Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Rooted Elm | Email Marketing https://rootedelm.com Rooted in created outstanding email marketing programs Sun, 30 Apr 2023 02:08:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.13 https://rootedelm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/cropped-Rooted_Elm_2c-32x32.jpg Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Rooted Elm | Email Marketing https://rootedelm.com 32 32 Tell a Visual Story https://rootedelm.com/blog/tell-a-visual-story Fri, 18 Nov 2016 02:06:59 +0000 http://rootedelm.com/?p=3672

A visual image can tell a greater tale than looking at a variety of spreadsheets or paragraphs of text. In the case of email marketing, using a dashboard is a good way to notice trends of key performance indicators (KPI’s) such as subscriber growth, engagement and conversion. Whether it’s growth or decline, pulling your data into a visual can save time in digging for answers or finding a quick solution.

Klipfolio is our data visualization vendor of choice. They have made it easy for our clients to evaluate their email marketing program using Excel-like formulas. We’ve created many custom visualization Klips (as shown to the right and below) as well as used one of their pre-built visualization Klips for many of the integrated data sources they have available.

 

Subscriber Growth image

Pulling the data into a dashboard can be automated or done manually.  Klipfolio, like many dashboard software providers, has a multitude of integration capabilities like the two shown below for Campaign Monitor and Google Analytics. Using SFTP, we’re able to import an automated report from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. However there are times when a manual import of a data source must take place to complete the story. Refreshing the dashboard depends on the integration of the data source. Each dashboard is interactive, allowing you to hover over for greater detail, drill down or access the raw data source for more insight. Sharing with your fellow team members is easy with a link or PDF or image downloads.

The downfall of a dashboard is that you risk becoming complacent. If you get used to the history, then you may not explore the full story. A dashboard is more than a reporting tool to monitor performance. By adding valuable KPI’s from a single data source or multiple sources, you can build the visualization Klips needed to build a stronger and better email marketing program.

To answer questions or explore dashboard capabilities for your email marketing program, please reach out to Lisa@rootedelm.com.

]]> A Sweet Story on Subscriber Engagement https://rootedelm.com/blog/a-sweet-story-on-subscriber-engagement Tue, 22 Dec 2015 13:46:29 +0000 http://rootedelm.com/?p=2398 A&W Restaurants ® has been an American icon since 1919 serving up frosty Root Beer Floats, infamous Coney Dogs and more. This original post from just over a year ago examines their subscriber engagement metrics for their email marketing program over time.

Understand Subscriber Engagement:

When A&W began their email marketing program,they wanted to take a deep dive into their subscriber engagement. Subscribers receive a monthly coupon or special offer along with a free Root Beer Float during their birthday month. Almost always, the monthly campaign includes an intriguing video to support.

RootedELM, A&W and Team Cornett, their agency of record, analyze their email marketing program through a metrics dashboard using Klipfolio. A trend line incorporating data displays an average open rate of 32% and a unique click-through rate of 6%. These metrics may sound pretty good compared to industry standards, however, when broken down by year we found a different story – a decline.  More importantly, although we change content each month, acquire and churn subscribers, the average click-to-open rate (CTOR), or sometimes referred to as the “effective rate,” basically remained the same at 18%.

CTOR: unique clicks ÷ unique opens × 100

To identify how many subscribers were unengaged, we ran a report in their Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) account. Our criteria was the subscriber had to have received a minimum of three emails over the past 90 days, but did not open or click once. This gave us about 44% of our audience — YIKES!

Now let me step back a bit. A&W ONLY obtains subscribers that have opted-in on their website to join the Mug Club and, on average, experience active subscriber growth of 4% each month. So, you can see why this number was a little shocking to us.

Time for a study:

During one month, the unengaged audience received the same monthly Mug Club email as the engaged audience, however each had a unique tracking and analytic code added to study their behavior.  We use Litmus for this.

Here’s what we found in SFMC – the engaged audience had a unique open rate of 42% and 6% unique click-through rate and the unengaged audience — a whopping 6% open rate and 1% unique click-through.  What a difference.

However, when we went into Litmus their engagement seemed very similar. As shown in the chart below, of the 42% engaged audience that opened the email, 67% spent greater than eight seconds reading the campaign. The majority used a mobile device. The unengaged audience had 72% (of the 6% that opened the campaign) spend greater than eight seconds reading. Even more interesting, we repeated this segmentation & send process over the next three months and found similar results.

What does this tell us?

Those that open the monthly Mug Club email spend time reading, but getting them to convert is a challenge. We can do better with the call-to-action and content. This outcome is also reflective where the average CTOR has remained at 18% for all three years.

Where to go from here?

A&W is taking an active approach to listening to their audience through engagement metrics as well as online surveys to determine interest. As a team, we’re working on an updated plan to nudge those unengaged back to life.


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