in a way that you couldn’t if you simply compared people who got the campaign to people who weren’t eligible to get them. That’s why many consider universal control groups to be the purest way to measure the lift generated by your marketing efforts.

However, implementing a universal control group involves some complexity. In this post, Oracle Marketing Consulting’s Peter Briggs and Tommy Hummel discuss the various issues so you can do one successfully.

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog

Marketing shifts like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection have changed the meaning of open rates. That’s left many marketers wondering which email marketing KPIs truly offer valuable insights.

In this hour-long on-demand webinar hosted by Litmus, I join Dan Oshinsky of Inbox Collective and Bree Rostic of HubSpot to discuss:

• Whether open rates still matter
• Which metrics are the most important
• Reporting cadences
• How to get a single truth that pulls email into the broader business impact picture
• Analytic toolsets
• What should be included in a dashboard
• And more

>> Watch the webinar recording on-demand