Understanding Metric Methodology Is The Key To Email Marketing Effectiveness

While organizations are captivated by the economics of email marketing, just 51% of 286 email marketers surveyed in a July 2008 Jupiter/ClickZ survey agreed that they understand the methodology their applications use to calculate email metrics like click-through rate. This can create an inaccurate picture of email marketing performance, which in turn leads marketers to make ill-informed decisions. Wide variances still exist in the metric methodologies of email marketing vendors, further complicating the value of competitive analysis. To maximize the value of integrating additional data and metrics into the email data mart, email marketers must press vendors for statements of metric methodology and develop their own measures to understand subscriber engagement, attribution, and email address value.