Many years ago I was presenting the monthly results of an email
campaign to the Marketing Director of a global manufacturing company. I was
very proud of my colourful campaign report and results, so I proceeded to share
graphs and “insights” on all those important benchmarks synonymous with email
marketing – open rates, bounces, clicks and unsubscribes. Now this particular
client had always been a reluctant participant in any form of digital marketing
and hurriedly brought the meeting to a close. At the end of the meeting he
thanked me for me time and asked a simple question, a question which changed my
views on digital marketing forever: “Out of interest,” he said, “who were the
three guys who unsubscribed from your email campaign?”
What on earth did he mean? Who were these three guys? Who
cares?! Clearly they were three customers with poor taste, no longer interested
in my beautifully designed email or well written content. Who cares who they
are?!
I smiled, left the meeting, hoping to ignore his question and
bemoaned my bad luck of working with clients who clearly didn’t “get” digital.
By the time I got back to my office, I was desperate to find the answer. I didn’t
take long to dig through the email reports, find the offending email addresses
and track them back to the customer database. Done. But that wasn’t the end of
it. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I also had access to this company’s past
three years of sales data. So I linked this information together and created a
quick profile on my unsubscribers. Thankfully two of these customers had never bought
from my client, and this was actually the first email they received. Who cares
if they left, clearly no loss. But the third guy, different story. This third
customer… who was this guy? Turns out he was more than some random customer, he
was a lifelong customer who had purchased literally tens of thousands of
dollars of products. If there was an award for most valuable customer, this guy
would top the list. What is going on?!!!!!
Shocked and rocked with this new perspective, I re-examined
my now questionable campaign report. Forty percent open rate, 20% click
throughs, and 3 unsubscribes. Great stats, but who were these people? What if I
asked “who” for every click, bounce and open? I had been producing seemingly
wonderful (substitute: meaningless) reports without the most important
dimension; who. This is the digital equivalent of counting revenue based on the
number of monetary notes received and ignoring the actual value on each note.
The shocking thing is, we still do it. With the explosion in
digital devices and big data, we have stats for everything; Facebook likes,
followers, tweets, app downloads, page visits and of course email clicks. By aggregating
these as some sort of score or badges of success, we are treating all these
interactions as equal, ignoring their independent value and most importantly
turning our back on who generated them.
Every week I see numerous digital marketing reports. All of
them are interesting, but many of them miss the most important dimension.
Whenever I’m asked to comment on one of these reports, I always ask one
question in return: “can you tell me who these customers are?”
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