Every (marketing) journey starts with a single data point

Oh, the journeys that data can take you on!

I was reviewing monthly reports last week when a data point caught my eye. Like many organizations, email is a key component of our channel mix - newsletters, invites to webinars, product, and company announcements are all delivered via email (as well as other channels). The thing that caught my eye was a report on the open and click-through rates for one of our monthly communications. The open rates weren't very strong, but the click-through rates were off the charts. "Why," I wondered, "and what - if anything - should we do about that?"

For many marketing teams, I think the typical answer would be: 1) our content is great, but 2) we are not standing out in a crowded inbox. Certainly, if the click-throughs are high (and these were 5x higher than our industry standard), then yes - the content is valuable to our audience, so stay the course there. But that crowded inbox problem begged a lot of questions. Is our email being flagged as spam? And of course, the answer is "yes", at least some of the time, for some people. Should we work on more compelling subject lines? Maybe, but our compelling copy suggests that content isn't our biggest challenge.

Maybe trying to optimize open rates isn't the right answer. So my questions took a different tack - What's the purpose of this email? What do we expect it to do for us? Brand awareness? Lead generation? Brand identity? In this case, the email was primarily a tool to present our brand identity - things we do that are uniquely us and give value to our market. Maybe we should shift our strategy on that type of content from broadcast to engagement - social media, specifically.

We don't want to abandon our loyal email subscribers, so I'm not proposing a true lift-and-shift here. More like using the content in two different channels and evaluating the results. But of course, our email and social systems use different data architectures and metrics, so direct comparisons will take a bit of science and a bit of magic.

I find that a lot of data-driven marketing is like this. You have to spend time peeling back layers to understand the problem. You often have to jump from one data puddle to another. And you have to be able to experiment and pivot if the results don't meet your needs.

These are some of the true joys of a 21st-century marketer!