Many of our clients migrate to Marketo from other marketing automation platforms and want to understand the differences between our email performance and their previous provider.
I have been working with one such client who sends a large bi-weekly newsletter. While the send, delivered and opens rates are on par, the clicked rates had some discrepancies.
Here are some things to consider when embarking on your own comparison:
- Marketo’s Clicked column means people who have clicked one or more links in the email. Be sure the competitor is talking the same language in any type of Click metrics.
- Check the math – in doing number crunching between reports, we discovered that the other provider uses different dividing metrics in their calculations. Marketo uses (Unique) Clicked/Delivered to report on Clicked %. You can’t rely on a pure side-by-side comparison of the reports, you need to dig in and crunch the numbers yourself.
- View as Webpage link in an email is not a metric that is counted in the Marketo Clicked column (Note: if a person then clicks a CTA link on that view as webpage, it will be counted in the clicked column*) Marketo doesn’t report on view as webpage links at all – and I’d argue that if we did, this type of “click” should be counted as an open, not a click. Read more about view as webpage here: http://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Understanding+Anonymous+Activity+and+Leads
- Delivered size and content varies with each send which is the ultimate driver for your clicked reporting. A true apple to apple comparison on a specific email’s performance can only happen by running an A/B test between platforms. Even then, there are going to be differences based on the technology.
To fully understand the implications of View as Webpage for this target audience, we designed 3 test scenarios to perform within Marketo with the next few newsletter sends. These are:
- Create a landing page with the same newsletter content on the page as if it were the view as webpage. Replace the {{system.viewAsWebpageLink}} with text and a normal href to treat this like any other link in the email
- Move the {{system.viewAsWebpageLink}} reference lower in the email so that it is not as prominent of a call to action at the top of the Newsletter
- Remove the {{system.viewAsWebpageLink}} offer all together to see if that drives more actionable clicks
*Special thanks to Susan Sauter for helping to verify the CTA clicks on view as a webpage.
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