Analyser et Optimiser vos Campagnes d’Acquisition Emailing
Oct 26th
Annonceurs, comment analyser vos Campagnes d’Acquisition Emailing et Améliorer votre Retour sur Investissement ?
Voici 3 étapes d’analyses complémentaires qui vous permettront de de tirer les bonnes conclusions, de déterminer l’origine exacte des résultats, et de finalement réaliser les tests et actions correctives nécessaires pour une Optimisation des Performances de vos envois.
1* Résultats Bruts :
Sur une campagne de Marketing Direct, l’objectif le plus important correspond au Retour sur Investissement, c’est à dire la Rentabilité de l’opération, qui permettra de déterminer si celle-ci peut être renouvellée ou non dans le futur. Selon les Annonceurs, les problématiques de rentabilité se calculent en fonction d’indicateurs pouvant correspondre au Coût d’acquisition client, au % du CA ou de la marge brutte générée, ou au Coût par Prospect Qualifié. Dans tous les cas, le calcul de la rentabilité globale est très simple et reste le même : Coût / Résultat
Cette information correspond au Retour sur Investissement de l’Opération mais ne permet en aucun cas une Analyse et une Explication du résultat permettant de déterminer les causes d’un échec, ou les axes d’amélioration des performances. Le Taux de Clic global (Clicks / Email Sent) donne une première indication de la réactivité mais ne permet pas de distinguer Taux d’Ouverture et Taux de Réactivité. Un même chiffre pouvant être obtenu avec des Metrics radicalement opposés.
Cette étape d’analyse correspond à une Analyse basique, dont se contentent beaucoup d’annonceurs, en particulier s’il s’agit d’une campagne à la performance, le ROI étant garanti. Pour aller plus loin dans l’analyse, l’annonceur doit disposer d’outils et de statistiques “externes” permettant de mesurer les différentes étapes de conversion menant au résultat.
Exemple : L’Annonceur X a un objectif de 25% de Coût / Chiffre d’Affaires qu’il ne peut pas dépasser (Panier moyen à 50€, Cout max. commande à 12.5€). L’annonceur X réalise une campagne Emailing sur 1 million d’adresses non ciblées pour 10.000€ (CPM 10€) et génère 27.500€ de Chiffres d’Affaires ( 500 commandes).
=> La campagne n’est pas rentable et ce niveau d’analyse “macro” ne permet pas de tirer d’observation sur l’origine du problème
2* Les Etapes de Conversion : Analyse Verticale
Du Nombre d’Emails Envoyés jusqu’au Chiffre d’Affaires final généré par votre campagne, l’analyse des différentes étapes de conversion ou d’abandon permet d’Identifier l’origine des plus grosses pertes de performance afin de les Optimiser. L’indicateur de Performance Global “Coût/Résultat” se décompose en autant de formules que la campagne comprend d’étapes de conversion. Le “Coût” ayant été determiné dès le départ (CPM), le résultat final dépend exclusivement de ces différentes étapes : Résultat = Email envoyés * Taux D’ouverture * Taux de Clic * Taux de Conversion …
Egalement valable pour toute campagne marketing, la représentation en Entonoir de Conversion est la meilleure manière de visualiser ces différentes étapes et de comprendre l’impact d’un changement de l’un des Metrics.
Le diagramme ci-dessus correspondent au étapes de conversion de base d’une campagne Emailing :
- Taux d’ouverture (OR %) : Impressions / Email Sent
- Taux de Réactivité (CTR %) : Clicks / Impressions
- Taux de Conversion (CR %) : Orders ou Leads / Clicks
Le Taux d’Email Aboutis est une composante du Taux d’Ouverture qu’il faut surveiller si besoin (doit être >95%)Cette analyse par étape vous permet ainsi de connaître les différentes composantes du Résultat final et de calculer les Metrics Effectifs de la Campagnes , qui sont de bons indicateurs par rapport à la moyenne constaté dans votre secteur d’activté :
- eCPM “Open” : Effective cost per Mille Impressions = Cost / ( Impressions / 1000 ) = 91€ dans l’exemple
- eCPC : effective Cost Per Click = Budget / Nombre Clics = 0,88€ dans l’exemple *
- eCPO/L : effective Cost per Order / Lead = 100€ eCPO dans l’exemple
* Le eCPC d’un campagne de Rachat de Crédits peut être >2€ alors qu’il sera <0,15€ sur du jeu concoursUne fois les étapes à Optimiser identifiées, vous pourrez effectuer différents tests A/B pour mesurer l’impact de vos modifications sur les performances.
Ce deuxième niveau d’analyse, dont les données ne sont déjà pas toujours facile à obtenir (à moins d’utiliser un outil de tracking central à toutes vos campagnes) reste toutefois relativement limité en terme d’analyse et d’optimisation. En effet, il ne s’agit que de Moyennes, qui peuvent cacher d’énomres disparités selon les différents segments d’utilisateurs.
3* Segments vs. Moyennes : Analyse Horizontale
Les moyennes sont de très bons indicateurs de performance et de suivi mais ne permettent en aucun cas d’effectuer des analyses fines permettant de réaliser le tunning nécessaire à l’amélioration des performances d’une action publicitaire.
La régle des 20/80 en est un parfait exemple où 80% du résultat est réalisé par 20% de l’investissement. Sans segmentation, il est impossible de voir que 80% du volume acheté ne performe pas. Dans la pratique, il est très fréquent que dans une Campagne Emailing, une partie importante des adresses soit totalement inactive et ne génère aucun résultat.
Prenons l’exemple concret d’un problème de délivrabilité sur les adresses @hotmail.fr, représentant 30% d’une liste email utilisée ayant généré 10% de Taux d’Ouverture Moyen. Sans analyser les statistiques par Segments “nom de domaine”, il n’est pas possible de savoir que 30% des adresses (=30% du Budget) n’a généré aucun résultat. A l’opposé, une fois identifié, il est possible de travailler sur le problème en effectuant des tests de délivrabilité préalables, d’exclure ce segment de la liste email (quitte à payer le CPM un peu plus cher), de re-negocier le CPM à la baisse, de faire une repasse supplémentaire…
Les différences de performances entre segments sont souvent très importantes. C’est évidemment le cas sur des critères socio-demographique selon du type de produit mais c’est beaucoup moins évident et tout aussi vrai sur des critères du type: Webmails, Récence, Ouvreurs / Non-Ouvreurs…
En conclusion, une analyse selon 2 dimensions, Verticale (Etapes de Conversion) et Horizontale (Segments) et le seul moyen d’obtenir des informations fiables et de bien comprendre le comportement de votre cible sur vos campagnes emailing, afin de maximiser votre ROI sur les futures campagnes.
Millions hidden under Transactionnal Emails
Jan 19th
Transactionnal, confirmation and notification Emails are totally under exploited by most of the marketers. A recent study released by JupiterResearch said that there were a 2,9 Billion $ of potential revenue in the US market coming from these automatically sent emails if they were done the proper way. Jupiter also forecasts that the average Online Buyer in the US will receive in 2012, 146 such emails, twice more than in 2007. Lastly, all senders interviewed for the survey agreed that this type of email have the Highest Open Rates of any type of message.
Some players have already understood the potential of such emails to generate Additional Sales, Brand Awarness and Advertisement revenue. The study says that 60% of the US web companies are already generating revenues from this channel (although 60% of them have limited or even no access to reports!). In Europe and especially in France, I won’t be amazed to see this number going down to 30%.
Remember that 100% of your clients or registrants wait for, receive, open and read these automatic emails sent after they’ve done a purchase or they’ve registered to your sweepstakes. This is the Most Qualified Audience you could get, and this for FREE! So why marketer tend to forget these high quality contacts ? Well, the “free” and the “automatic” may be one of the explanation:
** It is Free (in terms media cost), so it is “normal” if it doesn’t generate revenue. If you had to pay a placement in there, you would optimize it! As an advertiser, I’d be happy to pay a 20€ CPM for such a visibility!
** It often depends 100% on the Tech department, which has no revenue goals and no marketing instinct (some might)
** There are usually no easy to use Tool or Interface to manage this communication. This drives low visibility to the Marketing team and makes change a pain and A/B testing almost impossible
** It never stops: these emails are always going on, are send every seconds, depending on pre-defined rules. It is then hard to take the risk of change in order to optimize the system.
** It is hard to track, or at least it is different. Reports (if there are reports) are not as easy to look at as traditional email campaigns. This makes analysis and testing difficult
All these reasons, in addition to the corporate “routine” and organization make it very difficult to manage well this mutli-department channel (Marketing, Developpement, Client Services…). However, it is really worth doing it. If you are still not convinced, or your boss is not, here is a quick calculation of what kind of additional revenue this could bring. Let’s take the following hypothesis :
* e-commerce site, 2 million orders/year, AOV of 100€, 200 M€ annual sales
* 2 transactionnal Emails / Order, Open Rate of 60%.
You get already a have an amazing number : 2,400,000 Impressions of an extremely qualified communication where it is your job to display the best offer possible. If you do well, be sure that your customers will order again immediately.
Let’s take some more metrics :
* 20% Click Through Rate, 8% Conversion (high but only repeat buyers), 80€ AOV = 3,07 M€ additionnal sales
Maybe you think these metrics are high, but even an additionnal 1 Million € is worth managing well these emails!
Marketers, take a huge step back to analyze the exact process of all your automatic emails, invest time and ressources to set-up a great flexible tool to manage, track and optimize well this channel ! If you track it well and really generate an additional 1% to 3% of the overall sales, this could be your next career boost !
Also to read : The power struggle over transactional emails from Spencer Kollas
Tracking Marketing Campaigns Effectively
Dec 11th
As an Online Marketing Advertiser, who never had any tracking issue ? Nobody. Indeed, performance and cost tracking is not the simplest thing to implement for a e-commerce company. If your implementation is not well done it could quickly get to a terrible mess which will cost you a lot of time, energy and money. So if you click while reading the following keywords, this article is for you : monday reportings, discrepancies, duplicate sales, granular levels, different tools, cookies, mess…
Here are some tracking advice for e-commerce advertisers :
1- Use 1 Single Tool to track 100% of your activity
If you are using different source of information to consolidate your overall traffic activity, that’s not good. In order to accurately track your web traffic – coming from all sources – you need to use one single tool where you can get, for 100% of your traffic the following information :
Metrics : Sessions, Conversions (Registrations, Orders, Forms…), Conversion Rate, Order Value, Sales, New vs. Repeat
Dimensions : Channel groups, Channels, Vendors, Campaigns
With the Internal Information above, you would already have a good and accurate view of your website traffic activity (but so far you do not have cost information in here). But what are the solutions to get there ?
* Internal tool : From my point of view, developing an internal tracking tool is The Best Solution. However, this is not easy and will need a lot of engineering, experience and competencies on your side. In addition, you will still miss some information that you could get with Web Analytics tools. But do you really need so that much detail? Advantages would be that it will be Faster, more Flexible to adapt your own needs, you could develop your own Partner Tracking interface or Internal affiliate platform, you will be able to fire Third party Tracking Pixels on your confirmation page only when needed, and you will have No Discrepancies with your real sales. Then, it will be connected easily with your CRM which will help you doing ad’oc analysis regarding the quality of the customers you acquire and who they are.
* Site-Centric Web Analytics : Web analytics tools are extremely powerfull and will go very deep in the website analysis and merchandising (pages views, products, internal search engine…). Google Analytics is the most famous tool but you also have Omniture, Xiti, Coremetrics… and plenty of them. These solutions are incredibly seductive but are not that easy to implement well and will cost you money based on your website’s number of page views (could easyly be more than 50k€/year for a website with 2.5M unique visitor per month). What I felt most frustrating is that you cannot get the advantage mentioned above with your own tool (especially flexibility), it could be slower, and you will always have some discrepancies with your real data (a canceled order will not be deleted in the tool). In addition, you won’t be able to pass any personnal/customer information.
2- Differentiate Internal vs. External information
Now you have a clean, single, traffic reporting broken down by channels, vendors, campaigns with your Internal information (Sessions, Orders…), you will have to integrate the External information, like Cost, but also Impressions, Email sent…
Except for an internal affiliate program, or CPA partnerships based on your datas, cost data will always be external information. Here are some examples :
* Paid Search : the cost is based on Google Advertising platform depending on the numbers of Clicks and the Volume, with different prices depending on keyword, days… Maybe Google will charge you for 35.000 Clicks while you measure 28.000 Sessions ? It will not change anything on the invoice.
* Affiliate Platforms : this cost is based on the conversions (Share of sales, Cost per Order…) generated by the affiliates of each platform. However, the information they track will never be the exact same one as yours in your tools (even if you control the display of their tracking pixel). Even though you can cancel orders, the final invoicing will be based on their platform, which is external information.
* CPM Campaigns : this is a fix cost associated with a time frame, an external information based on the IO you signed or on the Volume of Impressions measured by your media partner. It may also include agency fees.
Here are some more examples of external/Internal Information:
- a Click is external while a visit, a visitor are internal
- Impressions are external Information while Page Views are internal
- Email Sent is an external information
All these external datas and metrics are KEY to measure Marketing Campaigns Performance and this important to try to integrate them in your internal tools. This is a tough part of the job and here are some solution to make it possible :
- Use Google API to get the cost, at the granular level you want (Campaigns, Adgroups, Keywords…)
- Manually enter Costs in your database for some vendors or campaigns
- Develop Data Feeds with your key Technical (email sender, adserver) and Marketing partners (Search, Shopbots…) back to your system to get Impressions, Email sent, Cost…
- Pay affiliates and CPA partners based on your own datas
If you manage to get all this, in a fast refreshing reporting, your whole team will gain plenty of time and will be able to analyze campaigns better and take the good decisions and actions way quicker.
3- Use External Campaign Management Tools
Even if you now have a Unique Reporting with External Information integrated, you won’t be able to get the same granular information as specialized campaign management tools, which have a lot of channel specific features. So don’t try to do everything internally.
* Search Marketing : This is the biggest thing within the Online Advertising Industry and there are plenty of tools out on the marketplace to manage Paid Search Campaigns and get feature like : keyword management, reportings, Bid Management, Cost integration… I am not expert with the tools names – although I’ve seen a lot – but here is some features I would love to get : Include Paid and Organic in the tool and Classify back Organic based on Paid search campaign organization, cross campaigns top keyword reports, Landing page split run at the Keyword level (for top keywords)
* Affiliate programs : While you may only track each affiliate programs with 2 or 3 links and you can’t access to any information about individual affiliates with your internal report, the affiliate platform give you the ability to track every single affiliates and creative. On the other hand you may not get interesting information like New vs. Repeat per Affiliate. Major platforms are : Commission Junction, Tradedoubler, Zanox, Affilinet…
* Display Advertising : If you are serious about this, do not give banners/URLs to each advertising partner. You will spend time preparing all the materials, have no global campaign visibility and no reactivity if you need to change. For many advertisers using an Advertiser Adserver is not very common (it is for agency, also because they make money on it). Although it may cost you up to 10% of your Media cost, you should gain this money back through campaign and creative optimization, time saving, knowledge transfer…
Here are some solution : DoubleClick, Mediaplex, Atlas, Bluestreak, + others
This is a lot of information but remember :
* Use 1 tool for your daily overall reports
* Different tools to manage campaigns and get cost information,
* Try to minimize discrepancies between the different tools
* Try to integrate as much external data as possible
Does Display Advertising Only Mean Low ROI ?
Nov 4th
Display Advertising is the perfect channel for branding campaigns. A targetted media plan focused on impactant placements, combined with interactive rich media ads and creative scenario will really have an impact on your brand, very likely way cheaper than a traditionnal offline advertising channels. I would love to manage some of these branding campaigns some days, in this advertising world were each click cost a conversion and where the goal is to maximize the unique users within the target audience. Get back to real world though!
Indeed, for those like us who need to get immediate Money Back from their Media Investment, it is another story and Display Advertising becomes one of the most difficult channel to break even. Display is different to Search Marketing in at least three key points which make difficult beeing profitable :
- you have to Push your Ads to the Users, whom doesn’t expect it right now
- you are competing with Advertisers from Different Industries with different goals, strategy, budget and seasonality
- Display Advertising is a Negotiation Channel, which means you pay a different price than other advertisers. Being big is a clearly an asset to enter the channel.
Display is a also a very specific and complex channel, with specific tools and technologies, lots of different sites, placements, audience, networks, performance shifts depending on publisher inventory, high creative fatigue and not always a good visibility. This means the performance delta between a good and bad campaign could have a factor of x100 while it is maybe x10 in email and x5 in search. In other words a Display Campaign could really bomb !
As a result, it becomes a very difficult channel for low to mid-size advertisers for profitable direct marketing campaigns because of high entry media price and little experience on optimizing campaigns.
So why should I try it, I am happy doing only Adwords ?
Why ? because Display – like Emailing – is scalable and will create and boost the demand for your product and brand while search only “answers”. In addition, impulsive buy products often have very little search terms and query volume. Display will also drive indirect revenue into other channels, especially brand channels (DirectTyping, Organic and Paid Serach brand keywords) that you will maybe not take into account in your cost calculation as tracking is not that easy and differs from one tool to another.
Fortunatelly, there are plenty of advertisers making immediate money through this channel ! But this depends on the industry and product. Here are some industries which may perform well on this channel from a Direct Marketing standpoint : Magazines, Betting, Dating, DVD rental, Free products and Samples, Sweepstakes… On the other hand, high-tech e-commerce websites (and generally speaking low gross margin products) would never be able to do Display Advertising with immediate profitability, although on a P&L point of view it’ll work as the Branding they’ve done through these campaigns helped them getting free qualified direct traffic.
When I was working for Cdiscount.com, a french e-commerce leader with 5M clients, we started investing massivelly in Display while keeping tough ROI goals. Although we’ve been having some extremelly good post-click performances and cost per session, we would never make immediate profit (gross margin – advertising cost) as it could be the case in search, but the overall P&L was still good and the awarness ad-hoc indicators were up, ending up with brand traffic regular growth.
At Powerspace, we believe we can do great on Display Advertising for our Direct Marketing clients, providing them at fix cost new customers coming from fresh advertising placements on qualitative sites, which is very unusual on a performance based environment. Here are our assets to succeed as an agency where Advertisers may not :
** We have great experience of what works and what doesn’t
** We buy a lot of volume, at good price, from Run Of Network inventory to targeted placements
** We use the right tools to serve, optimize, and test ads
** We optimize creatives based on our Best Practices and test results
** We advice our clients on the offer and landing pages
So if you think you have the right offer and you want to do big volume in the French market, feel free to contact us : http://powerspace.com