I think that does help.
I will proceed as you advise and then track the performance and see.

Thanks Dave.

Hi Sivachi,

That doesn’t sound right – are you tracking the clicks using an email package or using Google Analytics or similar. I recommend tracking the links in the enewsletter as explained here: http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-marketing-analytics/email-campaign-tracking-with-google-analytics/

You can then setup an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics so that you are only reviewing traffic from email and no other channels, so should be more accurate.

Does that help?

Dave

Hi Dave,
we send out a daily newsletter that has on average 6 products laid out on a single page. We then proceed to track the click rate for each product and accumulate this data over time.
However, we’ve noted something curious.

There seems to be no correlation between the popularity of a product as indicated by the clicks it receives and the revenue the product brings in or the number of buyers it attracts.
We’ve had some products perform dismally in terms of clicks yet attract a record number of buyers and vice versa.

My two questions are:
1. Is it wise to keep collecting this data?
2. How can we use this click rate data more meaningfully?

Hi John, I agree this is a possibility and inbox placement needs to be checked, as if that is indeed negatively affected by a high level of long term inactives then removing inactives is productive. For some clients have I removed deep inactive when this is exactly the case.

I didn’t make this clear enough perhaps in the post though I did point out the possible use of open rate “when identifying active addresses to solve deliverability problems”.

So to fully qualify I should say; don’t remove inactives unless you have inbox placement problem to resolve.

Thank you for picking this up and highlighting this.

Spot on, thanks for adding the comment, great to hear your clients are enlightened.

Hi Peter, thanks for the suggestion. Not as such, it’s a good idea, but has probably been done many times before. I’m not sure how we’d put a different spin on it.
Have you seen this: http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/the-inbound-marketing-process/ – think this is the nearest to what you’re describing?
Dave

Hi Jordie,

Yes that’s a good point and it shows where email open rates (and other KPIs) are useful – e.g. across webmail readers to show problems in deliverability or rendering or response rates across segment to show how your email is being responded to by different groups.
I think a lot of email systems aren’t good at encouraging review of segmented results. Anyone say which are the best = easiest to prompt and visualise this?
Dave