Your Click Thru Rate is probably much higher than you think

Recently, I was looking at some of the email metrics for a campaign we ran where I currently work. Since we ran a multivariate test, identifying each success metric was key. The first was easy enough – subject line. We could identify this just by the percentage of opens.

Lewis Skolnick got the open…but not the CTR

The next thing we were testing was the creative.

At this point, we could have looked at the Click Thru Rate given to us by our email service provider. But this did not sit right with me. Their formula was the total number of clicks divided by the number of sends. But that seems unfair! Why should you compare clicks based on total number of sends? It is not the clicks job to open the email. It is his/her job to get you to click once you have opened it!

I proposed using a new metric:

Clicks / Opens

This seems like it is a much better indicator of how effective your creative really is. And since the number is likely to be much larger, you will really be able to see a trend. For example, rather than a CTR of 1.3 compared to 1.4, which is such a minimal difference you might be inclined to assign this difference to chance, you might see 17% compared to 30%. In that case, it is pretty easy to see which creative won.

Lamar’s creative always wins

The only caveat I can think of right now is those people who use Outlook and have a preview email set. For some annoying reason, ESPs don’t count the preview view as an open, even though it should. Especially when the ESP will count the click from the preview view. But, just because one formula is flawed, does that mean we should continue to skew data to minimize the impact of successful or unsuccessful creative? Since we are trying to understand trends, I do not think so.

As an old boss said to me: “We are about identifying trends. We’re not accounting.” I think when it comes to Open Rates and Click Thru Rates, this is certainly true.
What do you think? How should we evaluate CTRs? Also, do you remember Revenge of the Nerds?

This Week in Digital Marketing – July 15, 2014

 

I cannot believe it is more than halfway through 2014! Just before you know it, it will be Holiday Season and everyone and their grandmother has an opinion on the best ways to market to your audience this holiday season. While I am sitting on some ideas, my only advice at the moment is just to start thinking and start planning. While you may not execute what you plan now, it is certainly a good time to start thinking about Halloween through New Years.

 With that, here is the second installment of This Week in Marketing, or my favorite links I have shared…

This Facebook ‘Manipulation’ Scandal Is Ridiculous — Companies Test Products (And You) All The Time

http://snip.ly/81E

Rather than being depressed that their lives didn’t measure up to those of the happy people on Facebook, the users who saw slightly more positive content actually posted slightly more positive status updates. The users who saw slightly more negative content, meanwhile, posted slightly more negative updates. 

RELATED: http://snip.ly/MxX

When’s the Best Day and Time to Post on Social Media?

http://snip.ly/Kdx

We took a look at our proprietary data based on 14 million sites using our tools worldwide (that’s about 3 billion pageviews a day), to help you optimize when you should post your content, including the day, time, and social network. Here’s what we found for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Custom Link Tracking: Capturing User Actions

http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/custom-link-tracking-capturing-user-actions/

From time to time, I receive ques­tions from clients ask­ing how to track some­thing that doesn’t fall under the gen­eral cat­e­gory of “page view”—a link, a but­ton, an image, a form interaction—something that can’t eas­ily be cap­tured sim­ply by tag­ging a page with Site­Cat­a­lyst code, even using cus­tom vari­ables. After all, when the page loads, you don’t know what link users will click, what but­tons they will press, or what val­ues they will enter into forms.

Buzzfeed editor-in-chief: ‘Technology isn’t a section in the newspaper any more – it’s the culture’

http://snip.ly/pT2

They’re more interested in this moment of crazy opportunity, with the massive economic and cultural transformation driven by Silicon Valley. And kids feel capable of seizing it. Technology isn’t a section in the newspaper any more. It’s the culture.”

And finally, in honor of my favorite sporting event on the planet…

How and When The FIFA World Cup Brasil 2014 Logo Was Conceived

For more good reading from around the web, Follow me on Twitter @whybegee.

 

 

Bigger is Better

The newest trend in etail website design is BIG images. The top retailers online have generally moved away from using lots of white space to accentuate a point to filling our screen with large images, with writing right on top of the image. I think part of this must be because brands want consistency in the look and feel from desktop to mobile and too much white space in mobile just means your site copy is too small. Have a look at apple.com:

Do you see any large white space? Practically none.

The first site that really got my attention on this was my favorite jeans shop, American Eagle. Though I was not in love with their barrage of email marketing following my last purchase, I did notice the design of the emails. White space was minimal. Image were huge and used as background, with cutting edge fonts on top of the images. This shot is from their homepage as of this writing.

Again, there is almost no white space.

Compare that to this:

 Which of those images looks like it was designed 2 or 3 years ago and which looks like 2014? Sorry Walgreens, but your site expresses an old model. There are a lot of CTAs, which is fine, but there just are not too much dynamic or interesting things going on here. Above all else, the only sign that humans created this site is the “wacky” font type. Where are those smiling “happy and healthy” people enjoying Centrum, Boots No7, or any other products? Check out the CVS homepage. At least they have an actual human on the page!

Bigger is better is not always about white space though. It is really about expressing a certain humanity through your site. While Walgreens lacks that touch, even the very white-space full Kroger uses its Hero Banner slider as a means to communicate a human touch.

As for Target, they go for the gold – cute babies sell. It is a rule as old as advertising itself.

But what unites these very 2014 images is the huge space they take up. They eat the page. Target advertises Black Friday in July next to its Hero Baby, but the size is nowhere on the level of the hero. There is no way you would look at that Target page and not see (and have some human emotion maybe) for the baby first. Now that they have you suckered in, enjoy those Black Friday in July “savings”.

Just to drive the point home further – Bigger is Better in 2014 through expressing a human touch and dominating the eye – check out an example of a site that already feels old.

Apologies Home Depot, but where is the Dad grilling for his family or building a deck? Where is the human touch to all these home projects?

This is the era of BIG IMAGES, BOLD STATEMENTS, and making the web feel like it has a human touch. Right?

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What do you think? Have you seen similar things? Feel free to leave me a reply or connect with me on LinkedIn about this.

Want to read more? You might like this article on how to improve your site.