This is a great interview Anil Batra does with the CEO of Webtrends Alex Yoder. He speaks about the 2 things he focused on in his keynote at Engage ’09, Openess and Elegance.

Here is a link to Anil’s original post as well. Thanks Anil.

I had a great conversation on Twitter with @rotkapchen about analytics. She said something that not a lot of people get, but really should.

A behavior in isolation of an intent is a fact without context. If someone does something + U don’t know why U’ve got bupkis.

To elaborate a little. People often ask to look at numbers, having no end goal in mind. They hope these numbers will somehow spur a flash of insight that will give them that magic KPI, you know, the one that tells you you are making tons of money from one single thing. KPI’s are what we make them, they aren’t magic numbers we find. We define the goals of the site and we craft KPI’s. They will tell us if our site is performing the way we intended it to. If it isn’t then we optimize.

The other important piece of this pie is the fact that we need to understand our users’ intent. This is where it gets tricky but insanely fun if you do it right. We have metrics to help us see users click paths, eye tracking reports, heat maps and so on. These all aid in helping us understand the intent of our customers but it is up to us to make those inferences. We need to really know who we are talking to and if we know our audience then, from the numbers, we can tell what their intentions are.

This is called turning metrics into analytics.

Photo courtesy of dannysullivan

I’ve been in charge of email marketing for over a year now. When I started doing it with my company we were using a $30 piece of software on a PC with a Pentium III chip. We had to install the software on its own PC because it took too long to send out our email blasts – keep that word in mind, BLASTS, I’ll come back to it – and when we would send out the emails it froze up any computer that was running any other program at the same time. Through this “email system” we had no way to tell who opened our emails, what type of click through rate we were getting, that is, unless we setup a bunch of blank redirect pages and then pulled WebTrends on those blank pages. We found the system lacking to say the least.

We started to look into other reputable email vendors that would allow us all the bells and whistles we could pay for. We ended up choosing one of the best email vendors out there, ExactTarget. We choose them for a couple of reasons, they weren’t too expensive and we have tons of functionality, they had a strict opt-in policy with ISP monitoring and a consultant we were using said they were really good. We started down the horribly overgrown path of trying to carve out an email marketing strategy.

I did presentations to all of our marketing folks and some senior execs. I tried to help them understand the value of email marketing, the benefit of actually being able to measure the effectiveness of our campaigns and then taking those metrics and bettering our efforts. I thought it was pretty much adopted by all, but I found that most people weren’t embarrassing the concepts presented. They understood the theory but we hadn’t been able to measure any of our past efforts and so we quickly fell back into our old habits of email blasting. Email was just a way to touch more people with a single, very general message.

Now a year later, it was time to take a look at what we had been doing and see what we could work on. I was thinking we would have a horrible wake-up call but to my surprise we were above industry standard in everything except our open rate. We found through the numbers, that we sent out too many general emails to as many people as we could get our hands on, email BLASTING. When I dug into the numbers I saw that the more focused an email message was and when we used very targeted lists, the numbers were better all around.

I presented my findings to our teams and we had a very enlightening meeting. Here are four take aways from that meeting and what we are working on now to get our numbers up by engaging our agents more:

1. Target – Create more focused email messages and send them to the people that actually are doing the business pertaining to that message. This way they know when they get an email from us it is timely to their business.
2. More Lists- We are going to give the control back over to the agents and advisors that keep us in business. There will be more lists out there that will be product or concept specific and they can opt-in to whichever list they want.
3. Study Industry Best Practices – There are a ton of other companies out there that are doing what we are doing and they are trying to get in front of their producers as much as we are. Why not take the best from them and build on it?
4. Other tweaks – We are adding Reply Mail Management, Forward to a Friend and a “how to add us as a safe sender” link.

Conclusion: You can’t change perceptions unless you have numbers to back up the proposal. We found that when we were able to measure our email marketing efforts and see what was working and what wasn’t, we had the ammunition to make recommendations for change. These small steps plus actually looking at the numbers and adjusting to them will greatly help boost email marketing numbers well above industry standard.

What have you found that works in your industry?