Analytics Help You Understand Your Effectiveness and Reach

It is reported that nearly 20% of email marketers do not know how well their email marketing campaigns are working simply because they do not track them. The importance of reviewing and analyzing the metrics of your email or e-newsletter campaigns is a major component of knowing whether or not what you are doing is effective or is providing you with any return on your investment.

Here are the major components of the metrics of any email marketing campaign.

Delivery Rate: The delivery rate is simply the total number of email that were actually delivered to the intended inbox. Delivery rate percentages are determined by taking the total number of emails that bounced (undeliverable) by the number of emails sent. Spam filters and other issues can cause an email to be bounced. You can reduce the chances of having your email bounce by asking the recipients to white-list your email.

Open rate: This is the number or percentage of total delivered emails that were actually opened by the recipients. There is some debate about how accurate this number is and whether it is reliable. However, it is still an important number to be aware especially as you send out multiple emails and if you are seeing any drastic change in your open rates over time. Industry research estimates the average open rate is 30%. If your rate is lower than this, you may want to research and evaluate how effective your emails are to the target audience.

Click-Through Rate: This tracks the number of times a link in your email was clicked-through by the recipients. JupiterResearch estimates that the average unique click-throughs is about 12 percent. The key here is to keep your content relevant, simple, direct and targeted.

Unsubscribe Rate: This is the number people who choose to unsubscribe to your email or e-newsletter from a specific message. The rate is determined by dividing the total number of unsubscribes by the total number of delivered emails. The number of unsubscribes are often an overall indicator of email list health or freshness. If you are using a list of emails collected greater than six months, then you may experience a high unsubscribe rate as the list is no longer considered fresh. If the list is fresh or the email subscribers are all recent or having been receiving email from you for a period time and you experience a high unsubscribe rate, then you will want to review the relevancy of your content to your audience.

Reviewing and understanding these numbers from any email campaign are an integral part of determining the effectiveness of your campaign as well as understanding the return on your overall investment in using email as a marketing or outreach tool.

I use iContact as my email campaign tool which provides me with all of these data and more to help me effectively track my email campaigns as well as the email campaigns of my clients. If you would like some help with determining the effectiveness of your email campaign, do not hesitate to contact me for a free consultation.

Image by Esparta via Flickr

The Brooklyn Art Museum has a Twitter account and at last check, they had over 21,000 people following them.  The Museum uses the account to tweet about happenings at the Museum such as events, announcements, new blog posts from the Museum blog and to interact with patrons. They also tweet links to their other social media accounts such as Facebook where they have they have a Group with almost 800 members. According to recent Facebook statistics, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, with over 2,500 fans, is one of the fastest growing Facebook fan pages with a weekly growth rate of over 600%.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is also on Twitter with almost 12,000 people following them. They are tweeting about events such as an Art Hunt, the announcing of their website redesign, to answer questions from people and to tweet about Art in the news. Both museum twitter sites indicate the name of the staff who are doing the tweeting. This is important because even though the accounts represent an entity, people prefer to interact on Twitter with a person.

A quick search on Twitter for other arts organizations include the Atlanta Symphony, The Chicago Symphony, the New World Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Houston Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet, and the San Francisco ballet, while not actively tweeting, has gone in and “reserved” their twitter name for future use. The Smithsonian has also joined the Twitter world.

A blog post of an interview with Marc van Bree, the PR coordinator with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra about their social media and online efforts. In referring to their Facebook fan page, they offered people the chance to win a new CD of one of their recent recordings and within a week they had over a thousand fans.  He notes they have primarily used the page for distributing information about the organization but they would like to see it become more interactive with their fan posting content and interacting with each other. Over half of their fans are under the age of 24 and 85% of them are under the age of 34 compared with the average age of classical music patrons which is usually between 50 and 60. Facebook is an additional avenue by which they are able to reach out and connect with a younger fan base.

YouTube is another increasingly popular platform being utilized by arts organizations and non-profits. The Anaheim Ballet’s YouTube channel has over 500,000 channel views.  The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust also has a YouTube channel which they use to provide information and insight about the city’s fine arts community. The Pennsylvania Ballet is using their YouTube channel to post video of performances, interviews with choreographers and chronicling the building of stage sets.

A recent article on how Philadelphia arts organizations are utilizing social media as a way to connect and engage a younger demographic. Almost every arts organization in the city has a Facebook page and others are using Flickr and YouTube as ways to reach their audiences and patrons. The Arden Theatre which has a Twitter, MySpace and a Facebook account, recently promoted reduced ticket rates on their Facebook page and increased the number of fans to their page by over a hundred. They are quoted as saying that they believe these efforts have resulted in a more loyal audience who better understands their overall mission.
Shawn Stone, the Philadelphia Ballet’s marketing director hits the nail on the head about why arts organizations or non-profits can benefit from using social media, “Using social media and e-mail marketing is a much-less-expensive way of marketing. It’s more targeted and can save your organization money. It’s also creating a direct line of communication with potential audiences of the future.”

Social media is creating new marketing avenues that arts organizations and non-profits are taking advantage of even as budgets continue to shrink. Not only does it seem to be helping them to connect with younger and target audiences, it’s also about having a strategy for getting the results and outcomes they want.

What non-profits or arts organizations have you seen using Social Media?

Did you know if you have a Gmail or other Google account, that you also get a “profile”? There are some great benefits to doing this. Not only is this a great way to share any of the content you have posted or created with any of the Google services, but it serves as a one stop and centralized location for any and all links or profiles associated with you. For a Social Media Virtual Assistant like myself, it’s a great place for me to be able to post links to all of the my Social Networking profiles allowing potential clients to get to know me.

You can customize the profile to show as much or as little about you as you desire. By making your name public on your profile, you make it that much easier for people (or potential clients) to find you. And of course, it provides you prime a spot for placing a link back to your website…on Google! Google provide you with a wide array of options for posting content about yourself. Also included is a “Send Message” feature so that someone can send you an email directly to your GMail account without having access to the actual email address.

Click here for more information on Google Profiles

Click here to see how I’ve set up my Google Profile

My favorite part of the profile is where I get to list my superpower: Sassy Social Media Virtual Assistant and Savvy Data Chick! If you’d like some help with setting up your Google profile or any other social networking profile, give me a shout out and let’s talk!

Image via CrunchBase

Marketing yourself and your business has undergone a complete face lift with the explosion of social networking and Web 2.0. For anyone who is looking to establish an online presence, promote themselves or their business online or sell a product or service, then using the social networks and other Web 2.0 application is quickly become an absolute.

A post over on Hiring the Internet about the theory of social media marketing talks about how social media is evolving as a marketing tool but is also a tool that many businesses will fail at using correctly. Statistics from several recent reports show that 60% of Americans are using social media to interact with companies and businesses online and that nearly two-thirds of businesses are establishing their presence on social networks.

Social media marketing is a new kind of beast that many do not yet understand how to harness it’s power. Most people are tired and distrustful of the old world marketing tactics. Using social networking for your business is a relational type of marketing where you can gain consumers by gaining their trust and providing them with a sense of knowing who you are or what type of company you are rather than just by your service or product.

Setting up social network profiles, updating and maintaining them is a time consuming process. It not only takes knowledge of the many different types of sites that are available but you must also know how to use them (correctly) which also requires that you understand what benefits you will achieve from using a particular site or network. Expertise and knowledge at using social media sites for marketing takes A LOT of time. But the payoff can be well worth the effort.

An internet marketing virtual assistant can be a huge help in this area. Internet Marketing Assistants have specific expertise and training in using all the most popular and relevant social media and networking sites for business. Many also use these for promoting their own business as well. Here is a short list of what an internet marketing virtual assistant can help you with:

• Set up and maintain social networking profiles such as Facebook, MySpace, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn
• Assist with building Twitter profile, locate people to follow and follow back
• Track blogs to relevant your business
• Post videos and track view statistics
• Track and report on your web analytics
• Conduct Search Engine keyword research
• Submit your website or blog to directories
• Article and press release submission
• Track your Google Alerts
• Format and publish blog posts, approve comments and assist with blog maintenance

And that’s just the short list. If you think you might like to talk further about how an internet marketing virtual assistant can help you get it all done without going crazy, shoot us an email or contact us for a free consultation. We love doing this stuff.

Image by against the tide via Flickr

While twittering today, I clicked through on a link to where I could download a free version of Seth Godin’s latest and greatest book, “Tribes.” In his blog Seth writes that he originally set out to write a book leadership but it ended up being a marketing book. He describes the basic premise as, “the next frontier of marketing is in leading groups of people who are working together to get somewhere.”

It’s a concept that’s been around since the beginning of time. Using the web to create your tribe with a purpose and a goal is much easier now with Web 2.0. Networks like Twitter and Facebook are prime examples of how this is taking place. It’s just a matter of identifying who the leader is or becoming the leader yourself. Twitter is based on who’s following who, but in reality, there are leaders embedded into that whole premise. Inevitably and not surprisingly, there are those within each industry who simply must be followed if you want to know the very latest of what they are saying and doing.

Which will you be– are you a leader or a follower? How will you build your tribe to get your message out and your goals accomplished?