Zack Aab, Manager of Email Deliverability at HealthLink Dimensions, and Nathan Lenyszyn, Vice President of Marketing, sat down on July 25th to discuss why it’s important to understand the goal of your email marketing campaign, ensuring that you accurately measure its success beyond open and click data. These men’s years of experience in this field make them quite valuable at HealthLink Dimensions, and they wished to share the expertise this company is so proud of with fellow healthcare marketers through this webinar.
Open and Click Data: “Measuring Users in Probability of Success”
With bot opens being so prevalent today, can you still trust your open data? Aab’s short answer was no – “The open is not related to the success of the email,” he said. Continue to track it but understand what it really means. This could be through increasing your confidence in if a given open is made by a computer or a real person.
At HealthLink Dimensions, opens and clicks are filtered by the time they are opened and the IP address, which helps to weed out the bots. Nonetheless, Zack Aab admitted that an “element of human judgement” is necessary here.
First Steps to Measuring Meaningful Campaign Effectiveness
Don’t know where to start? Nathan Lenyszyn and Zack Aab shared some ideas on how to start measuring success in your email campaigns.
“You don’t know what the user is interested in until you ask them,” Aab said. Let them tell you what’s on their mind so you can see what to effectively cater your content towards!
Use your primary tools of opens and clicks as mere probabilities – this will help you better understand what data your users are actually giving you.
Receiving Internet Service Providers (RISPs) like Yahoo and Office365 are something to consider here. Look at the metrics RISPs use and see things from their perspective. What do they think of you as a sender? How can you improve upon that perception?
During this webinar, Zack Aab said, “Deliverability is not about tricking your way into the inbox. It’s about getting through the spam filters.” It’s not a win if you simply go around the spam filters. You want RISPs to clearly recognize that your content should never be filed away as spam.
Lenyszyn’s Two Big Takeaways
1. Know your audience.
“The more you know about your audience, the better,” Lenyszyn said. Aab confirmed and replied, “It’s all about relevance and interest.” Following that logic, you’ll be more successful with customers who are already interested because you know more about that audience!
2. Send appropriately relevant messages to that audience.
Inboxes are not billboards! Save that for the display ads that can stick in a consumer’s mind to remember later. Certain messages are good for email while others should be saved for different channels. Lenyszyn compared it to not “forcing the square peg through the round hole.”
What Does the Future Look Like?
This upcoming fall, Apple’s privacy update to Safari will strip it of UTMs, which are Urchin Tracking Modules from links shared through Messages and Mail. The customer was being left out of the negotiation over their own data, the discussion only happening being between a marketer and website operator. “I think that we’re going to see more corporate enforcement, as well as more legislative enforcement, of users being aware and being able to decide what of their personal data is actually up for trade,” Zack Aab said. Because these UTMs will not be around much longer, it is even more imperative to understand the limitations of open and click data.
You may still be left with lingering questions about the email marketing process. To listen to Aab and Lenyszyn’s full conversation, you can view the webinar here.