How Analytics is Revolutionizing Audience Development
I was recently invited to speak at the IAEE meeting in Boston to shed some light on how analytics can be used to increase attendance at events. In recent years event producers have found it more difficult to attract attendees, due to the rise of the Internet, the growing inconvenience of travel, and an economic recession. As event producers have struggled against these forces, they have in many cases not yet taken advantage of analytic techniques such as data mining, CRM, web analytics, social network analysis, and test and learn strategies to grow attendance levels. My session explored how to apply analytic techniques to radically improve the results of audience development campaigns. I have used these techniques on over 100 conferences, trade shows, and special events to achieve significant increases in attendance.
The topics I covered included the following:
The Lifetime Value of a Customer – A discussion of how to determine the lifetime value of a conference attendee is followed by the an examination of the much more difficult question of how to determine the lifetime value of an exhibit attendee. These attendees usually attend at no charge, and usually generate revenue only indirectly by attracting exhibitors and sponsors. In addition, I review an example of how knowledge of the lifetime value of an attendee can be crucial in decision making.
Closed Loop Marketing – A closed loop marketing system allows event managers to measure the results of all the various components of their audience development programs. With accurate measurement of program results, they can accurately gauge the ROI of marketing programs, run controlled tests to optimize ROI, and identify key leverage points.
Email Optimization – Email is the keystone of many audience development programs. It is vital to optimize the revenue and response generated by email marketing through a comprehensive testing program. Properly done, email optimization can improve response by 50% or more, and in some cases double or even triple response. The presentation provides examples of how to identify key email test elements, implement carefully designed tests, and analyze the results.
Customer Profiling – Using the information about attendees collected during the registration process, prospects can be targeted with increased accuracy, and the results of marketing programs can be markedly improved.
Predictive Modeling – Moving beyond simple customer profiling, models can be developed that accurately predict which customers are likely to respond to promotions, and which customers are likely to defect. A case study is included on how predictive modeling helped triple conference revenue.
Segmentation Analysis – A highly effective way to identify which customers will respond to which promotions. Event managers can create custom-tailored marketing messages that address the needs of each segment to increase response, lower the cost of customer acquisition, increase retention, and increase cross-sales, up-sales, and referrals. An example of how a segmented campaign increased response by 20% is reviewed.
Web Site Optimization – Small increases in conversion rates can have a dramatic increase in registrations. An example of how minimizing abandonment rates during the registration process helped increase registrations by 30% is discussed.
Social Media Optimization – Analytics can help event producers amplify the results of their audience development campaign through the optimal use of social media. By mining social networks to identify influential customers and prospects, adding social media profiles to the CRM system, and using predictive modeling to target high probability prospects, an event increased attendance by 30%.
As more event producers take advantage of these analytics techniques, they’ll be able to attract more and better qualified attendees to their events. Face-to-face meetings, the original channel of social media, will remain a vital method of marketing. Here are the slides from the presentation:
Email: What’s Your Real Open Rate?
Many email service providers admit that there has been a gradual decline in open rates over the past few years. While the open rate doesn’t tell the whole story on on email success, it is still vital to measure. After all, if your audience doesn’t open up your email, they have no chance to read it and respond to it.
One of the primary reasons cited for the decline is inbox clutter. According to Forrester Research, 60% of consumers believe they receive too much email. In another study, Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power, Forrester found that the chief reason that marketers who believe email will be less effective in 2 years is “too much clutter in consumer inboxes.” A belief that “SPAM” will drive the decline was cited by only 59%.
Clearly, we are all becoming increasingly numb to the steady stream of email arriving in our inboxes. A second, related reason often given for the decline in open rates is the increasing effectiveness of spam filters that help manage this flood of email.
A third reason, and a significant one, is technological. The way that opens are measured is by including a tiny image (usually a 1 pixel by 1 pixel gif or jpeg) within the email. Once the images that are embedded in the email are served, the email is recorded as opened. The problem is that there are a lot of email readers don’t automatically serve the images in an email. In fact, ExactTarget estimates that 50% of all email is now delivered to email readers that either don’t automatically render images or are unable to render images, such as Outlook, Gmail, AOL, and handheld devices such as Blackberries. Thus, there is an inherent bias in not detecting all of the opens.
If you’re running an email campaign, it’s important to know the true open rate, so you can gauge the true reach of your email message. There’s an easy way to do this. It’s based on the insight that click-throughs are always measured, even if opens aren’t. Even though the email reader may not be indicating an open, because it hasn’t rendered the images, the recipient of the email can still click on the links. That means that some recipients will be tracked as clicking through, but not opening an email. Let’s walk through an example.
Here’s the initial tracking information for an email:
Here’s how to estimate the true open rate:
- Download the list of the email addresses that have opened the email from your email service provider.
- Download the list of the email addresses that have clicked on a link in the email. Now match up the list of those who have clicked through, to see if they were tracked as opening the email. In the case above, it turns out that 105 recipients clicked a link in the email, but only 75 of them were tracked as having opened the email.
- Multiply the open rate above by the ratio 105/75. This gives an estimate of the true open rate, assuming the same click through to open ratio for the group that clicked on a link in the email, but was not tracked as having opened the email. The revised tracking information is as follows:
As you can see, because not all of the email reader render images, the estimated open rate in this case was actually 40% higher than reported. Here’s how you can use this information:
- In order to maximize your click through rates, make sure that message in your emails does not rely on images. That way, if the recipient of your email doesn’t see the images, they can still respond to your message. As demonstrated above, this can help increase your open rates by 40% – or more.
- It’s vital to know what the real underlying trends are for your email campaigns, so you can make adjustments as necessary. You’re in a better position to know that if you monitor the estimated open rate, as described above, because it eliminates quirks in the tracking system. You need to make adjustments in your strategy based on real changes in customer behavior, rather than changes in the way email readers render images.
- With the estimated open rate, you now have a better estimate of the cumulative penetration of your message to your target audience. For example, if the reported rate shows a cumulative penetration of 33% after several emails, and you actually have a 40% higher open rate, a better estimate of your penetration is 1.4 x 33% or roughly 46%. You can then make better decisions about how to most effectively reach the rest of your target audience.
Test Results: Are They Reliable?
Testing is one of the building blocks of predictive marketing. Sites such as Marketing Experiments and Marketing Sherpa frequently report the results of marketing tests, with the implication being that you can apply the results to your own business. As we saw in my last post, however, you can’t infer best practices from somebody else’s test. You have to run tests with your own target audience to know what really works with them.
There is another huge problem with the reporting of test results on these sites. Let’s take a look at this test result, as reported on the Marketing Experiments site, regarding good vs. bad email copy:
What is wrong with this? There is absolutely no way to tell if the results are statistically significant! If you are not familiar with the concept of statistical significance, it is absolutely essential to understand if you are going to be testing.
Here’s a fact that tends to get lost in the shuffle when these popular sites review test results: if you ran the test again, you are virtually guaranteed to get different results. The % difference above may be 70%, or 30%, or even -20%, instead of 49.5%. If you haven’t thought about this before, it might seem somewhat shocking. But it’s true.
To say that the results of a test are statistically significant means that you can be confident that the next time that you run the test, you can expect similar results. Let’s take a look at one of the results I reviewed in my last post:
At the bottom of the test results, you see a statement that “The difference in conversion rates is statistically significant at the 99% level.” What does this mean? It means that if you repeatedly conducted the test again, 99 times out of 100 the first subject line would once again beat the second subject line.
The reason tests are conducted is to determine how much a particular marketing variable, such as copy, affects response, on a small portion of your target audience, before you roll it out on a large scale to your entire target audience. And before you do that, you have to be extremely confident that at the very least you can show an improvement in conversions. That’s where statistical significance comes in. If you don’t know the level of statistical significance for your tests, you are playing with fire, and might get burned.
If you would like a free calculator to help you test the statistical significance of your tests, email me at rhodgson@predictive-marketing.com.
Always Be Testing
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain
In today’s rapidly evolving markets, you can never take anything for granted. The average lifetime of so-called “best practices” is shorter than ever.
I experienced this first hand recently on a couple of email tests designed to drive registrations for some upcoming conferences. Both conferences were targeted at highly technical IT audiences.
My past experience had always indicated that the best subject lines had offers and calls to action, especially when closing in on a limited time offer pricing deadline. So the following test results were as expected:
I had seen this result dozens of times before; invariably, the subject line that emphasized the dollar savings and created a sense of urgency had always emerged triumphant. Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw the results of the following test for a different conference directed at a similar audience:
Not only did the standard subject line offer no improvement on the alternative; it produced a result that was significantly worse. There is no doubt that, for this particular audience, the second subject line produced more conversions than the first.
The beauty of testing is that marketers don’t have to figuratively stumble around in the dark searching for the best way to communicate with customers. Test and learn strategies provide a way to find out directly, from prospects and customers, what they value and want most. There is no longer any excuse for a marketer to rely on hunches, anecdotes, and biased opinions in order to make marketing decisions. Even the seemingly most insignificant of decisions – the color of a registration button, for example – may have an effect on conversion rates which can be quantified.
However, when employing a test and learn approach to marketing, there is a trap to be avoided, which is illustrated by this example. Every business, and every customer set are different. There is no one set of best practices that apply in every situation. Think of the body of knowledge that you gain by testing to be a set of “best guidelines” rather than best practices. And know that no testing program ever arrives at a final best answer. Your customers are always changing. Always be testing.
