REthink Wine Blog

With respect to measuring the effectiveness of email campaigns, many wineries are preoccupied today with one metric: “open rates”. This figure represents the number of people that actually opened their email which illustrates the “effectiveness” of the email campaign. This begs the question: What did they do after they opened the email?

In working with our winery partners to grow their direct sales each month, one of the many tools that wineries have at their disposal is our proprietary “email blast tool”. This tool helps wineries communicate to segments of their customer database on a monthly basis. For those emails that “bounce”, or are returned to sender for various reasons, our email blast tool even helps to maintain good “email address hygiene”. Once the email template has been created and sent, our Client Development team helps each winery break down the data points associated with the campaign based on the following criteria:

1. Campaign Description
2. Customer Segmentation
3. # of emails sent
4. Purchase Trigger
5. Conversion to visitor
6. Conversion to Contact
7. Conversion to Customer/Order
8. Total # Orders
9. 4-Day Sales Total
10. Avg. $ per Order

For historical reference, it is important to track a general description of the campaign for future ranking purposes. Specifically, it is important to track the segment of your database that you are targeting (i.e. All Club Members), the # of recipients in this segment, and finally, the intended “trigger” which will stimulate the website visitor to initiate the purchase. While there are many ways to “incentivize” the wine consumer, shipping discounts will certainly allow you to eliminate a huge barrier to purchase while continuing to support price points. Outside of a rewards program for your cub members or top customers, product discounts should be limited to driving volume (i.e. 15% discount on purchase of 6 bottles or more). For a long term brand strategy, it is very important that wineries DO NOT condition their customers to seek out their email and website offers solely as a destination for discounted wines. This will keep your distributors happy and maker it possible in the future to raise your price points.
Getting back to my opening statement, there are MORE important things to measure than “open rates” in order to properly measure the effectiveness of a particular email campaign. The conversion of email recipients to website visitors should be the MOST important metric. To say that your mailing list opened and read your email is one thing, but measuring how many of them were driven toward your call to action is quite another. From this point, website components such as product merchandising and streamlining of the purchase path can be measured through our web analytics tool - Google Analytics. By developing “microsites” to funnel traffic to a particular page on your website, you can be sure to eliminate any visitor data that may sneak into your analysis. Ultimately, the # of customer orders and avg. $ per order will provide concrete data on the effectiveness of an email campaign.

This entry was posted by Dan Chapin on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.