I’ve got to admit, I don’t like spam. Not just professionally, it really gets my goat personally as well. It’s not that I’m a particularly sensitive soul when it comes to email communications, but I just don’t like being sent stuff I haven’t asked for. Ok, I acknowledge that most of the downright illegal and virus laden traffic is now being successfully filtered by the great work of the spam filtering businesses and ISP’s, so what’s left to Grinch about?

Email is a powerful marketing channel, and its superb revenue driving potential is now becoming widely acknowledged. Email hasn’t got to this position by itself, it has needed to be understood and strategies carefully put together by some pretty clever people to bring it to where it is today. Some recent DMA reports show that the public now acknowledge email as a marketing channel that provides value. In anyone’s book that’s an achievement, and it isn’t as if everyone is using the same strategies. However the similar thing about all the successful strategies is they are done well, with considerable thought and great execution. So in a channel that is going from strength to strength, why am I throwing my presents out of the sleigh about spammers?

The most fundamental practice and legal obligation regarding sending someone a marketing email, is that you need to have the person’s permission to do so. I’m not going to start splitting hairs about the pros and cons of opt in opt out etc, but it is pretty widely acknowledged that the person should know what they are signing up for. But that’s right isn’t it, you don’t want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there, right?

And if they unsubscribe, it means they want you to stop sending them emails; so you stop, because it would be crazy to carry on, wouldn’t it?

So… why have I been sent marketing emails from a company I’ve previously unsubscribed from, with text saying “we’d like you to subscribe to our newsletter”. No thank you. I’ve unsubscribed once – isn’t that enough? Someone even sent me an email Christmas card that automatically signed me up to marketing emails!

Those are two examples from a very limited sample size. It is possible I have been very unlucky, but it does demonstrate this issue exists. It wouldn’t take long for the trust that has been built up with the public over the last few years to be eroded. At a time when we should be encouraging as many subscribers to sign up to our email communications, playing fast and loose with email permission is not the way forward. New European legislation threatens to make permission and data use more of an issue for the online marketer, we need to develop the public’s trust, not damage it.

With the revenue driving potential of the channel, it is easy to see how some could be tempted to go against the express wishes of their customers, in an attempt to drive a few extra sales. But in doing so marketers must consider the cost to their reputation.

A couple of weeks ago, before I flew to the States and entered into a turkey-induced coma, I shared with you some thoughts on five ways email marketing is thriving in a “mocial” world.  Well, as we all well know “thriving” doesn’t come without its fair share of challenges or effort. So, in that vein, here’s a look at five key challenges email marketing faces to stay relevant in a world intertwined with mobile, social and local marketing.

1. Focus on Deepening Relationships. The most savvy email marketers are adopting the long-held belief that email marketing is best suited as a relationship medium. Email programmes today are about adding more depth to customer relationships and expanding connections that already exist with the brand.  Use social media to create buzz and expand brand awareness. Use email to carry that first interest through the customer life cycle.

2. Design and Test for Multiple Devices. Email marketers face a design and testing conundrum with a myriad of new devices on the market. In fact, by the close of 2011, more than forty new tablet devices will have been introduced to the global market.  Email marketers need to make sure their messages are not only readable across of these different platforms and devices, but optimised for that experience.

3. Trigger Messages Based on Behaviour. Focusing on triggered and transactional communications allows email marketing to deliver an experience that can never be replicated in social media.  Real-time, behaviour-based communications triggered by a purchase, product shipment, event registration, etc. allow email marketers to connect with consumers with relevant information times precisely to the consumers interests.

4. Integrate Well with Mobile and Social. In order for email to thrive in this new world, it cannot live in isolation. Integration with social media for opt-ins is a must. And, design and optimisation for mobile devices is also critical.

5. Concise Messages and Focused Design is Key. Each month it becomes less likely that your email message is being read on a PC with a large, bright 19” display. Not only because Apple’s market share is growing along with monitor sizes – but because consumers and prospects are increasingly using mobile devices to triage and manage their inbox on the move.  The content, layout, and design of email messages needs to adapt to be more scannable, actionable, and designed for a touch experience.

The beauty of email marketing is that it never stagnates. Ever. The technology, practices and content strategy behind winning email marketing programmes is continuously evolving, and so long as it does, I believe email marketing has a bright and productive place in the marketing mix.  For now, we have a lot of work ahead of us to adapt our programmes to thrive in this new, Mocial world.  Let’s get started.

I’ve been hearing the phrase email cadence a lot lately and its sometimes been confused with frequency. So let’s look at how frequency and cadence differ and how to set them.

Ring-ring

If you’ve not heard a traditional UK phone ring it sounds like this

That’s a rhythmic pattern of 0.4s ring, 0.2s silence, 0.4s ring, 2s silence, which then repeats.

The cadence is the rhythmic repeating pattern and the frequency is how often it repeats. In this case the frequency is once every 3 seconds.

What does this mean in terms of email marketing?

Often there are several independent streams of email activity running concurrently and these different streams beat together to form the cadence.

Take a scenario of an offers email being sent every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a newsletter email on the second Thursday in the month and a tips email every Tuesday, then the individual frequencies are monthly for the newsletter and weekly for the tips. The timeline for all activity is shown below (offers in blue, tips in red and newsletter green bars).

The same pattern of emails or cadence is repeated every four weeks, so the overall frequency is every four weeks.

If you have automated sequences of triggered emails for welcome, post purchase, abandoned basket and so on then these are overlaid too.

Setting a contact policy

When setting your contact policy for cadence and frequency think about:

• Setting a minimum time between emails.
• Setting a maximum time between emails.
• Prioritisation or suppressing scheduled sends during triggered sequences.
• Set many emails on average per month are received per customer.

Having a contact policy like this also means that you can set a clear expectation at time of signup, which will reduce spam complaints and improve deliverability. Daily emails need not be an issue, if that is the expectation.

Make it a user preference?

Should you offer individualised contact policies as a user preference? I don’t believe it always makes sense and this will be the topic of my next post.

Acknowledgements: My thanks to @jvanrijn as it was my recent conversation with Jordie that persuaded me there was value in writing this article.

One of the contentions that surround email marketing at the moment is the issue of when you retire an email address. Leading up to Christmas, when the heat is on, ambitious sales targets tempt even cautious marketers to push out the boat and send to everyone. If an email list is causing deliverability issues, it is quite common for a bit of a clean up to be suggested. It’s not a “stab in the dark” strategy, because when used correctly it can lead to a net increase in response and revenue.

However, you cannot ignore, when retired email addresses are mailed, they often produce some revenue. This almost flies in the face of the no response/retirement strategy, but in reality, some fine tuning is in order to squeeze all the value from your list.

To deal with this issue properly, you will certainly need response (sales) data for your customers, and need to know which email addresses the data relates too. In most instances the full picture of your list can only be achieved through wider knowledge of the customer.

All too often, the most responsive customers are the ones who have been opening and clicking your emails recently. But it’s also important to segment those who are no longer interested, from those that have disengaged from your emails due to a higher contact frequency than their needs require.

The first stage of the solution should be test the differing frequency of those people who haven’t opened or clicked for a while. Although a 6 month open/click window might be fine for some businesses, it might not suit those businesses with a longer sales cycle or a wider range of buying frequency. In these instances, sending mailings for twelve months or even longer might be better, but proper testing should help you decide when a customer is signalling defection.

If you have transactional data, you can use the principles of RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary value) to build up a model which predicts your most responsive customers. In an ideal world you could marry up the purchase RFM data alongside the online engagement data, to see the point where Recency for online engagement (opens/clicks/visits) signals a lapsed customer.

Using email response data, we create two segments, those that are recently engaged, and those that are not (don’t throw any away yet!). The engaged segment can carry on receiving the main campaign emails at the normal frequency. The less engaged segment now gets a rest (for about three to four times the normal frequency of you campaign emails). So if you generally send weekly, rest this segment for a month.

What we are trying to do is identify a segment within the email database that has stopped responding to emails due to a mailing frequency that is too high for them. By responding to the users behaviour, you are able to make changes to the email frequency of this group.

If people from this lower frequency segment, respond, it is important that they don’t go straight back into the main campaign mailing frequency, but give them more of a rest between mailings.

What we are trying to do is to start down the road of mailing people at a frequency that suits them, keeping them engaged and encouraging them to buy more. Managing frequency is the easiest way to respond to behaviour (or lack of it) but if you have more resource, you could try content too. One of the other top reasons why people stop opening emails, is that the emails are no longer relevant to them. The difficultly with content relevance, is that it relies on a deeper customer knowledge, or web behaviour data.

Unfortunately there will be those email addresses in the list that despite your best efforts will never be responsive again. So, at some point you will have to bite the bullet and let these addressees go. It is important to accept that the damage that is done to the whole email programme (in the shape of poor inbox deliverability and reduction in response) will outweigh any extra revenue gained by mailing these inactive email addresses.

The four key eCommerce marketing trigger emails are; welcome, transaction confirmation, basket abandoned and ratings/review request. Of course there are other opportunities for trigger emails such as Birthday, back in stock emails, win-back and more, however those first four emails are the key emails to put in place before any others.

Here I’m looking at the ratings and review request email. Social proof ratings and reviews have become essential in eCommerce, Reevoo benchmark the average sales uplift due to reviews at 18%. The natural human instinct is to value the opinion of others. My six year old daughter demonstrated this to me. I’d pulled up a page of Nintendo games for her to look at. A few seconds later she exclaimed how one had four stars and another 284 comments. I hadn’t explained social proof or reviews to her and I’m sure its not something taught at school. She seemed to naturally ‘get it’.

A very effective way to build the necessary ratings and reviews is to send a post purchase request email. When Argos implemented such a practice they found 10% of their customers provided a review. If you consider how many purchases you have then 10% is quickly going to add up to a lot of reviews.

The following charts show two ratings examples are from Reevoo:

Which review would you find more persuasive? If you are like most people it will be the one on the right.

The most interesting point about these two bar charts is that they are for the same product. The only difference was reviews for the chart on the right were proactively requested by means of a post purchase email. By asking there is a difference in not only quantity of reviews but the number of positive reviews.

This difference is easily explained. If not asked for feedback, only the less satisfied customers are likely to make the effort to find out how to make a rating and provide it.

Here are some tips for a good review request email.

• The reivew request email should be sent a few days after the customer has experienced the product or service. This should be enough time that they have developed their opinion and not so long that the enjoyment of the new purchase has passed.

• The email subject line and body should reference the item purchased.

• The copy should be short and clear with a well positioned call to action button.

• The process to provide review should be quick and easy. A simple star rating could be collected right from within the email using images for each of one to five stars. That’s easy.

• Avoid clutter that could distract from the review request.

• Remind the customer of your normal support and service channels. If they are not happy, you will want to know directly rather than have a poor review.

ClickZ recently posted this model for ROI calculation of reviews and user generated content and in the last dotMailer ‘Hitting the Mark’ report only 48% of companies studied sent any sort of post purchase email. There is clearly opportunity for many to improve their bottom line.

Oh, and yes I did end up buying the Nintendo games for my daugther that she picked out from the ratings.

There’s no doubt there is a change afoot in the email marketing industry. Despite  all the best practice mantras (“must segment more”, “this year we won’t look like spammers”)  it is becoming plainly clear there is a divide growing between those who have stuck to their New Year resolutions and those who have not. Email is becoming the strongest digital media channel deployed by the modern marketer, but to make the most of it, you need to know more than how to push the “spam now” button.

The email channel has arrived with many businesses now acknowledging the importance of the channel to their business model. But despite the importance of the media, there has not been uniform treatment when allocating budgets..

This has been borne out in the recent DMA email benchmark report, that concluded there are “two classes of email marketer; those sending simple campaigns and those splitting lists into multiple segments” concluding ”A major divide has opened”.

The “haves” and the “have nots”

The latest Marketing Sherpa email benchmark report backed up this class system, but seemed to suggested the reason for lack of budget was due to some marketers not being able to justify (or measure) overall ROI. It also suggested that the segment of marketers who were investing liberally were in a “strategic phase of maturity” where they could measure ROI and segment effectively.  Unfortunately the research also revealed only 36% of the companies surveyed measure response by list segment and just33% measure revenue per email .

So it would seem that those organisations investing heavily in email marketing, are those that are best able to measure its ROI and effectiveness, and are best placed to know is value. So, how do you get your email marketing to the strategic phase? And what moves can be made to pitch for extra budget to drive the revenue the email channel can really generate?

Measure email’s influence across multiple channels

Trying to convince the board to allocate more budget to a media that is cheap, that you don’t need to invest much money in to get a return, is tough.

As email marketers, we’ve probably all sat round tables where we have discussed spikes in call centre activity and website traffic following an email campaign. The problem is proving these increases in activity come from email. If these revenue streams are not attributed to email (at least in some part), the budget for developing the media further will never be available.

So, mirroring the findings of the Marketing Sherpa report, if you want achieve more budget for your email campaigns, you need to make sure you are measuring its true value.

The value of Influence

I know it’s a bit of a contentious subject in some circles, but the value of email communication moves far beyond the last bit of revenue that was attributed to the last email sent (and last click). it’s the measurement of that value that provides the greatest challenge for the modern marketer. Over the last couple of years I have noticed that when you directly relate a person’s revenue value, against their open and click behaviour, they relate very closely. So closely in fact, that in some instances 80% of online and offline sales will come from the customers who are regularly and recently opening and clicking your emails. An interesting thought; this means someone who opens and clicks an email, is worth more than one who doesn’t. Factor that one into the equation when working out the value of your email list, and you soon see the people who open and click emails are worth far more than those that don’t (10+ times the value is not uncommon).

Segmenting for Influence

If the recipient is reading your emails, they can be influenced. If they can be influenced, you can encourage them to buy more. And that’s the important difference; if you are only attributing last click revenue to the email channel, it will be reflected in a restricted budget. If you can attribute email’s influence on overall sales, you are more likely to get the money to achieve the greatest returns from email.

Why is this important now?

Thanks to the global economic slowdown, there will be less money in the customer’s pockets and the fight for conversion will be a tough one. Thanks to channel migration, (offline to online) online sales have been growing for several years, sometimes in the face of reducing overall sales.  This growth cannot continue and soon it will be back to the slog of battle for market share. Email will be a key weapon in the marketer’s armoury and your strategy and tactics will either be pulling customers from your competitors or they will be pushing them the other way.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Karin Von Abrams’s* perspective of the DMA benchmark report;

“Time, effort and insight can partially compensate for lack of financial resources. But companies that don’t find either time or money to devote to their email campaigns may soon face the consequences. It probably won’t be too pleasant at the bottom of a two-tier email marketplace.”

*Karin Von Abrams, Senior Analyst, eMarketer

As a consultant on the vendor side of the email marketing industry, I spend a considerable amount of time working with clients to create strategies for solving their email challenges. Whether those challenges are related to attribution, creative templates, acquisition, deliverability or any of the other numerous practices and processes the client is looking to optimise, they almost always impact the client where it hurts the most: revenue and return on investment.

More often than not, the solution for solving the client’s pain – barring any serious sender reputation issues – involves creating a strategy for relevancy. In other words: how to send the right message to the right subscriber at the right time. This includes demonstrating value through the email channel and sending messages that subscribers anticipate and appreciate. Sound like a big ask? It certainly can be, and that’s why it’s especially pleasing to see marketers getting it right. Sephora, the international cosmetics and beauty retailer, does just that with their email program.

Here are some of the best practices they have implemented:

• Showing value with a loyalty program. Sephora offers subscribers access to their “Beauty Insider” program. The incentive to sign-up is to collect points through the purchase process and redeem them for perks, including free samples and a free birthday gift. Their best customers are considered “V.I.B.s” or “Very Important Beauty Insiders.” The email program helps to promote and support the rewards of being a Beauty Insider by using special creative to recognize V.I.B. email subscribers and offering access to exclusive online content, free gifts, invitations to special events and the ability to preview new products before they are launched.
• Sending triggered messages. Sephora sends one of the best post-purchase triggered messages I’ve seen. Two weeks after I visited one of their New York City stores I received an email asking me to rate my purchases. It included images of the actual products I bought and a call-to-action to write a review or rank the product with a star rating. The customised landing page also allows subscribers to enter their comments and upload a photo or a video of themselves using the product. A form at the bottom of the page collects additional data points about the subscriber, including eye colour and skin tone.
• Incorporating useful content. While Sephora’s email program is primarily promotional in nature, their messages still include a lot of useful and relevant content for subscribers. Emails often feature products that are grouped into relevant categories, like beauty problem areas (dry skin, bad hair days, etc.), or include content about new beauty trends, makeover advice or how-to videos for perfecting various looks or techniques. Even small snippets of content help to ensure the messages are relevant for subscribers who aren’t in market to make a purchase at that time, but are still looking for beauty advice and information. In addition, every message includes a link to their “Beauty Talk Community” page where subscribers can submit questions, get expert advice and share comments.
• Collecting preferences and use them. Sephora has a detailed preference center that collects information about everything from a subscriber’s skin type, eye colour, and hair colour and type, to beauty concerns and favourite types of perfume. This information is regularly used to target offers and content. To encourage subscribers to submit their preferences, a triggered message is sent asking for information and explaining why taking the time to enter it will benefit the subscriber’s experience with the brand.

As an email subscriber, I genuinely value the messages I receive from Sephora. I’ve even marked them as “important” in my Gmail Priority Inbox, an action many marketers are increasingly looking for their subscribers to take. As a consultant, I’m impressed with their strategic approach to email marketing. While I don’t know the exact amount of revenue that the email channel generates for Sephora, I would assume it’s pretty substantial. Their subscriber-centric and data-focused approach to email marketing clearly illustrates the value of implementing best-in-class practices, and I consider that to be a beautiful thing.

Email marketers talk *a lot* about relevance and engagement. And rightly so. Email marketing, when done well, can deliver a personalised marketing message not achievable in any other medium. (No pressure, right?!?)

But, as we all banter about personalisation, segmentation and targeting, we are too often failing to send the right signal to recipients. Take a moment to think about your last three email campaigns. Was it clear to the recipient that you actually care about them? About their interests? Even a bit.

We aspire to connect with our recipients. We aspire to be more engaging. And, we aspire to drive more revenue by doing so. So, let’s do it already.

Here are four personalisation tips to help you show your recipients that you really do give a damn.

Tip #1: Dear %%FirstName%% is NOT personalisation. It’s the beginning of a form letter.

In 2001, “savvy” email marketers could address each email recipient by name. In the subject line. In the content. Oh Wow, frank m, that is truly awesome! Please. Stop. Doing. This. It is not personalisation any more than that advert you received in the post last week addressed to MR R J SMITH. It’s a cop-out. You can find better ways to deliver tailored content to recipients.

Tip #2: Relevance cannot be achieved solely with an opt-in form

While getting opt-in forms right is critical, the data you gather through them is just the starting point. It should be enough to drive a fairly relevant first email, but it is not meant to be the basis of all campaigns to follow. Not by any means. It’s like meeting someone at a networking event and discovering they have an interest in cricket. And then, for the next three years, only talking to them about cricket each time you see them. It’s a quick way to become incredibly boring and irrelevant. And in the end, it will leave you and your email marketing programme standing alone.

From that very first message, you should be using each recipient interaction or lack of interaction to tailor future communications. And, you should be driving the recipient to take further action on your website to gather more data points that you can then use to continue the dialogue in a meaningful way.

Tip #3: Behaviour is the best predictor of preference and interest

When is the best time to send an email? What content should I send to this segment this week? Don’t try to guess what to send to recipients or when to send it. If you can do this successfully (and repeatedly) please leave a comment below — I need your help with my stock portfolio. The truth is, behaviour is the best predictor of a recipient’s preference, interest and appetite to engage with your brand. Use past open and click behaviour to predict when you should send a communication to a particular recipient. Use click-through data from email and website analytics to understand what product categories or content is of most interest based on the recipient’s prior interactions. By listening to recipient behaviour and responding to it you will create dialogue and you will have a far higher likelihood of delivering relevant and anticipated communications.

Tip #4: Don’t fake it. (Applicable to multiple areas of life)

Much like Tip #1, if you aren’t going to put in the effort to truly personalise the content in your email marketing campaigns, don’t fake it. Seriously. Don’t even bother. Please go into your template and cut the salutation. Do your brand some good and either commit to being relevant or stick to batch-and-blast methods and execute them exceedingly well. I can promise that your boss, your customers and your shareholders will greatly appreciate your spending the time to be more tuned in to your recipients — using their behaviour to guide the dialogue instead of guessing or, worse yet, not %%caring%%.

There have been many announcements over the last few months regarding the various types of inbox filtering being deployed by various webmail clients. At first they look pretty harmless, with the rules that the ISP’s intend to use ranging from the ambiguous, to the algorithmic detail. If you take the metrics that Google claim they are going to use to identify “wanted” email, it seems they are trying to find out how interested the recipient is in the emails they are sent.

Google’s metrics

- Messages read then deleted
- Messages deleted without being read
- Messages replied to
- Frequency of receiving/reading

As marketers, the only metric we can really measure, is the frequency of receiving/reading the emails. (How many people reply to marketing emails anyway?)This  reinforces the need to focus on individual engagement.

Although there have been one or two conspiracy theory mutterings regarding what might be motivating these changes, you can’t get away from the fact that they will be improving the user experience. And this is what the ISP’s want. If you are happy with the clarity of your inbox, and the management of your inbound mail, you’ll most likely stay with your provider, allowing them to gain further behavioural data, and serve you targeted advertising (and make themselves money). Let’s face it, as a web mail user, it might be free to use, but the trade off is the advertising exposure and revenue.

So this rush to improve customer experience is unlikely to stop. The fact is it’s going to become increasingly difficult to send poorly targeted and conceived campaigns. These campaigns will likely see a gradual decline in response rates, initially blamed on recession (although you can open an email for free), but as likely to be caused by inbox filtering. No matter how good an email marketer you are, you can’t stop the effects of economic slowdown. What you can do is start thinking how you can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns, and getting into (and staying in) the inbox, is a good place to start.

Sending an email campaign in this new future could become one of the most nerve wracking experiences for the modern day marketer.

• What are my customers going to think of it?
• What if most of my customers don’t open it?
• What if these same customers haven’t opened for a while?
• Could this email discourage my interested customers from opening the next few emails?
• Am I going to lose them forever?
• What if my competitors are doing it better?
• Will I need to spend more money on acquisition?

And ultimately,  if you reduce the ability to influence your existing customers, sales will suffer, and with the costs of getting new ones up to 8 times higher, it’s going to hurt the bottom line.

But it’s not all bad news, in fact for some it’s going to be a big benefit as the inbox will become less cluttered. If yours is one of the “wanted” emails a recipient receives, the inbox filtering should help your message receive the attention it deserves. So for those that are prepared to invest in effective segmentation and targeting for their email campaigns, the future is bright, with email likely to become more effective..  So, we are back to recipient engagement once more, seen as a nice to have in the past, but now vital to protect the value of your email programme.

But it will mean the “one size fits all” weekly newsletter needs to be relegated to the past.

The ability to measure engagement has been with us for a while, and those in the email deliverability circle have been deploying this type of segmentation to successfully manage deliverability for some time. It must now be used to decide who wants to hear from you, those that need a rest for a while, and those who are sick to death of your emails. If the Marketer doesn’t do this segmentation, the Webmail companies certainly will, and once someone’s gone, there’s no going back.

Football Manager, Kevin Keegan can (but doesn’t) claim to be a better manager than Bill Shankley based upon Management Win statistics.  (Shankly won 49.95% of his games as manager, while Keegan won 50.47% ).

In a Digital world the volume and range of numbers can be used by Marketers in a variety of ways. If you look at the Andrew Lang quote “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts…for support rather than illumination” there are some basic rules to follow to help you quoting email SUPPORT numbers rather than to drive tactics to achieve your business strategy  -

1. Gather lots of data & present many metrics but only highlight the metrics that are positive. “Our  open rate was up 3.2% compared with last month …… but don’t ask about our unsubscribes”
2. Show metrics that are easy to manage / manipulate over business importance – “Our deliverability rate is up 12% …… we only emailed recent subscribers”
3. Use extremely precise numbers and reference 3rd parties to add credibility – “Our open rate is 5.43% more than DMA / IAB / Esp (*delete as appropriate) quoted industry average” …….. rather than compare like for like performance.
4. Use comparisons, but out of context “We got a click through to open rate of 30% up 5% ……. but the actual volume of click throughs was lower than previously”.
5. Show your metrics inconsistently ……. It will stop people comparing effectively if you are adding value.

Whatever you do don’t educate your audience on the small number of key drivers for your business e.g. the health of your email database because

• If you do this will mean that you will have to define an email strategy
• If you start showing simple consistent clear metrics against targets then it is easier it is for the audience to grasp and work out how to think about your email data.
• They then may even ask for it more frequently and request the same data in the same format.
• It will ruin any future ability to keep your metrics “feel good!”

However it may help highlight what is important e.g. maintaining & growing the engagement with your subscribers through better segmented communications.

Just in case they do ask try this:

• Break your database into 3 segments – email addresses that have opened an email in the past month, those who last opened an email over a month ago but in the last 3 months & the rest.
• Give the three segments different values  e.g. £10, £3, & 10p
• Calculate how much your database is worth
• In a month’s time do the same again and compare the difference.

This simple Specific, Measurable, Agreed,  Realistic, Time Bound approach may help you on the journey to SMART email metrics – Alternatively  just stumble over to the Lamp-post.