The campaign results are in. What now?

Dear Pressed,

If the '94 Family Reunion Picnic is any indication, Lars isn't worth the time (or the bail money, dang it). There are far more meaningful things going on in your response section, and spending just a few minutes with your results is an important part of staying in touch with your audience. Plus, with a round of interface changes to the response section coming out later this month, there's no better time to focus on that section of your account. So, without further ado, here are a few tips for putting your campaign results to work...

Look at those bounces.
After your campaign is finished sending, it's awfully tempting to skip over the bounces and head straight to the juicy numbers, like who opened and clicked. But it's important to give your bounce list the once-over. Why's that? It lets you find addresses that have failed to deliver because of an obvious typo. It's not uncommon to spot bounces like joe@hotmail.co or ssarah@sarahsflowers.com - clearly good addresses that have just fallen prey to a typo somewhere along the line. If you fix 'em and bundle 'em up in their own audience group, you can easily resend to the corrected addresses.

Oh, and speaking of resending, one tip you *won't* find here is resending to your bounces (that aren't typos). As a part of the overall delivery process, Emma's servers are already retrying soft bounces for you, up to four times over 24 hours (which is why you'll occasionally see 'emails in progress').

Do the numbers (but don't overdo them).
If you're like most of us, you're probably not using your response numbers to construct elaborate formulas and metrics. Algorithm? Chi-Square? Um, those are characters from Harry Potter, right? Fortunately, there's a quick and simple way to do a little number breakdown. Use our campaign compare feature to see how your most recent results stack up against your results from last month or last year. It'll just take a few minutes, and you'll even have a handy Excel file that averages and summarizes the campaigns side by side.

Oh, and while we're chatting numbers, keep in mind that they're not the ultimate measure of what's successful in the wide world of email marketing. More than just stats, those numbers are your audience talking back to you (in that figurative, un-creepy way), so think of understanding your email responses as just one more way of learning about your subscribers.

-> More about numbers? This article from the Ask Emma archive is chock full of insight on interpreting your results and, yes, gives some benchmark averages, too.

Follow up.
When people click on campaign links, they're telling you they're interested enough in what you've mentioned to spend time finding out more. Armed with that information, make plans to send a smaller follow-up campaign to the folks who are most likely to read and respond. For example, you might send a 10%-off coupon just to the folks who clicked on your latest product but didn't buy it. Or you could follow up with a reminder email to anyone who clicked to find out more about your upcoming seminar.

Best of all, your account makes the process quick and easy. Just create a search to find people who've opened or clicked a specific link in a campaign, right from the response section, and send to it later. You'll find the how-to here.

Or, you can use our trigger feature to set a follow-up campaign to send automatically when anyone clicks a particular link in a previously sent or scheduled campaign.

Think about next time.
As you're analyzing numbers and follow-up efforts, you may find that you get your best ideas about next time when you're breaking down the results from this time. Got a hunch that a shorter subject line might have nudged those open rates up an extra few percentage points? Jot it down now and test your theory later. In this case, you might split up your audience to send two versions of the campaign, each with a different subject line, and compare the results later to see what's more likely to get your audience's attention.

-> TIP: For now, you'll need to manually split up an audience group by copying half of the master group members to Group A and the other half to Group B. But on our list of future features is the ability to set two subject lines and have Emma automatically divide your list and compare your results.

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Hope these ideas spark a few of your own - if they do, share 'em with us, won't you?

Cheers,
Emma