Dissecting Your Message Results - Drilling Down For Answers

Say your last message produced a 40 percent open rate and 12 percent click-through rate. But what happens to these rates if you look under the hood a little more deeply? By running "filter" reports, you can get a more accurate picture of your message performance and potentially identify problems or opportunities.Here are a few examples of ways to slice and dice your message reports:

• By top domain. Look at results by the most popular domains in your list - such as AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail if you are a B2C marketer. Dramatically different results across domains (generally the rule) might suggest delivery issues, inactive accounts and format problems or simply the result of different demographics of users of those email service providers. For B2B marketers, significantly lower metrics at a major corporation domain might suggest specific spam filtering issues or Lotus Notes challenges.
• By HTML vs Text. Because open rates aren't directly trackable for text messages, running separate reports for HTML vs Text messages provides a more accurate measure of your HTML open rates. Comparing click-through rates across the two formats may provide insight into layout issues that are either hurting or hindering reader action.
• By demographic. If you have demographic information, you might uncover significant differences in performance based on gender, age, location, whether they are a customer or not, product interest, etc. Significant differences across certain demographics might suggest the need for different versions of your messages for certain segments.
• By source of subscription. If you are a retailer, for example, perhaps subscribers signed up in various ways - in a physical store, upon check out in your online store, during interaction with your call center or via a general Web site opt-in form. Understanding which subscription source is driving the highest click-through and purchase rates will help you where to focus your list building efforts.