The most important success factors in e-mail marketing

Compared to most other tools, email offers a variety of success measurement options. Nevertheless, one third of the companies surveyed in this study (34 percent) do not collect any KPIs at all when measuring the success of email tracking. The most commonly collected success factors are open rate (41 percent) and click-through rate (39 percent) - followed by delivery rate (26 percent), conversion rate (24 percent) and unsubscribe rate (22 percent). Click-through rate (18 percent) and bounce rate (15 percent) are taken into account less frequently. "It is really surprising that the opening rate, as the fuzziest key figure, has the highest observation rate here," says André Görmer (Mapp Digital), Chairman of the Email Focus Group at the BVDW. The open rate is still seen as the most important reference KPI. "Yet the click rate, for example, provides much clearer insights for evaluating the success of email communication," explains Görmer. However, the insights are rarely used for campaign optimization: More than half of the respondents (52 percent) state that decisions regarding the implementation of email marketing campaigns in their companies are not made on the basis of KPI-based reporting.Unchanged high importance in the media mixEmail is stronger than its reputation: it is perceived positively by marketing decision-makers to an above-average degree. While only 42 percent of all respondents agree with the statement that e-mail campaigns still have the same significance in the media mix as they did two years ago, the figure for marketing decision-makers is significantly higher at 69 percent. "Those who use e-mail professionally in dialog marketing appreciate its quality and potential - unfortunately, this reputation has not yet been established on a broad scale," notes André Görmer. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement: More than half (57 percent) of marketing decision-makers say there could be more key performance indicators for email marketing. In addition, most classic KPIs in email marketing are associated with a high degree of fuzziness (marketing decision-makers: 69 percent; total: 35 percent).