In addition to the home office in Paris, ividence has offices in San Francisco and New York. For those of you who follow football, you’ll understand there was a little rivalry going on during the NFL playoffs between our bi-coastal offices.

As baseball season starts up, we’re already anticipating a Yankees vs. Giants World Series. The Yankees have now pulled slightly ahead in the standings with a record of 6-5, the San Francisco office insists that I point out that a 5-6 start to the season doesn’t look radically different from the 2010 Giants team who won the World Series.

Fresh off of wins for both the Yankees and the Giants, I wanted to see what email advertisers and list owners could take from baseball to improve their game.

Look at the Right Metrics for Your Program

The popularity of Moneyball makes this one obvious to include. You’ve got to look at the right statistics. To do that, you need to know what constitutes a win for your program and what influences that. In baseball, a win could be a winning season or great revenue from ticket sales. Factors that influence a winning season might be runners on base over the season, whereas revenue is affected by the number of fans in seats.

Each email program is different so you will need to decide what constitutes a win for your program and find out what factors influence that to look at the right stats. There are some basic stats we would recommend looking at for all programs though:

1. Open Rate – This is the percentage of emails that are opened of the total number sent. It’s a rough measure of the interest and engagement levels of subscribers. Acquisition email campaigns (that is email advertising campaigns) have been quoted as having an average open rate as low as 0.01-0.1%, and our research data suggests an overall open rate of 0.7%. ividence’s open rate for standalone email advertising is 13%. That higher open rate can make all the difference for an advertiser in getting more customers and for a publisher who wants to make sure their subscribers are getting offers they want.
2. Click Through Rate – The CTR for a campaign is the percentage of clicks out of the total number of emails sent.  Like the open rate, it gives an idea of interest and engagement, but it also drives traffic to another platform where consumers can learn more about a company or product that’s new to them.
3. ROI/Revenue – This is a way to measure if an email advertising campaign is a win. For advertisers, this might mean generating leads, making sales, or acquiring new customers. For publishers monetizing their email assets, this might mean looking at the revenue generated against the time spent in selling the ad space. One reason publishers may look at using a third-party to monetize their email assets is to reduce or eliminate the time spent in selling inventory.

Winning is all about long-term strategy

In the first few games of the season (during which both teams were off to challenging starts), ividence’s San Francisco and New York contingents would have been the first to tell you that baseball season lasts for several months, not a couple of weeks. Email advertising is the same: your strategy has to pay off over the long term, and you shouldn’t rush the process.

For advertisers, this means batch and blast tactics that play email like a numbers game aren’t your best bet. Sending more and more and more may equal larger returns in the short run. Over time, though, that damages your brand in the eyes of consumers and ISPs, making it harder to get new customers and get in the inbox (even with your retention campaigns). Sending slowly and in a targeted way over a longer period of time will generate better results for the campaign and for your brand.

For publishers, this approach is even more critical. An email list is among one of the most valuable assets a company owns (a fact illustrated by the liquidation of Borders’ assets late last year). Any approach to monetizing that asset should be focused on the long term goal of maintaining the value of the list.

The Right Audience Can Be a Game-Changer

A home field advantage comes not just from knowing the stadium. Fans cheering the team on can make all the difference in a close game. At least, that’s what fans like to believe.

The right audience for email advertising is absolutely critical to see success with a campaign. There are two main factors that go into finding the right audience:

1. Permission – Email ads should only be sent to lists that allow sending third-party emails and should clearly note the list that the user is subscribed to.
2. Targeting – Send to an audience that’s likely to be interested in your product or service. That may mean targeting on demographic factors or, even better, on behavioral data that gives a sense of how a subscriber is likely to respond.

What other suggestions would you make for tips we can take from baseball season? Or just tell us what team you’re cheering for to make it to the World Series in the comments.

Related articles
Why Buying (or Selling!) Email Lists Doesn’t Work
Getting Red Carpet Ready: What Email Marketing Can Learn from the Movies
Boost Your Email Marketing ROI by Focusing on Three Key Areas (on MarketingProfs)

Photo courtesy of Hollingsworth

Mary Byrne

Mary Byrne leads ividence’s sales and marketing team in the U.S. as SVP, Americas. She has nearly 15 years of experience in the technology sector, with special emphasis on advertising technology and email deliverability. Previously, Mary led the sales, marketing, and client services efforts at DoubleClick, Microsoft and Level 3 Communications. She can be reached at mb@ividence.com.