Email Performance for Email Resends

[Anonymous]

Hi all - Multi-part question that I'm having some trouble finding answers to. I tried searching the discussions, but couldn't find anything specific to what I'm looking for.

The first part of the question is: What is the best practice for looking at email performance on re-sends of emails (for example, re-sending an email one week later to everyone that didn't open the initial email)? Should this be lumped in with the initial send? Or are these tagged differently for almost a second set of benchmarks?

My second part of the question is: If they should be lumped together in a single statistic, what is the best way to handle this?

Due to rapidly shifting timeframes in our business, I tend to create a new smart campaign for the re-send of emails. However, this results in the numbers of emails sent going way up, and also significantly dragging down the open rate, as the resend never gets near as solid performance. Would setting everything up in a singular smart campaign avoid this (i.e. Send Email A, Wait 1 Week, Send Email A if not opened)?

My final thought on a potential solution would be to clone the emails we want to resend, and add "_Resend" to the end of the name. That way, when I go to run analytics on our email performance, I can easily export to excel and filter out all of the _Resend emails to compare the numbers separately, and develop a second set of benchmarks as I mentioned above.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, as I'm worried I'm looking at skewed numbers when trying to set benchmarks for our business.

Hopefully I explained this semi-clearly... Let me know if there are any questions.

Thanks,
Marcus

[Anonymous]

In the email performance report you can filter by date in the smartlist settings. This allows you to segment response to an asset by date. I often do what you are thinking and clone asstets to give me simpler reporting...Key thing though is to start looking at program statuses as your metrics vs. metrics around opens & clicks...Real engagment is buyers interacting with you content that is on the web.

[Anonymous]

Mark - Thanks for the quick response.

I do use date filters on some level today (when looking at specific emails), but every so often we take a step back, do a macro-level pull of results for our email performance over the past X months, and check our progress compared to our numbers last time we pulled them. When I do this, emails sent out a week apart don't do me any good to use a date filter as they all get lumped in together.

And I agree that program progression is more important than specific email numbers, but I still think it's valuable to compare how we're performing vs. top performers on email performance, and identifying ways that we can improve those numbers. At this point I'm just worried the numbers I'm trying to compare are skewed noticeably downward when I look at them due to these resends, and our actual email performance is much better than what is being shown.

[Anonymous]

All true. I would look at using the engagment score of an asset that marketo calculates on the back-end for compairing asset to each other...

[Anonymous]

I know it has been some time since this discussion thread took place, but we're grappling with this as well.  For example, we have an upcoming event for which we've been doing some email marketing.  The program has been set-up with progression statuses: Outbound, Opens Email, Clicks Link in Email, and Unsubscribes.  Each of these being their own campaigns.  However, under the Outbound campaign we'll send the email out multiple times (ie send intial email, wait 1 week, send out email again to those who's program status is not Registered, and so on).  Our insides sales team is also following up with phone calls to those that have a program status of Email Opened of Click Email, yet, didn't register.  However, it seems the reports default settings are to lump all the results together at the Outbound campaign level instead of allowing us to see the resuls of each run of the email separately, which is how we want to see it.

Should we not be setting up our programs the way we have been?  Is it better to have a campaign for each send of the email?  Or is this an issue of preference?  Marcus, what did you end up doing?

[Anonymous]

For what you are talking about doing I would not programatically link your Marketo Program to a Salesforce campaign. I sugest you take the additonal time to use indevidual smart campaigns to watch for engagment or sales acceptance and have flow-steps that change progression status and campaign status independantly. There will be some redundancy here but it will give you the flexibility to create child campaigns in salesforce that map to the broader program...

[Anonymous]

I apologize for the confusion.  I should have said smart campaign instead of campaign (that's what I get for not wanting to type it all out).  We're not linking our Marketo Program to a Salesforce campaign.  We pull Marketo reports that we send to the sales team, and that's how they know who to call - maybe not the most elegant way to do it, but that's what we've been doing.  We've only been using Marketo since January of this year, so we're still learning the best ways to do things.