Last week I spoke at the Email Insider Conference in Park City, UT with Matt Day of Agent SILVERFOX on the topic of search and email integration. One interesting case study Matt presented was related to how email campaigns affect brand search traffic. So, the scenario is straight forward enough, a customer or prospect receives an email from XYZ Corp and they then go to the web to search for the term “XYZ Corp” or possibly a product that XYZ Corp sells. This results in a bump in search traffic to the website that is normally attributed to search marketing instead of email marketing.
While working with Matt on preparing the presentation, we came up with a methodology for quantifying this traffic that many at the conference found useful: “search through rate”. To estimate this lift, compare the average search traffic on days where no email is sent and then compare it to the search traffic on days where an email is sent. The calculation for this is very straight forward:
This phenomenon is even more significant when emails are sent through partners. If you partner with a program like CoolSavings.com to send an offer to their client list the search through rate is usually higher than when sending to an in-house list. This makes logical sense since the people receiving this offer are less likely to be familiar with your brand and may choose to check out your site before proceeding with the offer. So, it follows that the conversion rate on these searches may be different than typical searches for your brand as well. Thus, we need to evaluate the conversion rate on these email influenced searches to get a good understanding of impact of these incremental searches. The calculation for the conversion rate on email influenced searches is:
Where:
- Conversion RateIS = Conversion rate on email influenced searches
- ConversionsO = Observed Conversions for 24 hour period following the email send
- ConversionsA = Average Conversions for 24 hour period with no email send (Can be calculated as Average Conversion Rate off Search times SearchesA)
- SearchesO = Observed Searches for 24 hour period following the email send
- SearchesA = Average Searches for 24 hour period with no email send
The conversion rate on incremental searches should be compared to the average search conversion rates to determine if these email influenced searches are performing consistently with typical searches. By looking at the incremental conversion rates, in addition to the direct conversions from the email itself, we can get a more comprehensive view of the efficacy of our email campaigns.
In my experience, many (by no means all) third party email campaigns have had a tough time justifying themselves in terms of direct sales. However, looking at the influence of email on search and subsequent conversion provides a more comprehensive financial picture by which to evaluate the success of these campaigns.
We already know that the ROI of email is very strong. By looking at these metrics and adding them into your analysis of email campaigns, either to your in-house list or through third party advertisers, we reallocate dollars that should have been attributed to email all along—demonstrating even more value being driven out of our email marketing programs.
