B2B enewsletters are a great way to promote your company and website, by periodically sending valuable information to your customers and potential customers. Valuable information will help you provide good customer support and keep your products and brand top-of-mind. There are two important parts to measuring the effectiveness of your B2B enewsletters: who your audience is, and what they’re reading and looking at within your enewsletter.
Audience
Hopefully you’re only sending your enewsletter to people who have requested that information be sent to them (current customers are usually safe). This is termed opt-in. Whether they have or not, you need to make sure there is always a link in your enewsletter for people to unsubscribe or you may be accused of sending out spam email (which can have legal repercussions). If you require your audience to confirm their request to be added to your email list, that is termed double opt-in. How much of your audience falls into these two categories is especially important if you have outside sponsorships or advertisers so they know that your readers really want to get your message. This is also important if you’re looking for an outside enewsletter to advertise in.
Interaction
Now that you have your enewsletter written and sent, how many people are actually looking at it? What are people reading and how do I tell if it is sending any traffic to my website? There are three basic stats to be aware of: number sent (or released), number of opens, and number of clicks. Number of sent/released will show you how many people the enewsletter is going out to (sometimes referred to as the circulation). Number of opens is typically measured by putting a small invisible image within the enewsletter (this is often done automatically by the enewsletter vendor), which triggers a count to a server. This should only be used for a general idea of how many times the enewsletter has been read, because this count is not triggered if a person’s email is not downloading images (either because they have it set to do it, or for some programs the reader has to click a button to request the images). If a reader does have images turned on, this can also be triggered if they happen to click on the email while going through their inbox. Number of clicks is where all the action is. The reader actually had to click on a link (and your vendor should be able to tell you what they clicked on). For links to your site a good web analytics program should be able to track these coming in from your enewsletter.
Next we’ll dive into more detail about the content you should consider for your enewsletters.
Technorati Tags: enewsletters, B2B enewsletters, permission marketing, B2B permission marketing, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting
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I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Matt Hanson
Matt,
Thanks for reading and thanks for your comment! I really appreciate it and hope I can continue to provide information you find valuable.
Thanks again!
Sarah
I was thinking about this comment “Now that you have your enewsletter written and sent, how many people are actually looking at it?”. I understand that the goal is for interaction between newsletter and customers, but simply sending the email, even if there is no interaction, can have benefits. Being “Top of Mind” is an enviable position for low involvement products in markets that lack physical differentiation outside of the brand name. The title for e newsletters is still shown by those when they open their email, even if the newsletter is deleted immediately. Granted, how many people are going to sign up for an e newsletter for toothpaste, soda, or candy, but for that segment of the population that does, or if a company can pull it off and get a large amount of customers on an e newsletter, I think that simply sending the email would have benefits without interaction.
Hi Malcolm,
Obviously there is some benefit to just sending the enewsletter out. However, with only so many hours in a day, it is nice to know what marketing efforts are effective to concentrate your efforts. If you can’t tell how many visits to your website, and how many sales you’re getting from your enewsletter, how do you know how important it is to your business?
I do also think you get a bit of ‘top of mind’ just from having your enewsletter in an inbox. But there’s also a negative feeling for what readers consider ’spam’. If they’re getting your enewsletter and instantly deleting it, you may need to consider what content you’re sending and whether it’s valuable for your readers.
Thanks for your comment and for reading!
-Sarah
Hi your report above is very useful. I work at a successful B2B news publisher with a registered user base of 30,000 industry professionals who receive a daily enewsletter from us with 20-30 fresh news stories every day: each with a headline and also link to our news website. Advertising is healthy (given the downturn!) but I need to start measuring interaction. Any idea where I can get a rough idea as to what to be aiming for for the following stats:
*** % of 30,000 daily emails delivered to registered users that are opened each day/week/month
***number of links clicked on each day/ week/ month fro the daily enewsletter
general page impression stats etc are healthy and we constantly focus on quality of daily news and also pay 12 full time journalists BUT I have no idea what a yardstick would be for the above.
my contact is peter@c21media.net
Hi Peter,
I’m glad you found this post useful. I’ll see what I can dig up for the B2B market for statistics regarding interaction. I know I have some stats but it’s been awhile since I looked at them and I don’t remember them offhand. I’ll contact you via your email.
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah
Here’s some of the info I shared with Peter:
There’s not a lot of current data on open rates for b2b, but I think the best report may be MailerMailer’s which has open and CTR by industry – http://www.mailermailer.com/metrics/
The following links may also be helpful:
an email marketing benchmark guide at Marketing Sherpa. The cost was approx. $250 but it had b2b and b2c stats broken out separately:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/index.html
E Publishing Trends and Metrics – http://www.snaponline.org/public/articles/index.cfm?cat=144 (costs about $200)
http://www.clickz.com/experts/ (lots of info about anything digital media)
http://email.exacttarget.com/ (newsletter vendor – check webinars or white papers)
http://www.btobonline.com/ (b2b publishing)
http://www.pubexec.com/ (publishing)
http://www.marketingprofs.com/ (marketing)
http://www.audiencedevelopment.com/home (publishing/audience development, b2b and consumer)
http://directmag.com/ (direct marketing b2b and consumer)
http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/ (marketing b2b and consumer)