Email marketing metrics are simple, right? Look at email open rate. Look at click-through-rate (CTR). Look at conversions from email. These are the common email metrics that all marketers rely on to compare email marketing performance.
I’m not disputing that these are important metrics to pay attention to. I just want to throw one more metric that should be mentioned with email marketing conversations, but isn’t because it’s tough to quantify: awareness
(Cue eye roll)
Bear with me.
A real life example
I’ve done digital marketing work for the historic Orlando venue Firestone Live / now Venue 578. From day 1, our lofty mission was to inform as much of Orlando as possible about an upcoming show.
As an example of what I mean, let’s say Saliva is performing at Venue 578. Let’s assume we’ve done a big digital marketing push leading up to the show, which is now next week. I walk around downtown Orlando and ask strangers if they know Saliva is coming to town– a simple yes or no question. A “yes” means we did our job as marketers, whether or not they come to the show.
Marketing isn’t about tricking someone. It’s about letting you know about something, and highlighting the best parts– you make the decision. Sure, marketers will make it memorable with clever campaigns, strategic remarketing, and intriguing content, but you’re not going to buy something that you weren’t already interested in.
I can’t convince you to like Saliva. Maybe no one can– they’re kind of terrible. All I can do is make sure you know about the show, why it’ll be fun (they’re playing their first album in its entirety), give you an incentive (20% off tickets), or give you a sense of urgency (the show is about to sell out! Like for real).
Note: Increasing ticket sales was a goal of course, but we looked at the overall increase in sales, as opposed to sales just from online tickets. Not everyone who knew about the show that wanted to go was going to buy advanced tickets. They might show up at the door and buy them (because everyone knows Saliva isn’t selling more than 500 tickets).
So why am I ranting about this?
Marketers talk about subject line tricks to get people to open your email. After all, an open is a win. To get people to open your emails, they usually need to be enticingly vague– you can’t give away all the info in 70 characters. The problem with this tactic is that if they don’t open the email, they don’t get the info.
Continuing with my example, this would be the equivalent of me sending an email to 30,000 people with the subject line “We have some exciting shows coming up”. Only 4,500 open the email. That means only 4,500 people maybe know that Saliva is performing because it was in the email.
But what if I made the subject line “Salvia is performing this Saturday night”. Sure, email open rate might be less because I just gave away the content of the email, but so what!
If they weren’t interested in Saliva, it doesn’t matter if they don’t open the email. If they’re interested in Saliva, they’ll open. I’m only concerned about 2 things with this type of email:
- People know about the show
- Saliva fans know about the show
In the first subject line example, only 4500 people opened the email / got the info (assuming they all got to the part of the email about the Saliva show)
In the second subject line example, more than 4500 people got the info. It’s hard to tell how many read the subject line (hence why people hate this as a metric), but I know it’s bigger than 4,500.
The second subject line gives me a better chance of asking a rando on the street, “Have you heard that Saliva is coming to town next week?” and getting a big ol’ YES!
Hear me out
I’m not saying that you should now give everything away in the subject line. Just consider the pros and cons more deeply. For the music venue, I think the increased awareness by adding the show in the subject line had more pros than cons.